Wow! Apple certainly wants more people to sign up as Mac developers, that's for sure. In changes made today, the ADC Premier and Select tiers have disappeared and they have been replaced with Mac Developer through the current developer portal (which has the iPhone developer sign-up as well). Mac and iPhone are now $99/year each and doesn't include the hardware discount, which has been an historical benefit of the more expensive developer program. More importantly, you can't buy the Premier version, which includes your ticket to the next WWDC, so you'll be fighting the crowd with everyone else.

This is a pretty esoteric topic, but I ran into it and maybe the google will help somebody find my solution before they waste too much time. I have a custom control with a custom IBPlugin which we use in Cartographica. The IBPlugin compiles in all 4 binary modes, but I restricted it to ppc and i386, because the IBFramework which you have to link to doesn't support 64-bit under Leopard. Enter Snow Leopard...

IndieHIG is an open source attempt to extend Apple's well-known (and a little long in the tooth) Human Interface Guidelines. So far, not a lot up there, but some good folks are contributing and all the content is available under the MIT license so it is free free.

I'm happy to announce today that LoadMyTracks (ok, make fun of the name if you must, everyone will be making fun of the icon), a program to download GPS data to the Macintosh in GPX or KML (Google Earth) formats is now available from the ClueTrust LoadMyTracks web page. More extensive information in my article on Cartographica.com.

For those out there (you know who you are) who may have some time over the next couple of weeks and are looking to hone Macintosh programming skills, you might take a look at the iron coder contest. It's a timed contest wherein an API is disclosed and the participants get 24 hours to look at/play with/become comfortable with it and then are given a theme along which they must create something cool within the next 24 hours. Winners get the admiration of the people who know about the contest.

Well, I guess I'm happy that I didn't upgrade to the 2.16GHz processor and that I ordered early. My order was, until last week, showing Shipment on the 15th, delivery on the 21st. Then Apple announced the upgrade plan and that shipment times would slip by a couple of weeks (which put my order at Shipping on the 28th, delivery on the 3rd). This morning, I was notified that it has shipped, delivery on the 23rd!

Following up a story from late last week (and a smidgen late in my follow up), Oracle has indeed announced Oracle(r) Database 10g Express Edition (XE). Unfortunately, the details aren't exactly to my liking.

What's new in programming—Cocoa

A lot has changed since the last time I seriously sat down to write Macintosh software. At that time, we were still using System 7 (I think...) and the Mac was dominated by the now-deprecated and renamed Carbon API. It was a good programmatic API, but didn't provide much application structure.

Fast forward to 2005 and the Macintosh development community (at least the pure-Mac community) is focussed on using Cocoa, Apple's major acquisition from NeXT for development.

You can't get away from cycles, they're everywhere. Today I'm going to focus on what I believe is a great cycle in software development?the return to meaningful software development.