Much kudos to the lovely folks at bravenewcode for their WPtouch iPhone/iPod touch WordPress theme plugin, which is the new hawtness:

Mmm, look purdy!

So, as you’ve probably noticed by now, the site looks a little … different today. This has come about for two reasons:

1. I wanted to go with something a little more inventive than the fairly basic theme I’d used so far.
2. I’m officially announcing my status as a freelance developer for hire, which seemed to merit a change in the site itself to go along with this.

Number one is fairly arbitrary, so we’ll skip past that one and go straight to the Big News:

My name is Jim Dovey, and I’m a freelance Macintosh, iPhone, and Apple TV developer available for hire.

Yes, that’s my Real Name™. You can reach me via the email listed in the pull-down shelf at the top of the page (click on the little tag that says ‘pull’). I’ll have a Clients page up sometime soon with the details of what I’ve been doing so far; however, I have to wait for stuff to be officially announced by said clients before I can really say anything publicly about them, so such details will need to wait a little.

However, the first thing I can announce is that I’m partnered up with a designer called David Kaneda to write a Basecamp® application for the iPhone, called Outpost. Head on over & digg that sucker.

The site redesign is very much a work in progress. I’m actually not 100% married to the current design, in fact— I mainly wanted something which would go with the photos of my new business cards, but I might decide to forgo that and make use of a simpler theme with less customization on my part. Who knows? Not me.

The current site design is a modified version of Foliage Mod from 5ThirtyOne. It’s GPL, so if I go with this design I’ll be releasing the finished version here once it’s all tied down.

So, I’m currently sat outside the Apple Store at Sherway Gardens, holding my MacBook Air, working on a couple of projects, and waiting for the keynote to start up. If anyone wants to join me (especially anyone with a portable battery pack, since Sherway appears to have closed off all its power points) I’ll be here until the end of the keynote. Either that or Twitter me, assuming Twitter doesn’t die horribly under the WWDC onslaught — I’m alanQuatermain.

Good luck to all who’re waiting for specific news, and let’s hope I can change the title to ‘Happy iPhone Day’ later.

Update: Okay, now I’m actually in the Apple store, borrowing their power supply. Apple customer service = EPIC WIN.

[…]

Thus spake Deric Horn.

In related news, the paycheque which would cover the cost of my ticket to WWDC ought to clear into my bank account in 3… 2… 1…

Oh wait, no, it’ll clear tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. Well, this month at least.

sigh— this ought to put a hefty crimp into my just-starting freelance business. More on that soon, once I stop being hideously depressed.

So, it’s been some time since I promised a little Cocoa wrapper around the (private) TimeMachine client API, as used by such applications as Mail, Address Book, and iPhoto. What with one thing and another, I never got around to expanding the example code to do everything I wanted (such as pulling individual items out of a backed up data file for re-importing, similar to Address Book), but such as it is, here’s what I have right now.

Download the example code

The complete (2560×1600) screenshot

The source code is, needless to say, Leopard-only, and the Time Machine helper class uses ObjC 2.0 features such as properties and @optional protocol specifications.

The archive above contains the project, based upon Jon ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s CoreData tutorial. This was done purely as a time-saving measure, since this tutorial resulted in a small app with a single data store containing a bunch of separate data objects.

Yeah, okay, I was just too lazy to write my own.

The archive also contains a PDF version of a talk I gave on this subject for the Toronto CocoaHeads group. This PDF is available separately here. Once I’ve got the code cleaned up a bit and released, via Google code or my own repository, should I ever finish writing that (I said I’d been busy, didn’t I?) then I’ll rearrange that a bit & do a screencast similar to the ADC/WWDC ones.

For now, enjoy, and ping me via the comments for more information.

Cabel Sasser released his FancyZoom scripts last week, and I’ve gladly employed it here. It supports just about all the existing images, except for a couple really big ones for which I’ve turned it off. Here’s a couple more samplers, with captions! Now I’m simply waiting for Markdown to be updated to do image widths & anchor tag titles

Oh, and for those wondering when I’ll be back on track, I plan to post my (still not cleaned-up) Time Machine API stuff here a bit later.

…well, I did say they would be coming.

Click each thumbnail for a full-size picture.

This morning at 6:05, my wife gave birth to our first baby, Olivia Bethany. Both are in fine health, if a little tired right now (and both in need of food), but my wife and I are ecstatic with this addition to our family.

Today has been a long day, so I’ll break off here, but expect some more news soon.

So, I’ve not posted anything for a while — firstly I must apologize for that, I’ve simply been extraordinarily busy recently. However, I am aware of the changes in the Leopard version of BackRow, and hope to have an update ready for that soon. This will include copies of ATVLoader and the BDK for Leopard (yay ppc support), and some documentation on the changes required for other existing plugins to run on the Mac OS itself.

However, before that will come some information about Time Machine. I’ve not got an example put together yet, but I’m going great guns on working out the API used by apps like iPhoto and Address Book for their built-in Time Machine support. Back when it was first announced, this was to be a public developer feature, but it seems that plan went by the wayside. However, the APIs are in there, they just require a little working-out since we don’t seem to have headers for them. I hope to deliver those by this weekend, along with a working sample application.

Eh? Eh?

Didn’t I say that there would be an iPhone SDK coming along at some point? Well, okay, I didn’t say it here, but I did say it in IRC. Yes, really. Really. Fine, don’t believe me then.

But anyway, go & read this. No permalink unfortunately (shakes fist at Apple), so you might have to scroll down a bit.

sits back & looks smug

Well, I’ve got my iPhone project worked out. This is likely to be a goldmine for experienced developers, if you can get your stuff sorted out in time. And I plan to be picking little flakes of gold from the seat of my trousers in about 12 months’ time.

Mmmm, gold. It’s shiny.

Now, all I want for Christmas is docs for BackRow. Well, that & a moon-pony.

Mmmm, pony.