Sugar Maple Software

Last night, C4[1] began. Wolf Rentzsch and Wil Shipley were the speakers. Wil was, well, Wil. Wolf’s talk was interesting and I found myself still thinking about it this morning. Wolf talked about the sea-change that indie developers are experiencing. He believes that indies have much more influence and power since platforms, languages, and interfaces have shifted from the large companies (e.g., Microsoft and Apple) to the web, resulting in a democratization. The lower cost of entry for developers is certainly an example of this trend. However, while I think we’re heading in this direction, we’re not there yet. …

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. …

NetNewsWire 3.0d62 has been released. This release fixes the previously mentioned issue where the bodies of news items could not be retrieved by NewsHakwer: “Fixed a bug getting the description (content) of a news item via AppleScript.” So, if you’re addicted to the new NetNewsWire, you can once again have NewsHawker speak your news.

IronCoder V has been announced for 30 March through 1 April! I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make time to participate again. Perhaps if inspiration strikes me after seeing the theme and API, I’ll throw something together. Regardless, this provides motivation to release NewsHawker before the competition so I can donate a license as a prize. Regardless of whether I do that, I encourage you to enter; you’ll learn something and have fun at the same time.

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. …

As I previously mentioned, I hope to give something back to the Mac development community that is so supportive. In that spirit, I’m releasing the Perl script, under the MIT license, that I use export NewsHawker. I have learned, at times the hard way, that every build that you give to others must be traceable and reproducible. That is, you must be able to determine easily exactly which software someone has on their computer and you must be able to recreate that exact software. This is critical when supporting customers or debugging issues. …

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. …