Hopeless Geek

I haven’t written jack crap for weeks now. Not here, not at Mac Geekery, not at After Apple. We haven’t recorded a Mac Geekery podcast in coming on two weeks now. If anyone is following, I’m sure the thought is “He’s gone into hiding again; we’ll see something in two months.”

That’s probably not far from the truth. On the weekends I’m head-first in Notae, trying to get some really cool things going for 2.0 (full-screen editing rocks). On my weekdays, I’m busy with the honest-to-goodness killer application at my little software partnership of a day job. Actually, I just got a couple of breakthroughs in that program and it’s really taking off, so that’s where a lot of my weekdays have gone. It’s quite shocking how much time becomes meaningless when you get into a stride and just start pushing out code that has a real effect on how the program operates.

Which is to say that in any large application, it’s kind of disappointing how much code is that stuff that’s behind the scenes that no one will ever really know is there because there’s no pretty graphic associated with it. From Notae 1.0 to 1.2.2, for instance, the UI did not change. However, the program gained feature after feature and became more and more solid and robust. The codebase is about 30% larger than the original with no real pizzaz screaming “Hey, I’m cooler now!” at you.

Not really a bad thing, I’d say. I mean, I could write little three-day wonders like Cha-Ching and shock everyone with a piece of useless eye candy. I could write yet another shitty app based on a bad Core Data model that runs like molasses because the creator had no earthy clue how to structure a database. I could do any of those in a week or less. I choose not to because the UI isn’t where a program’s beauty really is. It’s in the functionality and stability. It’s in the little things working as they should and not in how many Mac OS X features you can cram into a program to make it a candidate for some pointless ADC Best Of award.

I’d rather code correctly, code well, and make a nice app that I’m proud to say I made than the increasingly-popular alternative of creating a flashy beta, charging an arm today with a caution of wanting a leg post-beta, and thus showing my cards to an Internet full of laughing developers.

Cha-Ching, I laugh at you. What a joke. You and every other one of those “Quicken-killer” wannabes that think you can just slap together a Core Data model and expect a financial application. You made a transaction database that takes pictures. Big fucking deal. You want money for that? FileMaker can do that. Write a real app, guys.

OmniPlan, however, is something I’ve played with for a few days now and I’m really loving this thing. I’m not a project management guru, but I got a crash course from one and now I see where all this fits in. I already have a file with so much crap in it a I need a project manager for the project file, but it’s slowly taking form and giving me a real schedule.

I think sometime in April or May there may be a third application in my future that will really dazzle. And no, it won’t be full of flash and bling like Cha-Ching is. It’ll be a classic Macintosh application with real uses and real usability because, you know what?, that’s what an application should be. I’m getting really pissed off at the little one-off applications out there that do absolutely nothing well other than sit there and look good. At least Delicious Library did something useful and well with that over-cooked interface; it had a saving grace. What does eye candy give you if that’s your only “feature”?

Ill-gained success doth pisseth me off. Oh well. I just spent the weekend farking around with Cocoa’s graphics stuff and now that I get it there should be some fun coming soon in a few apps. Which is to say, I’ll get it working right, and then I’ll add the flash to it. So many modern developers have it backwards and so many other idiots are diving in left and right to join the party that it’s really just disturbing to see where desktop applications are heading. Meanwhile there’s folks like me that haven’t paid for new software in months because nothing is appealing. I’ve paid for two items recenty: SuperDuper! and Feeder. That’s it. No one else deserves my money, and I’ve been looking. I want to buy software. I want something to change my life. The only program to really change how I use a computer I wrote because no one else would.

It’s really kind of depressing. Well, I have my app now, and I have some others. I guess I’ll write my own life-changing apps instead, when the current crop is done.

And thus, I disappear into the darkness for some unknown weeks ahead. Chowzeritos.