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This is the developer blog of Simon Wolf, Mac and iPhone developer, owner of Otter Software Ltd.

I am currently available for contract work so please get in touch to see if I can help you.

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Wednesday
Jun092010

X Still Marks the Spot 

DateWednesday, June 9, 2010 at 11:19AM

Don’t Panic!

WWDC is Apple’s annual developer conference and this year’s event, which is going on in San Francisco as I type this in England, is almost entirely focused on what iOS, the operation system that runs on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Apple have even gone so far as to only have Apple Design Awards for iOS applications this year, completely excluding Mac OS X applications. Some developers are seeing this as the death knell for OS X and the Mac desktop and laptop range of devices but I don’t and here’s why.

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Sunday
May232010

Core Animation - The Animator Proxy

DateSunday, May 23, 2010 at 11:49AM

Introduction

The animator proxy is available to NSViews and NSWindows and is completely free of Core Animation layers. As such is technically not Core Animation but is rather Cocoa Animation. However the two are so closely tied together that it is worth considering it part of Core Animation. This article explains what the animator proxy does behind the scenes when you invoke it and how to customise the animations is uses.

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Saturday
May222010

Core Animation - Animator Proxy, CALayers, Layer-Backed & Layer Hosting

DateSaturday, May 22, 2010 at 4:06PM

Introduction

One of the aspects of Core Animation that can be confusing is that there are degrees of it. To start with there is the animator proxy which is available to NSWindows and NSViews and allows you to animate some property transitions. Next there is the concept of layer-backed views which allow you to perform additional animation effects to your views whilst still essentially working with the familiar AppKit objects. Finally there are layer-hosting views, a scenario where you essentially use Core Animation layers to create the user interface, simply using an NSView to contain the layers. This article explains each of these in further detail and will hopefully make the distinction between them clearer.

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Saturday
May222010

The Core Animation Series of Articles

DateSaturday, May 22, 2010 at 9:34AM

Introduction

I am working on a project for a client where the majority of the user interface is best suited to being created as Core Animation layers. Up until this project I had tinkered with Core Animation and I had what I thought was a reasonable understanding of it but, in retrospect, this really was not the case and I have learnt a massive amount and realise that there is still a lot to learn. To both help me remember what I have learnt and to hopefully help some other people better understand Core Animation I have decided to write a series of articles about it and although they may be a little disjointed and should not be considered an end-to-end tutorial about Core Animation they will hopefully grow into a useful and understandable resource for beginners and more advanced users alike.

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Tuesday
Apr272010

Recommendation: Spot Color & Developer Color Picker

DateTuesday, April 27, 2010 at 11:58PM

Name: Spot Color
Supplier: Zach Waugh
URL: http://zachwaugh.com/spotcolor/
Price: $0.00

Name: Developer Color Picker
Supplier: Wade Cosgrove
URL: http://www.panic.com/~wade/picker/
Price: $0.00

Spot Color is a small application that simply allows you to access the standard Mac OS X color picker as a stand-alone application. I was endlessly loading or switching applications to access the color picker so discovering this application was a huge relief and will save me endless amounts of frustration.

What makes Spot Color even better is Wade Cosgrove’s Developer Color Picker which makes it a snap to generate NSColor, UIColor, CGColorRef, CSS and HTML color declarations. I’ve just started doing a lot of work with Core Animation layers and being able to generate CGColorRefs quickly and easily is simply wonderful.

In addition to creating wonderful, free tools for other developers, Zach has released the source for Spot Color on GitHub. You can find it at http://github.com/zachwaugh/SpotColor.

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Monday
Mar222010

prevUI Released

DateMonday, March 22, 2010 at 11:01PM

I am delighted to announce that prevUI is now available and you can find out about it and download it from the prevUI page on the main Otter Software site.

prevUI was created because a graphic designer I am working with asked me to integrate a draft version of an application icon into my code so that we could see how it looked in the Dock. After asking a few other designers it transpires that most of them don’t have even a relatively simple way to preview application icons and prevUI is hopefully the solution for them.

I have lots of plans for the application, some of which are mentioned on the application’s page but if you have any suggestions or feature requests then please let me know.

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Monday
Mar222010

Lunches is Now Available

DateMonday, March 22, 2010 at 7:05AM

After an approval process of around 24 hours, Lunches, my packed lunch reminder application, is now available in the App Store.

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Friday
Mar192010

Lunchbox Becomes Lunches

DateFriday, March 19, 2010 at 9:43AM

Introduction

Back at the start of December 2009 I wrote an article about Lunchbox. Since then nothing really progressed on the project. My designer got diverted onto other work for me and the application was just sitting in limbo. Last night that changed and Lunches will hopefully soon be on the App Store.

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Tuesday
Mar162010

Designing and Polishing The SCO DVD Downloader

DateTuesday, March 16, 2010 at 3:26PM

Introduction

A couple of days ago I posted an article about the overall development process that was involved in producing the SCO DVD Downloader application for Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline. This post focuses on the design of the application both in terms of the actual user interface and the user experience.

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Tuesday
Mar162010

The ScreenCastsOnline DVD Downloader

DateTuesday, March 16, 2010 at 12:10PM

Introduction

Over the last few weeks I have been spending some of my free time working on an application for Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline called the SCO DVD Downloader. This article explains the evolution of the application and why either Don would have incurred higher costs or I would have lost money had it been a commercial project. It will be followed up by an article about polishing the application (and what, unfortunately, was left unpolished) and a few articles that will cover the more technical coding subjects touched upon here.

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