So, after I got started working on a couple more projects, I decided I wanted a brand to keep them under. You know, in case I hit it big or something.

Hey, you in the back: quit laughing.

I’m working on a website, which is taking valuable time away from the stuff that’s actually going to go on it, but I don’t care. Cuz I’m awful like that. Everybody needs a distraction, right?

You all already know about StudioMan (which was progressing along nicely UNTIL JOHN GOT ME STARTED ON PACKAGING UP THE CALENDAR VIEW… er… hehe. So yeah. That’s become a nice little project in and of itself.). I have two other things in the works:

ChocoMUD, a scriptable MUD client. I’ve actually chosen to write this one in Java for cross-compatibility reasons, and to keep myself learned up in a language that actually Matters™ out there in the real world. We’re really spoiled as Cocoa programmers… Swing is a real pain, although the new Swing Application Framework and NetBeans really help.

And finally, an unnamed application for iPhone, which will really just be a simple metronome with visual and aural feedback. I may end up charging a little bit for this one just to cover the costs of the developer license *grumble*

So yes. This is what I’ve been up to for the past couple months. Outside of the job hunt, that is.

After the Cocoaheads meeting the other night where I had shown John the iCal-emulating view I had made, he said something along the lines of “I hope that’s pretty independent and can be used elsewhere.”

Well, John, you’ve inspired me. I’m working on adding a few more general-purpose options and packing the view into a framework with an Interface Builder 3 plugin, so you should just be able to drop it into an app and have IB find it.

I hope to have ESCalendar.framework available in a week or so.

So, I woke up at 4AM and couldn’t get back to sleep… so I thought, what better time to start learning about bitwise operation!

Amazingly, it worked, and I’ve now gotten space-efficient serialization functions written to turn my array of bools into a nice tidy base64 string.

In related news… I’m hard at work on StudioMan. As soon as I get a little closer to UI completion, I’ll post a few screenshots. It’s going a lot better this time around than my previous try.

I started preliminary design work on StudioMan tonight. Owing to all the nice new technologies (and Interface Builder 3… WOW!!) it will be Leopard-only. I’m pretty confident that by the time I get a useful version out the door Leopard will be pretty prevalent.

So, I realized when sitting down to work on StudioMan last night that I’ve kind of lost touch with what I originally planned on StudioMan to be. Also, I’ve learned a lot more about Cocoa and programming in general since I started. So, I think it’s time to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. I’ll probably pull some of the code that I’ve already done into it, but there will be a new UI which focuses more on what’s important and less on what is more there for utility.

I’ll start uploading to SVN once I get something concrete done.

I finally figured out my combo button dilemma and started getting some solid work done on the schedule view. Ockham’s Razor in full effect, is all I have to say.

//edit: If you tried the recent SVN pull, you’ll probably notice it didn’t compile, as I forgot to remove an import for a non-existant file. The issue should be fixed now.

I’ve set up the web site and Subversion repository for StudioMan. If you’re interested in taking a look what I have so far, head on over and check it out.

http://studioman.crazymusician.net

You may have noticed an increasingly large amount of posts from me lately about various Cocoa eccentricies, etc. Well, it is more than just playing around. I’m laying the groundwork for an application called StudioMan (short for Studio Manager), which will aid private music teachers in organizing their student records and scheduling studio time.

Planned features for version 1.0:

• Consolidation of student, instructor, and accompanist info in one convenient place
• Automatic creation of studio schedules using user-supplied schedules for instructors, students, and accompanists.
• Student repertoire listing
• Import current students/accompanists into new academic terms
• Allows import and export of Address Book (vCard) and iCal (vCal) files, to allow integration with Apple iCal/Address Book

I haven’t yet decided whether I want to make this project Panther-compatible or not. I like the lifecycle-management of Core Data, but it some ways I think it’s more complicated than it needs to be. For now I’ve set up a data model as well as made data-object shells, so hopefully if I start working in one and realize I need to switch to the other, the impact will be minimal. The project will obviously be Universal Binary, as there’s no real need to go Intel-only at this point.

I’ll be setting up a new website for the project shortly, as well as some sort of version control mechanism. I haven’t decided on licensing yet. It will probably be GPL, but I’m not going to make a decision until I do some more research into the matter.