Released!

Friday, June 6, 2008

It’s hard to believe, but It’s been well over three years since I took Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Bootcamp. You’d think I’d have more to show for it. Of course, I haven’t been doing just Cocoa programing since then. I’ve still been doing a lot of 4D development to pay the bills. But I have picked up a few Cocoa programming gigs too, which have been a lot of fun.

Although the Bootcamp was a great head start, I learn new computer languages best by just trying to get something tangible accomplished. So right after the class I decided I’d write a very simple little Mac application that I could eventually give away or sell inexpensively.

In the past, I’ve always enjoyed those programs that would display an interesting quotation as the computer started up. But nowadays, you just don’t restart your computer often enough to enjoy these types of programs. So I decided as my first project I’d write a simple database for storing text phrases that could also display these phrases in an overlay window throughout the day.

Of course, I had too many ideas to keep it that simple. Besides the overlay window, I added a transparent panel, and a window that stays on the desktop, behind all other windows. I even designed it to display quotes using Growl, if it was available.

Then I realized not many people would use it unless it was really easy to load up with a bunch of quotes. So I added a services menu item to grab text from the frontmost application. But that still wasn’t going to be enough. Being a big iTunes Store fan, I decided to integrate a website into the application where users could download quotes. For free.

Finally, that project is now ready to show off. Today, I’m proud to announce the release of Inspire Me 1.0.

And yes, I decided I had put enough work into this to charge a small amount for it. It’s introductory priced at $12.95.

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