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Tuesday, June 04, 2002
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Maquarium 1.0 I just wanted to talk a little bit about our newest software, Maquarium, and let you know a little bit about it and how it was created. Maquarium was created in a little over 3 months working around 4-6 hours a day in Cocoa, which saved me a lot of time and energy. Simply put, Cocoa rocks. It has to be the most well developed framework I�ve used, it�s amazing what you can do with it. I�m not going to get into the details, but let me just say that if you want to develop on the Mac, this is what you should be using. As for motivation for making Maquarium, it was simple; I wanted something to record my aquarium chemical measurements in, and there was nothing for the Mac. I mocked up a very rough UI, sent it to Wade, and said, �what do you think?� He thought the idea was ok (maybe even good, I don�t recall :-) so I started working on it. This entire project has been one big question mark, will people use it? Will people like it? Since no aquarium software exists on the Mac we didn't have answers for any of these questions, which is always bad considering the amount of time and money I've invested into it. I figure we won't know if it's a success for some time after it's been released. Maquarium was my first full-blown Cocoa app (Wade did most of the work on Bookit, and Show Desktop doesn�t count :-) so I had some learning to do. But after the first day, I basically got the hang of Interface Builder and creating controller objects. After about the first month it was more or less running, not saving files or anything fancy, but it would record your data in it�s lovely data structure and fully supported all the data I was interested in. I contracted PixelPress to create icons for it. The icons turned out fantastic and we were both very pleased with Gary�s work. We put a lot of emphases on interface design, so great icons was a must, even though they put me in the hole. :-) Putting the final touches on Maquarium took longer than I expected, but I think it turned out great, and I hope you do too. As for future plans, assuming it�s not a flop, I want to add graphing support for chemical measurements in the next major release, I wish I could have gotten it in this release, but I had to draw the line somewhere. :-) Go check out Maquarium and let me know what you think. Cheers, Will comments posted at 11:48 AM Comments:Post a Comment |
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