The Bacon Bear Blog: Category general

My jump into Cocoa programming

Jeff — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:19:00 -0700

Ahh sweet freedom. After many months away taking care of things in the “Working World” I finally find myself with some extra time to pick up some projects to do on my own. My latest stint: Cocoa programming.

Granted I just started off, but right now the experience has been fantastic. The Cocoa architecture seems clean and well layed out, Interface Builder is fantastic to use (how much easier can you get then drag/drop and connect the pieces with lines?), and the best part… I don’t have to touch the icky language that is Obj-C. Yep, thanks to RubyCocoa I can do all the Mac development I want in the language of my choice.

I’ll post more as my experience grows!

VirtueDesktops: The new Virtual Desktop Manager in town

Jeff — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:17:00 -0800

I’ve always been a fan of virtual desktops, dating way back to my PC days. Being able to organize desktops by work task has just been a huge time saver for me and really, I don’t know how I would work without one.

After using Desktop Manager on my Mac for the last 2 years or so, I recently found and switched over to using VirtueDesktops instead. Why? Number of reasons actually:

Applications can be bound to a specific desktop. This means that when VirtueDesktops comes up, my Mail App is already on my “Mail” desktop, TextMate is already on my “Code” desktop, and Firefox is already on my “Web” desktop. This was something I had to do manually with Desktop Manager
Clicking an Application on the dock automatically switches to the desktop that App is on.
Actively developed. I haven’t seen a new version of Desktop Manager in over a year!

This is not to say VirtueDesktops isn’t without its flaws. I find it to be less stable then Desktop Manager, though its core functionality seems to be pretty solid. It’s little things such as text not updating, buttons not responding, and slightly inconsistent UI that tarnishes its otherwise excellent execution.

The latest version can be found here.

Grand opening

Jeff — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:07:00 -0800

Here you have it, the grand opening post of the Bacon Bear Blog (BBB). We’ll be using this space to talk about a variety of technology related topics as well as fun articles from around the web. We’ll try to keep it focused to these major areas:

The various projects Bacon Bear Productions publishes (icalify, stockedornot, etc)
Rails, web publishing, and development as a whole
Fun articles, with a geeky bend

Hope to see you again! And so does the Bacon Bear (You’ll hear more from him in the near future).