So, after a brief time in the lowest price tier (that’s just 99 cents in the US), Contactile is now a free app. The next planned release will sport a few enhancements and is likely to include iAds as a potential means of generating revenue. I’d rather not alienate the handful of people that paid for their copy, but the sales numbers are just so small that the burden of maintaining separate paid and lite versions is hard to justify.

In hindsight, I wish I had made Contactile ad-ware from the outset. That would have avoided the dilemma of having an ad-supported update go to people that paid for the initial release.

For small address books, the Contacts app is fine. As your address book grows, you often need to resort to excessive scrolling or using the search mechanism to locate a desired contact.  Scrolling through a long list can be challenging and searching in the standard manner requires more than a few taps.

Contactile admits that you have to search at the outset and offers a faster way to drill down to your desired contact. Read more about it here.

Years later, I entered the world of iOS and Cocoa desktop programming. Much of the learning curve in these technologies was eased due to my prior experience with WebObjects. This is true in spite of the fact that my WebObjects usage involved no Objective-C work at all.  The conceptual cores of iOS and Cocoa share a common heritage with WebObjects.

More recently I had an opportunity to work with the open source object-relational mapping framework called Apache Cayenne. Cayenne was inspired by the Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) which was part of the WebObjects product. It’s not an exact clone of EOF, but my prior WebObjects experience made me feel right at home with Cayenne. Completing the picture is a recent investigation of Apache Tapestry. Tapestry is a component-oriented web framework also inspired by WebObjects. Working with the component-oriented approach taken with Apache Tapestry felt like going home (albeit to a greatly renovated house.)

So, more than eleven years after first developing with Apple WebObjects, the time investment  that I made in learning/mastering that product is still paying dividends. My hat’s off to all those who have created the line of technologies that both precede and descend from WebObjects.

Well, the Java issue was soon put to rest when Oracle and Apple announced that the OS X port of Java would become part of the OpenJDK effort.  That still left Apple without a rack-mountable server platform of the sort that would be welcomed in most data centers.  The Mac Mini and Mac Pro server configurations just don’t fit the mold.

Then I thought, “what if Apple decided to relax the licensing restrictions for OS X Server to enable it to be virtualized on non-Apple hardware?”  (To date, only the server edition of OS X is licensed for virtualization and only on Apple hardware.)  The recent unveiling of the fact that “Lion Server” will be part of OS X implies that there will no longer be a separate OS X Server flavor.  This further implies that Apple will either license all copies of OS X Lion for use in a virtualized environment or shut the door on virtualization altogether.  I tend to think they will choose the former.

All that is needed to complete the picture, is for Apple to allow Lion to be virtualized on non-Apple hardware.  Then they’d have broader reach in the enterprise by being able to run atop a variety of hardware through virtualization.  This could be quite a coup, since OS X Lion includes some features geared specifically towards the iPad.

We shall see.

Over the course of the past year, I have had opportunity to work in a variety of modes including

• Full time for a small software company
• Part-time for a large government contractor
• Government sub-contractor
• Independent software developer for iPhone
• Consultant
• Freelancer (remote work for hire on small projects.)
• Flat-rate software developer for a large-ish desktop application

My current mix of income streams includes the part-time job and the large-ish desktop application work.  I’ve also got some fairly straight forward web site consulting in the pipeline, but that queue is moving rather slowly.  I’ve maintained my iPhone developer status, but I haven’t earned enough there in over a year to pay for one dinner out with the family so I don’t count it as an income stream.

It’s been quite an experience and I’ve learned a bit about what sort of work models suit me (and my family) well.  Some lessons learned that I can share at this point are:

• It’s possible to find reasonable work on the various freelancer sites, but you have to choose your projects wisely.  I found that smaller, flat-rate projects in areas I knew well worked best for me in that arena.
• For large jobs in areas that you have no track record in, flat-rate work will most likely favor the buyer.  I entered into an arrangement of this sort knowing that I would be working cheaply (considering the number of hours required) for one reason:  I wanted to gain expertise in Cocoa desktop programming and I was presented with a project that suited that purpose.  I’m working cheap by the hour, but it’s a trade I willingly made since I’m learning a lot along the way.  I view it as if I’m being paid to learn rather the other way around.
• Be careful what payment terms you enter into.  If you are relying on freelance/contract work for a good portion of your income and agree to payment terms on, say, a 45 day basis, be sure you have a cushion of money built up in advance to cover expenses between the time you complete the work and when you get paid.  Forty-five days can seem like an eternity when you are waiting for payment.

One possible solution is to subclass NSDatePicker to get the desired behavior in keyDown:.

#define RETURN_KEY_CODE 36
#define ENTER_KEY_CODE 76

@implementation MJTDatePicker

- (void)keyDown:(NSEvent *)theEvent {
	unsigned short keyCode = [theEvent keyCode];
	// forward return key and enter key events to the next responder
	if (keyCode == RETURN_KEY_CODE || keyCode == ENTER_KEY_CODE) {
		[[self nextResponder] keyDown:theEvent];
	} else {
		[super keyDown:theEvent];
	}
}

@end

While there are clones of Log4J out there for Objective-C, I wanted to keep things simple.  What I’ve come up with is a macro that I place in an application’s _prefix.pch file:

#ifdef DEBUG
#define DLog(format, ...) NSLog([@"%s " stringByAppendingString:format], __FUNCTION__, ##__VA_ARGS__)
#else
#define DLog(...)
#endif

2010-05-12 06:21:35.627 AppName[28401:a0f] +[AppController initialize] Hello