Pbur’s Adventures

Apologies for the lack of posts. Work and life have been keeping me busy. One of the things that kept me busy was going to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. I’ve written up a little bit about it over on my Cocoa blog, CocoaDevNation.

Ever since I switched back to the Mac, I’ve been trying to find the “right” financial management software to replace Microsoft Money 2000.

I’ve tried Quicken For Mac, iBank, Cha-Ching, Moneydance and Horizon. They all fell short in some aspect of what I needed. Either they were missing scheduled payments, balance forecasting, or just had a terrible user experience. I thought I was going to have to run Windows XP in a Virtual Machine so my wife and I could track our finances forever and it didn’t feel right.

Fast forward to mid 2008 and I’m listening to the MacSB podcast and they had an episode titled “Battling Big Iron Software Companies as a Micro ISV” where the host “Scotty” interviewed Kevin Hoctor of No Thirst Software about his relatively new product MoneyWell. I started researching the product to see if maybe, just maybe, I could finally stop booting Windows on my Mac.

It turns out, by trying to find an exact replica of MS Money, I was looking for the wrong thing. MoneyWell takes an electronic approach to an old way of managing your money: the envelope system. To do this, MoneyWell uses “buckets” for allocating income to spend. As you spend money, you assign those expenditures to a particular bucket. The amount available to that bucket goes down as you spend it until there’s nothing left to spend. If you go over the amount you’ve allocated for that bucket, and you don’t want to go into debt, you have to pull money from another bucket to cover your overage. In that way, you are somewhat forced to live within your means. It’s this approach to money management that Maggie and I had actually been looking for.

I was going to write a full review of MoneyWell and its use, but I’ll leave usage to the very excellent video tutorials provided by No Thirst. If after watching those videos, you still have questions, then I suggest you join the most excellent user group on Google Groups and ask your questions. One thing I love about the user forum is that not only are people talking about how to use MoneyWell specifically, but how to go about managing their finances.

Something that really sets No Thirst Software apart is the amazing level of customer service Kevin provides. I can not emphasize this enough. While several customers, including myself, try and help those that have questions on the Google Group, Kevin generally gets to them faster. He provides the most amazing enthusiasm for supporting his software and trying to solve user’s problems. I have never seen the care and time spent providing such public support from any other developer.

As for my review, I’ll say that MoneyWell works really, really well for Maggie and I and gives us a very accurate picture of how much money we have left to spend on particular things. It also shows us what we’re not going to get when we overspend elsewhere ( such as eating out, which is our Achilles Heal ).

If you’ve been looking for a finances tracking application for the Mac, I’d very much recommend you check out MoneyWell for yourself.

About 2 months or so ago, I was able to pickup what I consider to be my first “real” camera: a used Canon Rebel XTi with a 1.4 50mm fixed lens. So far, I’ve been blown away by how awesome it is. One of the things that had been driving us crazy was how slow the point and shoot we had was. Trying to catch Brenden or any other toddler doing something wasn’t possible. They just moved too fast.

Enter the XTi. It’s super fast and can take photos as fast as I can hit the button or in bursts of 3 a second or so. I can easily catch Brenden doing what he does and not worry that I’m going to miss the opportunity for the shot.

The camera shoots in RAW format at 10 Megapixels. These are big files coming off the camera. To compare, our P&S has a 2 GB card in it, at it’s highest quality ( 7 Megapixel ), the card holds almost 800 pictures. The XTi in RAW can only put 200 pictures on the same card.

I have two examples of some shots I’ve gotten that I really like and I think show off the camera and lens some.

This is a shot of Brenden staring off at the TV. I really like how the picture captures the light from the TV hitting off his eyes.

This shot is an example of how quickly the camera can get itself together. This was at a birthday party for one of our friend’s kids. I was sitting on the sidewalk when this baby runs up to me. I wanted to get a shot of him because I loved the color of his eyes, so I brought the camera up and shot as fast as it would go and this is what turned out. I really like it.

I’ve already found myself taking more and more pictures that I used to. The trick now is to delete the ones that aren’t so good and only keep the ones that are worth it. I should be posting more photos now since there will hopefully be a lot better selection for me to choose from.

Have you ever wanted to quickly add an event to iCal but didn’t actually want to either launch it or bring it forward? Or you wanted to take a quick look at your schedule for today? Well, earlier this year Second Gear Software released a new utility for OS X called Today that does just that and more.

What Today does is provide a very quick and easy interface to iCal that shows you what’s going on “today”. In the top part of their window are the day’s events and appointments. The bottom half is your to-do list from iCal. All the events and to-dos are in the color of the calendar they are assigned to, which makes for some quick browsing.

One of the best features of Today for me is that you can assign a global keyboard shortcut that will bring up the Today window for quick adding of events or viewing of your calendar. This has been a godsend since I don’t have to have iCal open and Today is super fast and responsive.

Lastly, I wanted to comment about the support I have received from Second Gear Software. I had a couple of issues while I was checking out Today, so I went to the support site. Second Gear is using Get Satisfaction, a sort of “social” support service. Users and Companies helping each other to solve issues with products. The developer of Today responded very quickly to my issues. This level of support is fantastic and I believe helps set apart these smaller Mac Software companies.

To keep on top of your busy schedule, I’d highly recommend Today as it provides very quick and convenient access to your iCal calendars. Today is $15 and can be purchased at Second Gear’s website.

Great talk by a Microsoft Fellow, Brian Harry, about what’s coming in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the next release of Visual Studio code named “Rosario”.

Coming up in SP1 for 2008 is some very nice changes for Team Foundation Server/Team Explorer, which is the source control piece. The biggest one that is going to save me headaches is that the “Add files/Folders” dialog has been made smart enough to only show files that are not already under source control.

Also added is some really nice performance comparison tools when running code to check to see how much a change to some code changed the overall performance. This analysis also shows so called “hot paths” that tell you some part of the code that takes the most amount of time, or makes the most calls. It also allows you to see the most called functions and methods.

Coming up in Rosario are a couple of really cool sounding changes: Historical Debugging and Architecture Modeling.

Historical Debugging takes the way we currently debug and basically stands it on its head and allows a “step back” to go backwards. This helps when you’re trying to find out where an exception is being thrown. Normally, when you’re stepping through code, you step over methods until you find the one the exception is occurring in, set a breakpoint there, restart the program and step into that method. This is repeated until you get to actual line with the problem. This can be a very time consuming process. Historical debugging removes the rerun piece by allowing a developer to step back, everything is restored to how it looked before executing the method with the problem, allowing the developer to then step into the method immediately instead of having to stop the application and step back to it.

Architecture Modeling allows someone to define how they feel their architecture should look like, defining all their layers. Then, Visual Studio can look at your classes and their references to each other to catch when you break out of the architecture you wanted to follow. The example given was a web page using a direct access of a data access class instead of going through the data access service layer. Visual Studio will flag this and let you know your architecture has been violated.

Also coming in Rosario are “Gated Checkins”, which won’t allow a checkin if it breaks the build. This means that the build server should never get a build that’s broken on checkin. In addition, the current build available to QA isn’t broken.

One last really cool feature around testing is the addition of being able to test interfaces automatically via scripts. These can be recorded and replayed by testers, or played to a particular point ( i.e. Login, click this, click that ), and the tester takes up manually manipulating from that point. If during this testing, the tester finds a new bug ( or why they are doing manual testing ), the testing can be recorded and this recording can be added to a bug report along with the historical debugging info. This allows the developer to replay the video for showing reproducibility, as well as the state of the application during the bug and the ability to step back and forward around the bug.

This was a great talk, but it’s too bad so many of these features aren’t available for us to use today. As with most things Microsoft, everything I wanted was in the “next release”.

Tonight I wrote the following:

git tag 0.1

What that means is I tagged version 0.1 of my first Cocoa App. I was able to get this version done in about 3 hours and it has all the features I’ve learned from the weekend. The UI took the longest part as I had to keep changing things as I learned more. In the end, I went back to a super simple UI to start and will be building up from there.

I’m purposefully not divulging much information because I want to get more complete before I announce this app to the world. It’s not a very exciting app, but I still want to keep it under wraps.

I’m still impressed with Cocoa. Now, I’m to the point of searching the API docs to get most of the functionality I’m looking for. Although I still need to read the basics of using Core Data.

It’s been almost two hole days with Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Book and I’m about three quarters of the way through it.

This book is what I have been looking for to help guide me into Cocoa after several weeks of just trying to figure it out on my own. Now with Hillegass’ foundation, I think I can easily move on learning just by looking at the regular Apple docs.

I want to note that this is the first tutorial/learning type computer book covering an environment that the sample apps actually do some amazing things. Before being halfway through the book, I had a pretty sophisticated sample app that had document saving/opening and full undo/redo support. More amazing was how easy it was to do those things. The total amount of code for that project is 150 lines of code that do the work. ( I’m cheating and not counting the code on the model or the header files, but they are quite small ).

Building the GUI with Interface Builder is initially a little awkward, but I’ve gotten used to it and can operate pretty quickly. I think it’s very ironic that Interface Builder is quite possibly the least intuitive application on my Mac. Considering the amazing intuitive applications that get built with it.

All-in-all, I’m very impressed with Cocoa and the tools used to build OS X applications. I’m going to get my app started this weekend and report on it’s progress and my progress through OS X technologies over the coming months.

Some of you may be asking yourselves, “Does he mean he’s going to be programming hot chocolate?” The answer to that is “No”. Cocoa is the technology behind programs on Apple’s OS X. Learning Cocoa has always been on my todo list, and now I’ve decided to finally tackle it.

Tonight I received “the book” on learning Cocoa and will be starting my learning process. I’m hoping to blog as I go along. I have an application in mind to build, but I’m going to save what it is for later.

So those of you who follow for personal updates, well, expect some technical ones for a while. I guess the good news will be that I’m posting!

So here’s to a fun adventure with Cocoa.

I just saw a post over at Will’s blog about this and I was amazed. Watch and enjoy:

If you’re like me, you’ve subscribed to a ton of Blog feeds. I was up to around 200 until I read a friend of mine Will’s post about consuming blogs. That post has changed my blog reading life.

I went from having hundred’s of unread posts when I got home to my Newsreader, to maybe a max of 20 entries when I check. I also got rid of the post machines BoingBoing and Slashdot. I basically went through my blog list and if there was something I constantly marking “all read”, then I dropped it.

I figure if something on BoingBoing or Slashdot is worth it, someone I know will link to it or send it to me. That has made as huge a difference as reading posts throughout the day.

Google Reader’s interface makes it very easy to glide through posts and choose which ones to read later either via marking it with a star or opening the post in a new tab for reading during my next blog break.

If you aren’t using a Feed Reader, I highly recommend it.

Will has also posted about other Media consumption, but the blog one really helped me out.

As Maggie pointed out on her blog, I was one of the many who braved the crowds Friday night and got us both an iPhone. My friend Jim has a pretty good account of what we went through to get our phones.

After a fairly quick activation, and after having my corporate discount removed, Maggie and I were up and running. First sync went beautifully, at which point I grabbed the phone out of the cradle and began my weekend obsession. ( There’s a 14-Day return policy, and I want to make sure this is the phone for me, although as you’ll soon learn, that’s not going to be an issue )

The first thing I did was to play the “Make Love, Not Warcraft” South Park episode I had purchased a while back from the iTunes Store. It looked gorgeous! In fact, the screen is just about perfect. When it’s off, you can see smudges, but when the thing is on, you can’t see them at all. The iPhone performs just as it appears in the commercials, but I digress.

Next up was getting it connected to the Wifi network I have setup in my house, and that as always, was a snap. I fired up the Safari web browser and started poking around. My blog came up great and I used the pinching to zoom in and the spreading to zoom out. Worked like a charm. The only downside I’ve seen here is that occasionally Safari crashes ( which means the phone just abruptly goes back to the home screen ).

Next up was YouTube. I watched a few of my favorites and they again looked awesome.

The SMS client is great! I’ve sent more text messages in the last 48 hours then I’ve sent in the last 2 years. The client is actually worth using, much more so than my old Nokia phone.

The mail client, which I’ve only got setup to check my Yahoo account works just like Mail.app in OS X and is full featured. The neat thing about Yahoo accounts on the iPhone is that they are completely synced up, meaning when I’ve read something or deleted something on my iPhone, it’s had the same thing done to it if I view it through the Yahoo Web interface.

I wore the phone out in the first day, meaning I did about as much stuff as I could exploring every little feature I could find. And after all that playing, I did have to charge it last night.

The biggest negative I’ve read leading up to the launch was the slowness of AT&Ts EDGE network ( the network you use for the Internet when Wifi isn’t available ) and to be honest, it hasn’t been as bad as predicted. I’ve read reports that leading up to Friday, the EDGE network got a sudden speed boost.

There’s only one missing feature for me, and that’s custom ringtones. At present, you must use one of the 25 provided. Although there are rumors abound that it’s coming “soon” via software updates. Which is one of the reasons I wasn’t too worried about some of the minor things people have found missing or that could be better: The entire interface is software and can be updated through iTunes. I see a lot of updates coming as Apple works out the kinks and adds requested features.

Overall, I think the iPhone lives up to what I want it to be, a convergence of my Music/Video Player and my cell phone. I love being able to just carry one device and the fact that’s it incredibly small and still pack in the features is just icing on the cake.

If you’re on the fence about getting one, I suggest going to an Apple store and playing with one. I think the form factor and overall weight will surprise you. And if you’re worried about what happens when you accidently drop your iPhone, you need to watch this video from PC World.

I’ll post more as I get more experience with it.

One last note, the clownfish background in all the promotional materials leading up to launch isn’t available as an actual wallpaper. I think that’s pretty funny.

I saw a cool site today: Speed Demos Archive . It features movie recordings of people playing games from start to finish as fast as they can. I think my personal favorite is:

Super Mario Bros. done in 5 minutes (using the world warps) and just under 20 minutes, playing all 32 levels.

I played a lot of Super Mario Bros. when I was much younger. And I finished it several times. But after watching these guys, I realized my skillz, they be lacking. And watching these people finish all these games I spent hours playing and finishing them with astonishing speed, I also wonder “is playing like that fun?”. I guess we all play for different reasons.

I found an iPod Vending machine at my local mall recently:

Yep, that’s right. You can buy any of the current iPods and several accessories right at this machine with your credit card. I was actually amazed it was in a hidden corner of the mall. I figured something like that would be put out right in the middle.

I thought vending machines like that only existed in Japan. I guess we’re finally getting there. Although we have a long way to go before we even get close to the Japanese.

With my new iMac comes a program called Comic Life which allows you to take your photos and quickly make comic book style pages with them. Here’s my first one which took a couple of minutes:

I know it’s not nearly as good as my friend’s comics, but hey, I can still try and get into the act. Now if I could only think of funny things to say.

It’s been a long time since I’ve actually gotten to play, but I really enjoy the game “World of Warcraft”. Blizzard has done a good job of making a game that appeals to both the Hard Core and Casual players (I definitely fall in the latter category). When I do get time, I can generally logon and have a good time playing for an hour or so. I’m hoping here towards the end of the year I can find a little time to get back into the game and maybe, just maybe gain a couple of levels.

But nothing sums up the hard core type players to me than this Penny-Arcade cartoon:

For those who don’t know, Penny-Arcade is an online comic that covers the gaming industry. And some fair warning if you visit the site…they can have some, shall we say, “colorful” language, as you can tell by this cartoon.

Oh, if you do like World of Warcraft and haven’t seen the World of Warcraft South Park episode titled “Make Love, Not Warcraft”, I highly recommend either buying it from the iTunes Music Store or finding it online.

Here are a couple of links to some interesting iTunes Smart Playlist ideas:

Music Only Type Playlists

and

Playlist for packrats

The first link starts out with building a “Music Only” smart playlist, then expands on it by building a “New and Unlistened to” list and others to get you to rate your songs, and build out more interesting lists based on those ratings.

The second link is to lists that help you find music or podcasts or videos that are eating up space that you could reclaim if you got into a pinch for disk space.

About two weeks ago I ordered a new 20″ iMac Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and an 256MB RAM upgrade to the video card. So I’ve since “switched” from a main Windows desktop to an iMac running OS X. Now, those that know me from back in high school will remember a time when I was a Mac Zealot. But around 1997, I got my first PC running Windows 95 and since then, a PC of some type had been my main machine. Some may remember that last year I bought a Mac Mini and had discussed the fact I figured my PC was about to become my secondary machine. Well, that didn’t happen because quite frankly, my PC was much faster at getting things done than the Mini.

Turn the clock forward a bit and Apple computers now use Intel chips and it has made an amazing difference. This iMac is faster than the Core Duo laptop I have running Windows XP and it just feels more at “home”, especially now that OS X is as responsive as Windows. I don’t know how, but Intel has found some magic wonderland to make context switching just faster than other processors.

Since I setup the Mac, I’ve been having a blast using it. In fact, you may notice a correlation to my sudden return to blogging with the purchase of the iMac. I just feel like getting more done on it. It’s such an elegant design with such a small footprint. I have tons more desk space now, and it runs much quieter and cooler than the PC did.

I have purchased Parallels, which is a VM for OS X for running other Intel bases OSes. And yes, I have installed Windows on it for the odd Windows only thing I have. Funny thing, the iMac runs Windows XP faster on Parallels than my actual PC.

Maggie is also much happier now, as I’m not stealing her 17″ iMac Core 2 Duo. Thanks for letting me try it out babe. It got me sold on knowing an iMac for my next computer was the right choice.

Coming soon, a post about the software I’m using that makes life on the Mac just fun.

I’ve moved my domains over to TextDrive from my co-lo. I couldn’t justify the cost of the co-lo or have the time to properly manage my own machine any more. So for the first time my domains aren’t being hosted on equipment owned and run by myself. But I’m kinda glad to be rid of having to deal with all the maintenance.
So far TextDrive has been good. The intial setup was a little confusing, but their support has been very good. I’ll post more as I use more of their system.

Ever since the Mac Mini came out I’ve been wanting one. I enjoy using a Mac with OS X for a lot of the development I do. I really need the Unix underneath, but at the same time the Linux GUIs drive me crazy most of the time. OS X is a very nice mix of “Just Works” and UNIX. In fact, after power on, the Mini found my wireless network, joined it, then discovered my laser printer via Bonjour (the new Apple name for ZeroConf), I was all set.

I got the highest end model and upgraded it to 1 GB of RAM. So far it’s held it’s own very well. For a few things it’s beaten my work PowerBook, mostly to do with some of my Java work. That probably has a little bit to do with the slight boost in CPU speed the Mini has over the PowerBook. And it’s so freaking small. I was able to just set my LCD on top of it to conserve desk space.

So far, the only performance thing I’ve noticed is that if I overload the HD with requests (copying a lot of files, doing several thousands DB inserts, compiling java, starting Tomcat, etc) at the same time, it bogs down. But I knew that HD I/O would be a bottleneck on the box. Luckily I shouldn’t regularly be doing that. Just for the few couple of days while I get things really setup for it. Worst case, I can get a Firewire enclosure cheap and put a spare 3.5 in drive in it and boot off that.

I also got a KVM switch so I can switch back and forth between the Mini and my PC. Although, I have a feeling I’ll be using my Mini more than the PC since it’s now mostly for games and MS Money. Although the Mini came with a full version of Quicken that I’m thinking about taking a look at.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited to finally own my own Mac again. (Since most of the time I’ve ever bummed off Maggie or been using the work PowerBook)