One thing I have never understood is the fact that there is a huge lack of games out there for OS X. Even the small games like Tetris, Trism, Fastlane, are great games but where is the OS X version? I know that you will lose all of the accelerometer features but you could still have nice keyboard commands. I wonder just how hard it would be to port these games over to OS X. I wonder if this will ever happen? I know there are a handful of games and even less gamers on the mac but some of these nice small games would be good for me to put on the laptop for the kids to play.

I remember back in the day (4th – 5th grade) I would play “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” and “The Oregon Trail” and used to love these games. Trying to find something like that for kids today on OS X seems to be almost impossible. I did find one game that I know the kids will like and that is Wall-E. What happened to all the small games for kids though?

This is a new layout that I have in the works. Please tell me your thoughts on the layout, what you like and what you don’t. Feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Until the other day the only iPod I had was the latest iPod Nano. It worked fine but when presented with the option of buying a 2G Touch pretty cheap I jumped on it. I connected it to my Mac Pro and it worked without an issue. I used it for a few days and everything was going fine. Last night my girl and I wanted to go running at the beach so I connected the iPod Nano to the Mac Pro just to charge it. As soon as I connected it I was presented with the good ol’ Kernel Panic screen. I thought this was odd so I shut the system down and restarted. This time during the boot up process it gave yet another Kernel Panic. I disconnected the iPod Nano and restarted again. Everything went fine.

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The other day Steven released another video on the TMC website. This video is all about Key Value Coding and using Bindings in your interface. I finally got the chance to watch the rest of the video this morning and I have to say that it is a great starting place if you are looking into bindings. He goes into detail about KVC and explains how it all works. I do wish however that he went into more details on the magic of Bindings and how they work behind the scenes.

There are many developers (myself included) who have not yet adopted bindings because they see them as some magical functionality. At some point I will have to read deeper about bindings and actually learn how they work so that I can use them properly in my project. I do know how to implement a table view without using bindings and I have to say… Bindings looks *much* easier to do. It was a short process for getting the data into the table view in this video tutorial. When doing all of this without bindings you need to have all the table view methods in place to return the proper data.

This is another good release from TMC so be sure to check out the KVC and Bindings video tutorial if you want to start learning about KVC or Bindings

The other day my friend Steven from Thoughtful Tree Software released a new version of his Inspector Framework. This new version includes both the framework and an Interface Builder Plug-in which makes it extremely easy for you to integrate this into your own projects.

After reading his blog post and watching the video that he has created it looks like a very nice addition to any application that would require an inspector style window. I might have to look at using this in my project the TomTom POI Manager. I am not yet sure what I would use this for but surely I can find a reason to use it.

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I ran into an issue with iTunes and purchased content a few months back. I had bought the Knight Rider season pass from the iTunes store. When ever I tried to play an episode I would be presented with a video window that was all gray and a nice little alert box telling me that my displays are not HDCP authorized. I got on the phone with Apple support and iTunes support and could not come to a conclusion as to why this was happening. I have a 24″ Apple Display that is about 2 years old and a 30″ Apple Display that is about a year old so everything should be golden. They are both HD displays so that is not an issue. Where the issue comes from is when Apple decided to make all of their iTMS content require HDCP displays. I guess this is some new standard although I am not quite sure why because I have never had a problem playing any of my content in HD format at all. After making an appointment at the Genius Bar and them telling me that there should not be a problem since my display is only a year old and suggesting that I contact Apple and get in touch with the Customer Care department I came home and did just that.

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My friend Steven just launched this site. It is a site based on WordPress that will host video tutorials on how to use Cocoa called TeachMeCocoa.com. Currently it has just launched and only has one video Files and Collections which talks about different collection types and how to use them. It also discusses how to save and read data to and from files.

Steven is doing something great for the community by offering up these tutorials for free however he will accept donations. He mentioned that he needs better equipment such as a nice headset that will cancel out the background noise as he has a few little one’s running around.

I have yet to watch the first video but I am going to do that now. A BIG thank you goes out to Steven as I am in the process of learning and I AM SURE that these videos will be very helpful for me. Watch your donation box Steven

Over the last few weeks I have been using what spare time I have to learn Objective-C with Cocoa. While Objective-C has been easy coming from a PHP background the Cocoa frameworks have not. There are things in Cocoa Programming that I have to worry about that I did not have to even think about in PHP. Just a few of those things are Memory Management, The Main Run Loop, etc. I have never had to worry about any of that with PHP because the scripts are run and then destroyed. They do not take up memory and just hang around all day long. However if you are not careful with Objective-C you will have a lot of memory eaten up really quick.

Now I have been working on small apps mainly using NSBezierPath so that I can learn how to draw squiggles and straight lines by clicking the mouse just like you would with the pencil/brush or line tool in a paint application. While this really is boring to me I am being instructed to do this by a friend who is helping me along the Cocoa path.

So here’s a plug for him.

Steven Degutis
http://thoughtfultree.com/

If you want to support me learning Cocoa I cannot say buy my products but you could go buy his. He is a great developer and has been very helpful along the journey. His apps are very nice and are rather inexpensive also. You can get all of his apps for around $30 (at the time of writing this) or buy them individually.

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I figured since I run my own blog (and it seems like they did some work on their editor) I would give Flock another try.  They seem to have incorporated more services and also their website seems to be redone.  I am not sure exactly what has changed with the release of 2.0 but I am going to check it out.

Have you been using Flock?  Can you tell me and my readers the biggest changes in 2.0?  Please leave some comments on this if you can.

While I was looking into the TomTom POI’s I started to wonder about incorporating Google Maps into a Cocoa Application that could handle creating custom POI sets for my device. Well it led me on a small detour but I figured out how to incorporate Google Maps into a Cocoa Application and explain how in my article titled Google Maps in a Cocoa Application. While I cannot say that I am an expert on Cocoa Development I have been learning a lot. With that said you may find issues with my code, I don’t doubt that. I just figured since I figured out how to do it I would share with everyone.