New Year, New Mac, New App
Well, it's a new year and I've got a new machine: a 13" MacBook Pro, which my amazing wife conspired with my family to get me for Christmas. Since then, I've been playing around with it, trying out apps... basically kicking the tires to see what I can do with it. I've installed XCode,
homebrew, and
rvm, to name a few. I jumped on the deal to get
Pixelmator at half price from the new App Store.
So, it's been about 3 weeks, and I'm settling in to working on the Mac. Gotta say that I really love it; I even find myself trying to use Mac keyboard shortcuts on the PC at work! The Mac is a creation platform, right? and its been a while since I've actually, you know,
created something. Time to get down to it!
Inspired by the
MEAP copy of
MacRuby In Action, which I also picked up during a holiday sale, I've decided to embark on a journey to create my first native Mac app... in Ruby! Yay!
Introducing PomodoroMRIA
PomodoroMRIA,
source on GitHub,
(so-called because it started as the sample app in chapter 2 of MacRuby In Action) is a simple app for the
Pomodoro Technique. Another Pomodoro app? Yes, another Pomodoro app. The domain is relatively small and very easily understood. Yes, there are a number of
other apps, from which I will undoubtedly draw inspiration. My issues with these other apps include:
- too many features/options that I don't want
- missing features/options that I do want
- not written by me, so I didn't get to learn MacRuby & Cocoa ;)
I've got the basic app working, but it is a far cry from what I want it to be. I'll be
tracking bugs and feature requests on github, and judiciously editing them. My goal is to keep the app small and focused; This is my
Breakable Toy for learning about developing, testing, and deploying Mac apps. Progress will likely be slow, as I try to keep a reasonable balance in my life, but I'll be keeping this space up to date on my progress.
Look for a post on TDD'ing this app with RSpec next!
