Fernando Valente's weblog

Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus

Developing for Android is not a choice anymore. A lot of my customers are asking for Android apps, so I bought this nice piece of gadget. I need a real device because Android simulator is just too slow and doesn’t seem to work very well. Time to learn how to program for Android!

Hey folks, unfortunately, my blog Sensitive Code is dead. I had no time to update it and ended up not renewing the domain registration. It had a great page rank. For example, if you type UIFileSharing on Google, a post from Sensitive Code it is the first result(not sure for how long). I moved every post from there to this blog, so everything is still available. I hope to write about programming on this blog in the future.

People ask me very often what they should do to get started in programming. I usually tell them to read books. And what’s the best book for those who want to learn Mac programming? It’s Cocoa Programming forMac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. This book is the best, it simple defines what we are, it’s our bible. The book considers you already know a little C or C++ and teaches you everything a decent Mac developer should know: from a hello world to printing, web services and Core Animation.

The guy who wrote this book can be considered the world’s best Cocoa teacher. He taught Objective-C at companies like Intel, NeXT, Apple and Microsoft. He is also the own of Big Nerd Ranch, a very famous training center.

Now let me tell you guys about my faith testimony. I started to try to learn Cocoa in the beginning of 2008, I had gave up and started to look for alternatives to Objective-C. I mean, that syntax looked so weird. A very long time after that, in the end of 2009, Lars Bergstrom told me about this book. In less than a month I was writing my first commercial app.

At the time I’m writing this, it costs $30.24 USD on Amazon. It’s not the world’s cheapest book, but it isn’t the most expensive one. It’s worth investing on a copy. Get it on Amazon.

Two or three days ago(I don’t remember) I released my first Mac application. Also the new Chiaro website went online.

The application is called Blue Moon App. It’s a powerful customer management application. It’s really nice and costs just U$10.99. More information may be found on this link. For the new website, my friend create a new layout.

The old Chiaro logo is just UGLY on a white background, so I created a new one. It’s not beautiful as the old logo, but it’s nice. There are many companies using a just text logo, so there’s no problem with the simplicity of my logo.

People use to hate a black background with white text, so I fixed it on the new website. Why don’t you just go and check it out?

Every time I’m about to finish an paid Mac app something goes wrong and makes it impossible to finish it. For real, I’m starting to get bored. First I tried porting Radio Tool X for the Mac, but I got some fucking issues with the QuickTime framework that has some incompatibilities with QuickTime X, so I can’t adopt it for playback. Without it,  I can’t stream audio from radio stations easily. I also tried to make another musical app, but QTKit can’t play the same sound twice or more at the same time. I did an workaround, but I got a memory leak. Then I tried a Core Data application. It’s almost finished, but I couldn’t find on the web how to export/import the database. For real, this shit is starting to get strange. I don’t know any really good programming forum, excepting by Apple Developer Forums. The problem is that I need to be enrolled at the Mac Developer Program in order to have access to them. I don’t have those damn 100 dolars to join it. I’m dead. I really need to finish something. I ran out of ideas. Damn it.

As a programmer, I always have study(no metter what you know, you never know enough). Now I’m learning advanced C and Objective-C. I’m reading a great book called Advanced Programming for Mac OS X. This book was wrote by one of my idols: Aaron Hillegass. You know when you’re proud of your progress? I’m feeling this way!

I just learned how to make an application read simple plugins. It may seem that easy. OK, it doesn’t only seem easy, it’s easy. Programming for Mac OS X uses to be really easy and this is not an exception.

As I was just doing this to learn, I created a simple terminal application that loads a plugin and get a message from it. Bellow you can see the entire code used to load and read the plugin(s):

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