You Can’t Fire Me, I Don’t Work In This Van

It’s time to take the wraps off our first post-themes program. It’s called Gluestick, and we think it’s going to make creating simple graphics easy and quick.

The Gluestick icon was created by Bobby Anderson last year before he got hired by Apple. He did a great job, rendering it all the way up to 1024×1024. You can find the Gluestick icon on his homepage here.

Gluestick is not a heavy duty graphics editor like Photoshop or Pixelmator. Rather, it is a quick and easy editor built for the Can Combine Icons or iLife type. Want to combine a few photos together or create a title slide for an iMovie? Gluestick makes it a snap.

Our beta testers made us keep it lean and quick. It starts fast, it makes it quick to create a composition, and it saves fast. We included several time saving features that we think are really cool, and we haven’t seen in other software. I have a feeling you’ll think they’re cool too. But you’ll have to wait until Gluestick is done to try them.

Gluestick does not use a 3rd party graphics engine like Pixelmator. We started writing the graphics engine in OpenGL on 10.4, but then Apple demoed their lovely CoreAnimation API for 10.5, and we just had to make the move. Gluestick uses CoreAnimation for it’s rendering, meaning that creating a composition is beautiful as well as quick. Yes, this means Gluestick is fully GPU accelerated. In addition, we’ve optimized it for multi-core CPU’s. Gluestick can take advantage of up to four cores simultaneously, and we’re working on getting it optimized properly for eight. The graphics engine will even render your images with smooth scaling, and nifty CoreImage effects.

Gluestick is in final candidate, although we made the executive decision to make one major change in the last build, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer to get your hands on it. Gluestick requires Mac OS 10.5. It should run great on any Intel Mac or G5, but G4’s are also supported. We’re always working on getting it running faster so that users of older G4’s will be able to effectively use Gluestick.

The other day Jens Alfke made news when he announced he was leaving Apple. I first met Jens at WWDC2006, where I have attended a session that he and a mutual friend were giving. Afterwards I had dinner with him and some of his team, where I got to talk with him about his history with Apple.

Jens raises an interesting concern about Apple and how they treat their engineers. Those of us who were around for the pre-OS X days might remember that in every software, in the about dialog, there was a list of engineers who worked on the project. It never felt obtrusive, but I imagine that it gave engineers a chance to show their family and friends that their name had ended up on a finished product that they had been working on for the last six months. Read the rest of this entry »

Mid last year I finally upgraded from the green Honda Civic I had been driving to a 2004 Honda Accord V6 Coupe. Quite an upgrade.

Upon getting the car, I started to look at options for adding iPod integration, my only requirement being that the head unit had to stay stock (I’m not big on ripping up the dash.) I quickly found that there is a lack of good solutions for Hondas. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be the first to admit it, I’ve never been big with coding websites by hand. When I started doing web design, I started with my trusty copy of Adobe GoLive 4, and moved all the way up to Adobe GoLive CS2 from there. I spent some time in the code pane when I’d write my PHP, but CSS was edited within Adobe’s CSS editor.

With the Adobe/Macromedia merger GoLive met a quiet death, and I was left looking for a new web design tool. Dreamweaver was Adobe’s anointed replacement, but Dreamweaver’s UI was complicated, it’s CSS editor slim, and it’s site management tools extremely poor.

Enter Coda!

Coda is not a WYSIWYG editor. So going in, I knew I’d have to brush up my HTML and CSS skills. Transitioning didn’t take too long. It’s hard to do WYSIWYG editing in a tool like GoLive without knowing some HTML, so really most my time was spent brushing up on CSS. Read the rest of this entry »