I neglected the blog for a while… I have a couple of ideas for posts, but other things keep jumping in. In any case, this is not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to start 2013 with 2.2 release of Startupizer which was sent to Mac App Store review team on january 9th. It only took about a week to enter review, however in a day or so I received rejection note. It’s not the first rejection I got, but this one is more serious; if I want to correct it, the core feature of Startupizer - managing login items - will stop working. It’s unfortunate consequence of the app sandbox.

Just a quick post about the first update to Startupizer, 2.1, which is now available on the Mac App Store. Check history page for release notes.

With all the reports of how much iOS6 maps are worse than they were on iOS5, I though I’d share my experience with the new version, based on my usage from the last few days.

I neglected the blog for a while. It’s full summer here, so I spend my time with family and friends, relaxing and preparing for the upcoming months. I also do a bit of work and I’ll outline it below:

With todays vibrant world of iOS apps, there are usually many choices within the same category. So it’s easy to switch to another one. But how about the most important part of it: your data? Well, some developers offer a way to export or import, but unless you’re dealing with standard formats, it’s likely you have to enter all your data again. This blog post will look into how you can use your programming skills to import the data from one application to another.

After many months of hard work, Startupizer 2.0 has been released and is now available on the Mac App Store at a special introductory price! Go get it until the price goes up!

After starting work on appledoc redesign, one of the first things I added was command line parsing. I used trustful DDCli library from Dave Dribin. However I soon discovered it doesn’t work well with arc. That, coupled with different workflow I wanted, prompted me to digg in Dave’s code to see how I could change it to suit my needs better. At the end I ended with writing a command line interface library from scratch.

Appledoc became quite popular amongs Cocoa developers, especially since 2.0. It also seen many contributions from various users. But it has become very hard to maintain. In this blog post I’ll describe the reasons and future directions.

Creating Mac application requires lots of though and effort into creating a good user experience too. Although generally Cocoa API and tools allow us spend more time on this, there are areas that could benefit from additional effort. When developing Startupizer 2.0, one such area I wanted to address was nicer about window with scrolling credits. This blog post demonstrates the solution I chose.

Almost two years ago, I wrote about organization and architecure of my Xcode projects. As all, I also envolved a lot during these few years. If nothing else, I released my first shareware application and I learned a lot from it. In this post, I’ll describe some of the changes to how I architecture my applications.

One more year is nearing to its end and it’s time to review the ups and downs. I’ll take a look at how the year went by, what was going on as well as plans for next one.

In September, I wrote about our Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Auto Layout. As auto layout is one of the building blocks for laying out user interface for next major update of Startupizer, and being new technology, I came across few issues that took me a while to figure out. In this post, I’ll cover some of them for my future reference and hopefully shed some light for those of you stumbling upon the same walls.

In June, we wrote about our new website look. Some time after that, Matt Gemmell wrote a blog post about “baked” web sites. The concept wasn’t new to us, but the post was published right in the middle of the time when we were playing with local Word Press installation, and due to unnecessary difficulties with the process, it resonated in our mind.

In my previous post (part 1 and part 2), I talked about new Lion feature - view-based table views. I skimmed over auto layout briefly. In this post, I’m going to talk about it a bit more. We’ll update the example app from previous post to use auto layout and see what changes are required when porting existing code. In addition, we’ll take a look at how we can use auto layout with view controllers and dynamic view hierarchies.

With OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple has introduced many cool features to it’s AppKit. One of those that caught my attention right away, was view based table views. It seemed like the missing widget I was looking for when implementing Startupizer’s items list. So I decided to take a spin as a research for directions for 2.0 release. In this post, I’ll go step by step through a small project gradually adding features until it will look similar to current main window.