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

Earlier I mentioned that the Gluestick final canidate was delayed due to one last minute addition. Well, I’m happy to announce what we’ve been working on!

Gluestick compositions now operate in a three dimensional context. That is, layers can have depth. You can transform layers now using pitch, yaw, and roll! Read the rest of this entry »

According to iLounge O’Reilly is making available it’s “rough cut” of “iPhone Open Application Development” available. I’m not sure how useful this book will be with the official SDK on the way from Apple this month, but hopefully most of the frameworks should be the same. Still cool for those that want to program for the mobile version of OS X.

Cocoadex has posted an excellent article on how you can take advantage of the Macbook Air’s multi-touch trackpad in your Cocoa OS X application.

Thanks to Charles Srstka for sending me the link.

Remember the time I said that Gluestick wasn’t optimized yet for 8 core systems?

So I have a new eight core Mac Pro on order, but I’m stuck in the mass GeForce 8800 GT wait. So tonight, I went to the Apple store to see the new Macbook Air, and I tried Gluestick on one of the new 8 core Mac Pros while I was there.

My primary development system is a dual core Macbook Pro 2.16 ghz, and on average Gluestick spawns 3-4 threads while idle, and 5-6 threads while busy. Pretty decent optimizations for a quad core system or dual core system.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when I fired up Gluestick on a new Mac Pro and found that it had spawned 20 threads. When it was more active it spawned around 25 threads. Gluestick was running great on the new Mac Pros. Now, I wish I could take credit for this, but it would seem there is some previously unknown optimizations in OS X that Gluestick is taking advantage of that allow it to run nicely on 8 cores.

So I’ll admit it. I bought MacHeist’s bundle. I needed a copy of Snapz Pro, and to be fair, I would have bought it separately. But the opportunity to sample Pixelmator was attractive. Unfortunately, the MacHeist crew isn’t making me feel too comfortable about surrendering my credit card number to them…

It all started with John Welch over at his blog. Apparently John posted something to his twitter about the whole Malcor thing, and John Casasanta of MacHeist decided to take it a wee bit personally.

I’ll spare you from having to read the actual entry by basically summing up what happened: Read the rest of this entry »