I’ve just spent a hour reading the first chapter of Aaron Hillegass’ excellent Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X¹

Aaron makes it easy to pick up Objective-C and start learning the ins and outs of event driven applications. This is the first time I’ve really started to ‘get’ this model of development. Granted I’ve got the free time to put into the project, but still.

I’m looking forward to future chapters and I apologize to my family now as I suspect I’ll have my head buried in this book for some time to come.

I’m going to attempt to not spam this site with a bunch of non-development work stuff. I’ve other blogs for that… But in keeping with the vein of this website¹, I’ve recently been pointed to a very cool website who’s basic premise is too simple to have not been thought of before now…

We’ve all seen web clipboards and code repositories before², and even I am guilty³ of wanting to get in on the action. But all of these sites are simple repositories.

Marc-André Cournoyer⁴ has a fresh take on the idea. His refactormycode.com⁵ site isn’t just a web clipboard, but rather it is a place to put your code up for community scrutiny.

The idea is that you can post a code snippet and ask for help to see if anyone can help you sort out a problem. This isn’t a wholesale help board for new programmers, but for people who are having problems envisioning code design changes, code cleanup problems, and even those who want the tightest code possible and are seeking improvement.

The website even has an API⁶ for those who want to dig into the site that much more… (Maybe I’ll add a widget here for my refactorings…)

Good job Marc. Nicely executed.

I’ve released¹ (finally) a version of what I consider a ’starter’ Wordpress² plugin.

This little baby is a simple text replacement thingy. The nice thing is that is easily demonstrates a clean plugin that won’t trip over other plugins, creates proper administration pages utilizing AJAX and uses 2.5’s shortcodes.

It’s not production level code as there isn’t any real data validation on the admin form (altho if someone has gotten that far, you are toast anyway…), and it doesn’t check to make sure that it is being called from the admin pages either.

Beyond that, it is easy to read as an example for starting your own Wordpress plugin.

Enjoy.

EDIT: Looks like I’ve done something horribly wrong and the readme.txt file isn’t being parsed correctly… Thus the download isn’t working. Will update when this is fixed.

EDIT: (June 17, ‘08) It is fixed. I just ran the plugin auto-updater and it worked perfectly from this copy of Wordpress. Go download!