Although I have been a Mac user for over twenty years now, I have only recently started to develop using Objective-C and Cocoa.

For someone who has been programming in Java for the past nine years, Objective-C is very interesting. It shows that there is nothing really new under the sun.  Sure, Java improved the state-of-the-art in many ways (for example the garbage collection process) but many of the ideas that seemed revolutionary when SUN introduced the language had already been around for years and many of these interesting ideas had been developed by those who created Objective-C.

Writing an application using APIs such as Win32 or the old Macintosh toolbox is extremely painful because there are many concepts that you need to understand before even writing a single line of code. After a while you forget about it and accept it as inevitable. However, once more, Apple has surprised us all with an elegant solution that simplifies software development and makes everything else look old and inefficient. With Cocoa, writing software is fun again and much easier for beginners.

I have recently started working on a new cocoa project. Tentatively called Professional Crossword Designer, the goal of this new app is to provide graphic designers with a tool that will allow them to easily create all kind of word games (crosswords, word find, etc.) and include them in their print projects. Find out how it is going.

This is a simple Address Book plug-in that allows to visit your contact's web site without having to open Safari. It may grow into a full RSS reader in the future

My first Mac OS X program. Not a real challenge but a nice, short and fun project to understand the new concepts behind the Cocoa framewok.

One of my first assignments at my first "real" job was to help localize educational software into Spanish. In most cases we worked with the editors and the task was quite easy, but MECC was not interested in having their titles translated at that time. However we really loved their Munchers game and wanted to make them available to schools in Mexico...