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.

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 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.

There are many applications we find invaluable and rely on them for our daily usage. In this post, we’ll write about some of them. Note that our selection of apps reflects our personal needs and tastes and this post is primarily intended to give tribute to these tools and perhaps show various options to our readers. We’re sure many of you have your own personal favorites and many of those would be different from ours. Keep this in mind when reading the article. This post will only cover generic utility apps, we won’t write about apps we use for developing - perhaps we’ll cover them in a future post…

We’re slowly approaching first beta of our first shareware product - Startupizer. It’s advanced login items handler for OSX. Besides handling login items startup, you’re used to, it allows you to change the order of items, enable or disable individual items and what’s even more important specify optional items startup based on time, modifier keys etc. All this allows you to drastically reduce system startup times while still enjoying automated startup of all items you need at specific time!