Musings from The Software Underground

Wow, a lot has been going on lately, and I've been so busy with MacGourmet 2.1, nutrition support (which is coming later), and a complete redesign of the Advenio and product sites, that I haven't had time to comment on things.

But here goes:

Daniel Jalkut over at Red Sweater today announced his acquisition of MarsEdit, which is a product created by Brent Simmons of NewNewsWire fame. It was part of the NewsGator Acquisition of NNW, but since then it's sort of stagnated. I use it, as does my sister, to post to The Cooking News) and I look forward to the changes in store for it now that it's in the hands of Daniel.

On a related topic:

Brent Simmons over at NewsGator has posted screenshots, dev stories and an alpha download of NetNewsWire 3. It looks different, and promising. He has a interesting blog post on the evolution of the toolbar buttons and a lot of great discussion follows in the comments.

There is also a great discussion over at Justin William's blog Carpeaqua entitled "How Do You Develop Software?" (God I love visiting that blog just for the random picts of Elisha Cuthbert)

It's interesting to see how other Mac devs approach the whole development process. Personally, I'm a top-down designer, bottom up developer. I have an idea in my head, and know pretty much were I ultimately want to go, so I always have a plan.

The implementation though, usually starts with a small core that I build on. I always go for solid functionality over the glitter at first. I'm more interested in making sure the features and usability are there before the eye candy, so a lot of what I do tends to be sleek and clean. I am also a firm believer in the notion that version 1 of a product is really just a dry run for version 2 and beyond. I am usually inclined to completely rewrite things for version 2, using everything learned from the first pass.