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Scrolling credits

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.

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State of the art state machine

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.

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Auto layout and view animation

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.

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Auto-layout in Lion

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.

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View based table views in Lion - part 1 of 2

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.

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View based table views in Lion - part 2 of 2

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.

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Startupizer 1.1 released!

Can’t believe how time flies! Another spring is in full blossom, so there’s plenty of activity outside, from work in the garden to relaxing walks. But we are still coding - in fact, last month we were quite busy working on first Startupizer’s upgrade!

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Everyday software

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…

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