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MultiFireFox
Code contortionist is home to the MultiFireFox utility for Mac OSX!
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MultiFirefox on TUAW!! http://moourl.com/mff_tuaw
Posted in Cool Things
by David on June 18th 2008 at 22:13
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Announcing my new project, "sVersioN": http://moourl.com/tvtik
Posted in Cool Things
by David on April 30th 2008 at 21:12
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Code contortionist website finally has RSS feeds! Ain't that lovely. http://moourl.com/wcb06
Posted in Website
by David on April 23rd 2008 at 11:52
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5k run with @indyhallfitclub and friends ruled! http://moourl.com/m1197
Posted in Life
by David on April 19th 2008 at 19:39
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Today is "GOOD PEOPLE DAY" and I know plenty! http://moourl.com/snt3e
Posted in Life
by David on April 3rd 2008 at 08:33
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Venice is awesome! Second home, absolutely. Miss Philly, love Italy!
Posted in Cool Things
by David on March 26th 2008 at 17:29
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MultiFireFox hits the home page of download.com!!
Posted in Cool Things
by David on March 21st 2008 at 00:48
Two Guys On Beer launches! http://twoguysonbeer.com
Posted in Cool Things
by David on March 21st 2008 at 00:47
Thursday release of a new project of mine (and Johnny Nines). Can't wait to release it!
Posted in Cool Things
by David on March 19th 2008 at 01:28
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Back at Indy Hall - so long SXSW, see you next year!
Posted in SXSW
by David on March 14th 2008 at 17:30
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- Objective-C
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MultiFirefox 2.0 and Objective-C - Learning by Doing
I've got ADD, I'm sure of it. I get exhausted just trying to keep up with my brain, which seems to switch its focus before I can even figure out what it was just focusing on. I believe that a lot of people with any degree of creativity find themselves suffering this same problem. Often times it's about finding the best way for you to control it - for me, it's music. If I have a lot of work to do, I put on headphones, crank some great tunes, and it drowns out all but what my eyes are focused on - which is my work.
Keeping this in mind, I recently decided to learn Objective-C and Cocoa to write some native OSX apps - and perhaps some iPhone apps in the future. Now, I'm nowhere near declaring that I'm an Objective-C expert - I'm still a n00b. But that said, I'm less n00b than once I was.
My first stem was to get what is probably the preeminent book on Objective-C - "Programming in Objective-C" by Stephen Kochan. It's the most recommended Objective-C book on the internet, is considered required reading before hopping on the #objc channel on irc.freenode.net, and is so well written it's good for both people completely new to code, as well as seasoned programmers such as myself.
Problem was, once I had the book, I couldn't concentrate long enough to actually get through a full chapter.
Learn your way
I don't learn by reading. I learn by doing. If I read about a certain way of coding something and don't actually do it at least once, I will forget it. Once I actually implement the code - even if it's just in a throw-away test file - it's committed to memory.
So I finally landed in XCode, and just started writing code. I was fortunate enough to have a friend here to help with some of the very basics of the XCode project structure, but that information can be readily had on the internet. I often turned to "Programming in Objective-C" as a fantastic reference (and I did learn the basics of Objective-C message passing and data types via the book) but it was only that - a reference that helped me along the way.
I learned by rewriting MultiFirefox.
So I announce to you today that MultiFirefox has been rewritten "from the ground up" (that phrase always bothers me) in Objective-C and Cocoa. It's got some nice new features, like Sparkle integration (that means it has auto-updates!) and auto-determination of how many versions of Firefox you have installed - so install as many as you like! This also fixes a big bug dealing with phrase-based profile names.
So go pick it up! MultiFirefox 2.0 - your newest old friend, and mine.
P.S. - thanks so much to everyone who has downloaded MultiFirefox and written about it in the past two months. We're over 10,000 downloads - that's crazy! Thank you!!
Categories: Cocoa Freeware Objective-C
Tagged: osx, freeware, objective-c, cocoa
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