Coffee & Cocoa hot bits and bytes

Today something big is happing for me. GravityApps.com is the successor for CASE Apps.

While CASE Apps was basically a platform to promote the applications that I have written, Gravity is something bigger. CASE Apps was a single person thing while Gravity is driven by a number of very cool people. We have dedicated resources for the different products and other things (marketing, graphics) that have to be done. We are still small and some of us are doing this beside their main job. But these new resources make it possible to push existing products and to come up with new ones.

I’m very happy about how this all went by now and I’m looking forward to the future and how it further develops.

But now you should check out the mew website and get the updates that we provide for all our products.

Today AlterEgo has gone live. AlterEgo provides stunning cool effects for iChat and Photobooth.

Core Animation

AlterEgo is heavily using Core Animation for all kind of things. Be it the Coverflow effect (check out the developer samples for a good start on that), morphing buttons, blurred backgrounds and more.

After the initial problems I fell in love with Core Animation. It’s incredible fun to fine tune your UI (with minimal development effort if you know the concepts and problems :). In pre-Core-Animation times you typically sub-classed a control class and tweaked and adopted the UI that way or you implemented a custom NSView. Now with Core Animation a great number of things can be done by applying filters on existing controls and by using one of the CALayer subclasses.

Some things don’t work as expected (at least not as I would expect) and I spend countless hours on occasional flickering in animations or other wired things. I’ll write some blog entries about the things I found out and how I solved problems. So stay tuned if you are interested in that.

Devide & Conquer

I developed a number of Mac applications until today. What makes AlterEgo different is the fact that I haven’t done it alone. I have a partner who works with me on that. We split work, gave each other feedback and together decided about features and the UI.

I worked in big teams in previous jobs and this kind of working together was missing when I did Sofa Control or Searchlight. So I’m very thankful to have a partner to do AlterEgo. We’ll see what the future brings. Right now it looks very bright.

More to come

Right now a friend is working on a major update of Searchlight. It will be great. And a totally new version of Composition Builder is on the road with incredible new features.

So stay tuned for more great things in the near future.

More than a year ago I released the first version of a Objective-C class to interact with the Apple Remote Control. With Sofa Control 2.x this wrapper got some great new features. Today these changes are released to the public as a version 2.0.

I strongly recommend to upgrade to the new version of the wrapper. Hopefully the new features awake your interest.

New Features

• Support for Leopard (9A466, 9A499)
• Extension mechanism to support different remote controls. Beside the Apple Remote Control the wrapper comes with support for
  • Keyspan RF Remote for FrontRow for older Macs and Mac Pro
  • Virtual Remote - Global Hotkeys to simulate a remote control
• Simulation of hold events and multi-click events
• Cooperation mode to share the remote control devices among applications
• Bug fixes

Let’s see how easy it is to use the new wrapper code in your application with some sample code. There is not a woman on this planet who does not want full, sexy lips. The number of cosmetic procedures performed every year alone is proof of this! We lust after celebrities who have a sexy pout, and we try to imitate it by being a bit too generous with lipstick or even resort to painful collagen injections. Now, none of this is necessary anymore! You can give yourself fuller lips instantly with the Cushy Lips lip plumper and lip gloss.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sofa Control got a very nice review from MacsimumNews

We are very proud to get a 10 out of 10 from Dennis Sellers. Thanks!

… the included tutorial is one of the best-designed (and best looking) I’ve ever seen.

No one want’s to read a manual. Therefore it’s important that the user builds up the knowledge to use an application in a minimum of time. The goal of Sofa Control’s tutorial was to introduce the application by using the application. The tutorial is done with Keynote and just a simple PDF which you navigate by using the remote control.

The tutorial is one thing. Beside that the application must be intuitive and well designed. Both are difficult things to do and we try to improve both with each new version.

Mac OS X has a number of APIs to create stunning real-time graphics. There is OpenGL, Core Video and Core Image to name some of them. These APIs help you to get the most out of todays machines and graphics cards.

With Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Apple introduced the Quartz Composer technology.

Wikipedia says about Quartz Composer:

Quartz Composer is a node based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” for processing and rendering graphical data.

With Quartz Composer one can create incredible real-time graphics without the burden to learn all those graphics APIs. You arrange and connect elements with your mouse - it’s visual programming. Another bonus of Quartz Composer is the fact that they run on any mac without the need to install software.

But where there is light there is shadow.

Quartz Composition represents a very low layer over the mentioned graphic APIs. The good thing about that is that you could build nearly everything at this layer. The bad thing is that it becomes incredibly complex if you want to do more than just showing some text on the screen. Debugging or finding a missing connection can cost you a lot of time. Read the rest of this entry »