Caffeinated Cocoa

Wow, you all must be so sick of hearing from me. I was really trying to wait another week, until the one year anniversary of my last post before writing this, but I just could not resist.

And thus(ly) I begin a chronological blog-journey of what’s happened in my ongoing quest for awesomeness:

• Epic entrance into the world that is iPhone with the release of People 1.0, a white pages application. One of the first 500 applications available on day one of the app store
• People won the Best iPhone App in the the WhitePages.com API contest, and I got a sweet MacBook Pro out of it.
• Did pretty much nothing for the rest of the summer. Just hung out with friends and feared my most certain impeding doom to come in mid August
• Started my freshman year at MIT. Confirmed my suspicions that I can never be a mechanical engineer, in a single week, before classes even started.
• Started classes. Woot exciting GIRs: 18.02, 8.01, 3.091, and 21M.011
• Learned what GIRs are (classes all MIT students are required to take) and what those strange numbers mean (Multivar Calc, Physics (Mechanics), Solid State Chem, and Into to Western Music, respectively)
• Unibody MacBook Pros, grrrr…….
• Discovered that MIT is not impossible and that people in this horrid society stress way too much
• Ahhh problem sets! What ever shall I do‽‽‽ (those are interrobangs for those less cultured than I).
• Learned to love the amazing efficiency achieved by referring to everything with numbers. I need only say, “I’m off to 18.02 in 10-250″, and everyone will know exactly what I mean and will wish me luck in getting a seat close to the front of the giant lecture hall such that I might get a good view of Prof. Auroux’s dreamy eyes.
• Finals… </pass no record>
• Came back for IAP and competed in the 6.270 competition (autonomous lego robots). I had tons of fun and pulled my first work all nighter. We got like 5th place or something. Check out our super cute robot: http://web.mit.edu/adaml/www/6.270/
• Second semester: 18.03 (diff eq), 8.02 (e&m), 6.01 (awesome but extremely vague “Intro to Computer Science and Electrical Engineering”), STS.003 (rise oF MOdern SCIENCE!!). Hard, but pretty awesome
• Declared Course 6-1. I’m a CS major. hurrays!
• Approaching finals….. disliking all those people who stress out too much, getting stressed out and thusly hating myself.
• Summer!!! (for 2 weeks). Relaxed, hung out, and started and finished People 2.0.
• My life officially begins; I start twittering. Please follow me. It will make me feel super cool and important. http://www.twitter.com/adamleonard.

Then, I started my internship at Apple. It’s been incredibly awesome and fun. Sorry, I can’t say anything about it, but I’m working on some really cool stuff. It super sucksies that I have to wait like 3 more years before I can start working at Apple (or somewhere as awesome as Apple) full time.

But yes, what inspired me to write today was to announce that finally(!) People 2.0 is available on the app store. It’s got some cool new stuff and is compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, so try it out!

I apologize for ignoring my other apps (PhotoBook and Google Importer). I really do still love them dearly, but understand that I work on these apps in my spare time, for free, just for fun, when I have a cool idea or something. Since said time is quite valuable, I find myself not working on them for months, or even decades (well, not decades).

And to all youz developerz out therez. Photobook is open source, so if you want to add a feature or fix a bug, please do so!

A super special, completely rewritten and ambitious, vaporware edition of Google Importer is also fairly far along, but I really have no idea when I will conjure up enough interest and time to finish it… I greatly apologize to those who have been persistently asking for it. Again, if there are any developers out there who want to work on it, just shoot me an email.

And finally, I will leave you with a detailed outline of my ambitious goals for the rest of my life:

• Purchase 17″ Unibody MacBook Pro with employee discount

The next generation (to be dramatic) of Google Importer is coming along nicely.
Right now, it is code named Web Importer. Whether or not that becomes the final name is dependent solely on if some sudden stroke of creativity hits me (or if anyone else has suggestions, in the spirit of its future fate of being open source).

So, here’s what is done:

• The backend (minus a few bugs)- Spotlight menu and Finder searches work, the plugin system is ready, results are saved to disk, Spotlight finds them and imports the metadata, etc.
• The Yahoo! Web Search Plugin
• The Quick Look Generator- you can use Cover Flow to see thumbnails of all the results, including the logo for the service, the title, and a description. Hit space and you get all the detailed information about the result. Then, double click on the file and it opens instantly in your web browser.

And here is what is left:

• Preferences. I have only worked on the basics, but all plugins will be fully customizable and extendable.
• Plugins. Aside from the Yahoo web search plugin, I am planning on shipping it with at least Yahoo image search and Facebook friend plugins
• All the polish and little details…

So, I am hoping to have a near feature complete beta available soon. Like really soon. Probably.
If you are interested in being among the first to try it out, just send me an email (support [at] caffeinatedcocoa [.dot] com)

And what would a teaser post be without some screenshots? (Click for full size)

Yeah, so about this Google Importer for Leopard business.

I am done with college apps and I am now officially a second semester senior! Theoretically, that means more time for programming.
I have started working on it, and it seems to be progressing nicely. Once it is done, I plan to make it completely open source and hopefully have a plugin architecture so developers can make it search information from any website. I am also planning on dropping Google and switching to Yahoo, since they have a much more powerful API (that also means Google Importer will be renamed to something like Web Importer).

So, unfortunately I still cannot tell you when it will be done. I would really appreciate it if people would let me know if they like the path I am taking. If there is a lot of interest for just getting something out, I would be willing to rush a release that has none of these new features, but works on Leopard. Send pleas and candy-flavored bribes to support [at] caffeinatedcocoa[dot]com, or post a comment below.

So, I released PhotoBook 1.1 today. 

That’s right, I finally got some time away from school, college apps, and friends (ha) to code! This release has a few major new features, a bunch of little changes of additions, and a whole lot of bug fixes. Most notably, you can now open almost any Facebook photo or album URL in PhotoBook, and I redesigned the photo viewing window to add easier to use slideshow controls. 

The vast majority of changes in this release were based on suggestions from users like you. So, keep sending me your ideas to support  at caffeinatedcocoa dot com. 

I know a lot of people have been asking about Google Importer for Leopard. I have started working on it, but unfortunately it requires a complete rewrite and Apple didn’t add in a nice API to make it easy. You should be learning more about the project soon. 

By the way, I got an iPod Touch and it is incredible. I can’t wait until February when Apple opens it up to developers. I’m hoping that means all developers, including starving (pre-)college students.  If so, I think PhotoBook Mobile or whatever would be really cool. Let me know what you think.

Leopard is out!
I never got the beta, so I am pretty excited to finally have it. As Walt Mossberg put it, Leopard is a evolutionary, not a revolutionary new OS. I would consider only 10.0 and 10.4 to fall under the latter. In my opinion, though, Leopard is the best evolutionary release ever, and exactly what Apple needs. Tiger added a lot of huge features, but lacked polish and consistency. Leopard pretty much leaves no part of the OS untouched. It seems like most every detail has been rethought. John Gruber gives a good example of this. That means a lot of small features will likely be hard to find, but will make the overall experience of using a Mac considerably better. 
But enough of that, there are plenty of Leopard reviews out there. On to my software.

PhotoBook

Good news! It looks like PhotoBook 1.0.2 runs great on Leopard. I am pretty surprised that in my early testing, I did not find any new problems. I probably just need to tweak some of the colors to better match the new window style, and drop in a 512×512 icon for funness in CoverFlow. Thanks Apple for such a clean upgrade.

There are so many new features I can add to PhotoBook that are made possible in Leopard, so I intend to start requiring 10.5 pretty soon. Think better slideshows, smart folders, animations, iChat Theater sharing, etc. Therefore, I will probably put out just one more major release for Tiger before starting to add some of these new features. 

Google Importer 

Bad news (Sorta)! Google Importer 1.0.1 does not work on Leopard. The way things were set up in Tiger required that it use a pretty ugly hack, so it is no surprise it is broken in Leopard.

Google Importer used an Input Manager to “plug in” to Spotlight, get the search terms, and add the Google results to the list. Apple has decided to stop supporting Input Managers in Leopard, so Google Importer never runs for a search.Input managers were a really easy, powerful tool for developers to extend applications without special plugin support. Applications that add features to iChat and Safari, for example, used input managers. The problem is that someone can just as easily build one to take control of an application, without the user ever knowing what is going on. This poses a big potential security threat, so it is no surprise Apple decided to get rid of them all together. (UPDATE: Oops, I guess they are still loaded in Leopard, but with a bunch of added restrictions. Also, there is a release not saying they are not supported, and might not be loaded in the future)

I am confident that there will be another, better way to get Google Importer to work in Leopard. I am so busy with school and college apps that it is unlikely you will see an update soon, but I will try to get to it eventually. 

So, congrats to all the Apple developers who worked on Leopard. While it does still have some problems, I really encourage everyone to consider upgrading. 

Hello…
Well, I am Adam Leonard, the sole developer for Caffeinated Cocoa.

I live in the Los Angeles area, and will enter my senior year of high school in the fall.

As you probably have not guessed, this is my blog where I might post about Magrathea, my geotagging app, and Google Importer, a plugin for Spotlight to add Google results. I also want to blog a bit about programming with Cocoa, the library used in both of my apps.

I know there are so many cocoa blogs on the internets (wow, the OS X spell checker says that is a word) so I probably will not have much to contribute, but, eh. I will be happy if I reach 10 posts this year

Anyway, I finished school last week (yay!), so now I have much more time to work on coding.

I also just released Magrathea 0.5 . There is a ton of new stuff in this version, like Flickr uploads and a beautiful new icon by Fernando Lins. In my desperate attempt to join the Delicious Generation I have tried to clean up the UI and add superfluous effects and gradients. Leopard is going to be awesome for this.

0.5 will almost certainly be the last beta of Magrathea. After 0.5, I just want to fix bugs, add some polish, and maybe finish a couple of features if I can work around some incredibly annoying Yahoo bugs. I will try to get 1.0 out next week.

And no, I have not forgotten about Google Importer. I haven’t worked on it in a forever, but I want to change that. I am considering doing a complete rewrite of it and use Yahoo’s APIs so I can add a bunch of cool features.

Also, several people have asking about how I brutally hacked Spotlight to search Google, so I will write a post about that soon.