10 Must-Install Mac Applications
I’m a software developer, so bear in mind that my Mac is for working and coding (mostly Objective-C, Java, and Ruby). You won’t find apps for ripping DVDs, viewing videos, or playing Canasta. These...
Grailbox Blog
From One Steve to Another: It’s About the Developers
I got to watch Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, being interviewed at the 2010 Gartner Symposium in Orlando this past week. Though Forbes lists him as the 33rd richest person in the world, he...
The Quickest Way to Lock a Mac
When you walk away from a Windows machine, you can press <Windows key>+L to lock the screen and keep out the bad guys. Mac OS X has no such shortcut, so the workaround I’ve...
Hanging Out with Old Friends: SWT and JFace
I’ve been working on a new project at work that deals with files in X12 format: delimited files that generally use asterisks for field delimiters and tildes for line delimiters. Here’s an example fragment:...
The End of Innovation
Last Saturday, Michael Privat and I drove up to Atlanta to attend Cocoa Camp, a BarCamp-style un-conference focused on Cocoa. We each got two free T-shirts, got to present twice, met a lot of...
Sibling Squabble over Regular Expressions
I was working in Java yesterday to parse a URL that had a somewhat flexible format, so I set up my unit tests, wrote the code in a declarative fashion using indexOf() and substring(),...
Users Don’t Read? They Don’t Listen, Either!
The company I work for, Availity, LLC, provides (among other things) a web application that allows healthcare providers to submit transactions to insurance companies and get responses, all in real time. Users learn just...
How to Write a Chapter a Week
When Michael Privat (@michaelprivat) and I signed up to write a book for Apress, we both gulped at the schedule: one chapter due each week. He gulped because, despite being a book virgin, it...
We Got a Cover!
Every so often I search Amazon for Pro Core Data for iOS, which I did this morning. Last time I checked, we didn’t have a cover image, but now we do! Look here. I...
From Ablog to Grailbox
After some discussion with Apress, I’ve decided to move my blog from there to here. Many thanks to Apress for hosting my blog all these years. We must still like each other, too, because...