1. You travel so much! Do you ever travel to NYC? - lather

    Despite travelling to the US four times last year (and 2 trips the previous year), I’ve never actually visited NYC! I really want to visit NYC soon though: maybe later in the year.

    If you’ve got a question you want to ask, fire away. All previous questions are tagged Ask for your viewing pleasure.

    Tuesday February 9th, 2010

  2. Before you learned Cocoa, did you have any experience with coding? - mxvltr

    I’ve been writing XHTML / CSS since late 2004 - which I learnt through building RapidWeaver themes. In the summer of 2007, shortly before I started full-time at Realmac HQ, I wrote a fair bit of non-object-oriented PHP (taught by Ben during my summer working at the office). Since then, I’ve continued hacking away with the PHP, whilst going Object-Oriented with Objective-C.

    If you’ve got a question you want to ask, fire away. All previous questions are tagged Ask for your viewing pleasure.

    Monday January 11th, 2010

  3. How did you learn Objective-C / Cocoa? - Anonymous

    Last summer, I flew to the States for Big Nerd Ranch’s Cocoa Bootcamp. It’s not cheap, but it’s taught by Aaron Hillegass: the guy who wrote the book on Cocoa - and I learnt an incredible amount. Talking of books, I read a fair amount of those too - and played with a lot of sample code, hacking away at pet projects to see how things work.

    If you’ve got a question you want to ask, fire away. All previous questions are tagged Ask for your viewing pleasure.

    Monday January 11th, 2010 (1 note)

  4. What steps would you recommend a Mac developer take to go from Beginner (just read Hillegass) to Intermediate?

    In addition to that, what are the best ways to support your mac apps' userbase?     - Anonymous

    Develop an application and release it in some form. It doesn’t have to be the next earth-changing application by any stretch of the imagination, but whatever you do try and find something you want to use yourself. That’s the easiest way to push your knowledge: if you can’t figure out a way to do what you want, you’re more motivated to learn how. My iPhone app is exactly that: scratching my own itch to build something I want to use.

    As for the support? Always try to answer this question: “If I were using my app, what support would I want to see?”

    If you’ve got a question you want to ask, fire away. All previous questions are tagged Ask for your viewing pleasure.

    Thursday January 7th, 2010 (2 notes)

  5. How do you keep the rising sun behind your little ninja head all day? - Anonymous

    I pondered a couple of highly-unlikely answers to this awesome question:

    1. That I pay a child-slave to carry the scenery behind me all day (I mean, they’re non-unionised and happy to work for a small bag of sweets).
    2. That I actually never move, and the sunrise is fixed behind me.

    However, the answer is much more mundane: I’ve been testing a touch-based tablet from a certain Cupertino company. As well as curing cancer, it has this awesome hover feature that means you don’t actually have to hold it to use it Minority Report-style with two hands - and best of all, it’ll hover behind you to show a sunrise background. I can’t say too much about the device - other than it’s going to rock. Or at least that’s what I was told by the friend of a friend of a friend who used to work at Google….

    If you’ve got a question you want to ask, fire away. All previous questions are tagged Ask for your viewing pleasure.

    Thursday January 7th, 2010 (4 notes)

  6. ➶ Ask Me a Question

    I’ve just turned on the handy new Tumblr “Ask” feature, and made it open to everyone to ask me a question. Fire away: I’ll respond to all sensible ones over the coming days. You can view all questions and their answers here

    Thursday January 7th, 2010