Sugar Maple Software

Obviously, I’ve been using NewsHawker longer than anyone. I thought I’d share how I use it on an almost daily basis in hopes of providing potential uses that may not be obvious at first glance. …

At this point, for many who have downloaded NewsHawker, the 25 day trial period has elapsed. While I hope that many of you have sufficiently evaluated NewsHawker in the past 25 days such that you will soon be purchasing a license, for those of you that haven’t, you can extend your evaluation. A common complaint about a time-limited trial is that if you download the application, run it just a couple of times, forget about it for a while, and then later want to continue to evaluate the application, the trial has expired. I implemented what I call a 25 + 5 trial to address this criticism. The 25 + 5 trial consists of a standard 25-day time-limited trial with a one-time 5-day extension. The five-day extension begins when you choose. This can be immediately after the 25-day trial expires or months later when you rediscover NewsHawker in your Applications folder. You don’t need to send me an e-mail, lobby for an extension, and wait for a response; instead, you can extend the trial automatically. If you find this 25 + 5 trial helpful or have other complaints about this approach, please post a comment to let me know.

NewsHawker 1.0 has been released! You can now purchase a license for NewsHawker for US$19. You can also download a trial and give it a listen before purchasing. …

NewsHawker 1.0.0b3 is now available. The major new feature is support for the Apple Remote. This integration must be explicitly enabled in the preferences. Note that NewsHawker will only “listen” to the Apple Remote when it is the front-most application. This allows you to continue to use the remote in the standard manner when NewsHawker is not the front-most application. …

The most requested feature for NewsHawker is support for the Apple Remote. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t provide a public API for this. I considered only supporting the Apple Remote through third-party applications such as Sofa Control and Remote Buddy. However, once I found Martin Kahr’s Apple Remote Controller Wrapper Class, I decided to integrate support directly in NewsHawker. …

This was initially sent to the macsb mailing list. A couple of people suggested I post it here as well. It’s the same other than the addition of some links to previous posts.

I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts that may be of interest to those macsb folks in a similar situation. First, I decided that NewsHawker would be my first app because it met two criteria previously mentioned on this list: one, it is an app that does something I personally want (which provides motivation) and, two, its implementation isn’t too complicated (which results in a greater chance of actually releasing). I’m relieved that I didn’t start with a more complicated application since the effort required to reach beta is more than I expected and the amount of time I have been able to dedicate is less than I had hoped. It seems like other commitments often trumps my development efforts. …

NewsHawker, the first application from Sugar Maple Software, has recently reached beta.

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Do you spill your breakfast cereal on your keyboard or yourself while trying to eat and read your news at the same time? Does your keyboard get sticky from your dirty fingers as you eat pizza and advance to the next news item in your news reader? If so, NewsHawker can help you read more news while keeping your keyboard clean.

NewsHawker reads you your news so you can focus on other tasks. NewsHawker extends the functionality of NetNewsWire to speak the news items in NetNewsWire. NewsHawker is configurable. Do you want to read just the headlines of the news items? No problem. Just the bodies? Sure. Read the bodies of some items as their headlines are being read? Certainly. Open certain items in your browser if they sound interesting? Of course. …

I needed to convert HTML to plain text for the application that I’m developing. I figured someone else had done this before; so, I searched for a solution. I found one that leveraged WebKit and worked well but was too slow for my usage. I found another that leveraged libxml2 and was fast but crashed. In the end, and only because I could browse the source to the version of libxml2 included in Mac OS X, I was able to work around the crash and keep the faster solution. …

While I usually write about programming in the land of milk and honey (i.e., Cocoa), I spent most of the previous ten years writing kernel-level code. Recently, I’ve ventured back into the kernel and was reminded of the challenge of logging from an I/O Kit driver. When writing code in the kernel for an I/O Kit driver, you can’t invoke printf to log messages. Instead, you usually invoke IOLog. …

I recently wrote my first draft of documentation for my upcoming application. Integrating this documentation into Apple Help was much easier than I expected. The Apple Help Viewer simply displays HTML files. More impressively, cascading style sheets (CSS) are supported. I hope this will allow me to share the identical HTML files between my application and the support section of my web site and simply have different CSS files for each. …