So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend. On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo. Towards the end of the presentation, he showed off the Dock. You all know the Dock, it’s been … Continue reading "I Live My Life a Quarter Century at a Time"
I tell this story, not to gain your sympathy, but more to be a cautionary tale. As we head into Apple’s OS release cycle, I don’t have a lot to show for it this year. Not nothing, but not anything I would consider actually substantial. I know a lot of people who are in the … Continue reading "Subscribe to Burnout+"
Catalyst is in some ways a miraculous technology – just click a check box and instantly have a working Mac version of your app. And, given the source code of a relatively modern iOS app, it certainly works. Even PCalc’s About screen worked out of the box. But that is just step one of a … Continue reading "Catalytic Converter"
25 years sounds like a really long time. A quarter of a century sounds even longer. Yet, that is how long it has been since PCalc 1.0 was released. Date: Wed, 23 Dec 92 17:41:10 GMT From: thomsonj Subject: [*] PCalc 1.0 Submission Enclosed is a binhex file containing a submission for your archives. … Continue reading "A long time ago, in a...
I originally wrote this piece way back in April 2015, just after returning from speaking at Úll. It ended up not being published, but I figured since I’m preparing for my trip to Úll 2016, I would put it up here instead. And hey, first post on my blog in six years! I wrote an article in … Continue reading "Rise of the Úlluminati"
Reprinted from issue 28 of The Loop magazine from March 2014, with thanks to Jim Dalrymple. It seems ironic, that despite our invention of near-instantaneous global communication, we are still not the best species on the planet at actually telling each other how we’re feeling. Probably not even in the top five. Instead, many of … Continue...
Today, I would like to complain about the following two groups of people who are cheap: Developers Users Ok, not all of them, some of you are quite lovely. But I’ve been noticing a couple of trends of late that I think deserve comment, and a couple of people today really pushed me to the … Continue reading "Universal cheapness"
“So”, I hear you thinking, “I remember James being very anti-software bundle earlier this year. He had that spat with John Casasanta and everything. Imagine my surprise when I saw this offer in my inbox this morning – both DragThing and PCalc are part of the new MacUpdate Promo Winter Bundle. Is he a just a … Continue reading "Four Legs Good, Two...
You might have seen that we have a number of new PCalc releases out today, two for the iPhone, and one more for Mac OS X. On the face of it, these might look like minor upgrades to fix a couple of annoying bugs and nothing more. Let me state here, for the record, that … Continue reading "Taking A Stand"
Well, that was exciting. So, you probably all saw my little marketing effort for PCalc at the beginning of the month. It started out as a conversation a while back with some of the usual suspects at the monthly Glasgow MacMacDev developer meeting. We were discussing the recently introduced age ratings in the App Store, … Continue reading "Going...