waffle

“Homer” is out of beta - say hello to Martin Lee Medero. My best wishes to Shawn and Julie Medero. Looks like a solid release.

Today, Steve Wozniak turns 51. Here’s to a brilliant hardware wizard, a large cog of the big clockwork that led to the personal computer as it is today and an excellent educator.

The keynote came and went and as always, some of the best things are hidden. Garbage collection is not only real but backwards-compatible, as is the new Objective-C 2.0 API.

Xcode 3 looks good, Xray looks great, but Interface Builder 3.0? Pinch me.

As some of you might remember, 14 months ago I started modifying Brent Simmons’ (and thus Ranchero Software’s) search utility Huevos into something a little more modern. Something with a search field. I decided to call it Nuevos.

Nuevos has always been a bit problematic. Actual development came in sporadic bursts, and more and more “public betas” have been released over time with pieces of new functionality. Nuevos has a great heritage as literally the first real Cocoa application Brent ever wrote, but that doesn’t mean that its fundaments were structurally sound.

Earlier this spring, I was writing new features for Nuevos and I found that it got harder and harder to add stuff. This was after I had spent a month or two re-architecturing the code to allow for other changes. The code was still butt-ugly and I had promised an open source 1.0. Even if I hadn’t, I was stuck like a velvet, paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in a hallway: unable to move either forwards or backwards.

It was time for a complete redesign.

Thusly, for the past month or so, I’ve been working on the spiritual successor to Nuevos. Something that’s mostly the same but with new ideas, reformed habits and a new lease on life in a general sense. It’s not a rewrite as such - I have a lot to learn from the 4+ years of evolution that made Nuevos into the app that it was. Some pieces of code are the same and I’ll be cherry-picking more of them, but in fact, all the architectural hinders in my way are gone, or at least convincingly SEP’d. The hallway is widened and the Chesterfield has a jet engine.

The app I’ve been describing is a Nuevos reboot, because I wanted to get this really right, and with that comes a new name not carrying the burden of a thousandtwo interconnected in-jokes: Monocle.

Monocle has been making some very steady progress which is why I’m announcing this now. Today, there’s no “public beta” to download and no screenshots to drool at - we’ve played that game and we’re sick of it. But in the very near future, Monocle builds will trickle out to some private beta testers, of which you can be one by getting in touch with me.

One last revelation: Since it simplifies development and helps enable some features, Monocle will be requiring Mac OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”) or later. I know that there are people out there on 10.3 that have told me how much they like Nuevos, and this has not been an easy decision to make, but with 10.5 (”Leopard”) as well as second-release, stable Intel-chip based Macs just around the corner, my thinking is that many of those running on 10.3 because their Macs are slower with or can’t install 10.4 will be upgrading very soon.