Attending Matt Gemmell’s workshop last week was a great exercise for thinking from the user’s perspective – something which we, as software developers, often do not usually spend enough time doing because of being wrapped up in other things.
As developers, it is hard for us to detach ourselves from what we do and cater to the user. We live on …

Source Lists feature in many Mac OS X applications. From iTunes to iCal to Versions, they are a great navigation control.
But for us Cocoa developers, they aren’t that easy to implement. You can easily create an NSOutlineView and set its highlight mode to “Source List” but none of the other Source List features come built in out of the box, …

Interface Builder is one of Apple’s developer tools, used to design interfaces for both Mac OS X and iPhone applications, and in most instances saves developers huge amounts of time from having to write the equivalent code, whilst also providing a useful visual representation of the interfaces they are working on.
Some developers try and fight Interface Builder, and would rather …

Reinventing the wheel – a phrase which means duplicating an existing feature from scratch – is often used in the context that it is unnecessary or inefficient.
I think that in most cases this is true, but I was hesitant to start this post by screaming to never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever reinvent the wheel, because I think that sometimes …