For the past few months, I’ve been dabbling with programming on the Mac but I haven’t had the time to really dive in. I was trying to explain to someone how it worked and realised that I couldn’t really articulate how. Therefore, this will be a series of posts on how I intend to build applications using Xcode, Apple’s free development environment.

There are plenty of excellent guides but I found that they all had one flaw: obsolescence. I would be following a guide until it reaches a point where the window, method or button isn’t there in my version of Xcode. And I come to a screeching halt. Lots of the guides have been written for previous versions of Xcode and haven’t been updated.

Again, I intend to document my journey through development on my Mac and iPhone. I’ll start with writing a simple word processor, SimpleWord.

If you have an Airport Express you have to get Airfoil. The app lets you stream music from your Mac to just about anything that receives a wifi signal, including your iPhone, a Windows or Linux box or even the AppleTV. You select the source application and activate the destination speakers and off you go!

For the past few years I’ve had a little Apple-related ritual. Whenever iLife is released I walk over to the Apple Store in Regent St and buy it. iLife ’06 and ’08 (they skipped ’07 I think) sit on a shelf in the study upstairs.

The one application from the suite that gets used much more than the others is iPhoto. iPhoto ’06 was a slow, clunky beast but I still faithfully used it to organise, tag and upload to Flickr (using Connected Flow’s FlickrExport) and even created and ordered one or two hardcover books. The ’08 version was much faster and the Events feature was fun to use.

iMovie ’06 was simple and straightforward. ’08 had me scratching my head a few times and came to the conclusion that I preferred the previous version. As for iDVD ’08, I don’t think I even launched it once. That’s no reflection on the software which I think is pretty good but times have changed. The ’06 version was used and used a lot. Garageband is great for recording scratch tracks for work and the ’08 release had a very handy Movie layer to sync voiceovers.

The one app I never used was iWeb. The fact that it doesn’t talk to TypePad, WordPress or Blogger was a great disadvantage and even though I know that it isn’t tethered to .Mac/MobileMe, it still feels constrained.

So, iLife ’09 is the one that’s going to break my little ritual. The one I have no interest in buying. Faces and Places? My D60 doesn’t have a GPS function (there is a third party shoe-mounted one apparently) and I can tag my photos with the person’s name. iMovie? No thanks, Final Cut Pro does the job a lot better. If iDVD had BluRay support it would be really interesting as opposed to being nearly useless now.

There isn’t a single feature that would compel me to buy this version, not one. Does anyone else have a different opinion?

The codecs seem tightly optimised and I’m able to play 1080p without the CPU hitting 50%. And it can play anything I can throw at it. It also supports Subtitles. All of these grown-up media centre features make Front Row look like a distant unliked cousin.

Here’s what the Movies view in Plex looks like:

The App scanned my library after I added it as a source, downloaded all the artwork including the background fan art and lots of info. Then I added a few TV shows and this is what that interface looks like:

And the TV Series interface: