huibert-aalbers.com
My home away from home
CityListBuilder for iMovie ’09 released
You may have noticed that I have been quiet for the last few months. I was busy working on a new Mac application. As you may have guessed, I don’t have a lot of time to work on personal projects. My job at IBM from Monday to Friday, with extremely long working hours, and my family to which I devote week-ends take most of my time. As a result, I have to be smart and use any spare time wisely. Working on multiple projects is definitively not an option.
The application I have just released, CityListBuilder for iMovie ’09, is quite simple. It is designed to help non-technical Mac users to add support for additional cities to the new animated travel map feature. This can be done by hand quite easily by just editing the contents of a flat file, but I thought that Mac users deserved a better solution.
From a technical perspective though, writing this app was a very interesting exercise. It gave me the opportunity to work with REST services (to interface with the Google Maps geocoding service), WebKit and the authorization services. I think that the strategy of releasing relatively quickly small apps that allow me to learn new technologies is quite effective. I have already started to look for new ideas for my next project. One candidate project involves using Bonjour and Quartz Composer, two technologies I have never used so far and that I believe are quite interesting. It would also allow me to work on an iPhone client which is quite exciting. I will let you know more once I actually start coding.