The rants and ravings of a Mac developer

I Love programming, Macs, the iPhone, iPad, Apps & iOS! In my spare time I like Programming in ExtJS, PHP, MySQL / SQLite3 and Apache - in other words a Real Geek's geek. I've tinkered around with programing for iOS in the not so distant past . During the day I work for Motorola Solutions in IT as BSA for our Export Compliance system JPMorgan's TradeSphere. At night I freelance program on the Mac & Web. I'm also a techie who likes Sci-Fi and Horror. Some of my favorite authors include Stephen King, William Gibson and Frank Herbert as well as his son Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson.

But my real passion is for Comic Book Collecting. My current freelance project is writing a web based application using ExtJS for collecting comics books. After I get the web application completed, I will be integrating some portion of the web application into a desktop client for the Mac through the use of web services for all data exchange & transaction. Eventually, the web site & Mac client would also include a social networking component as well as an iOS component.

I started collecting comic books as a kid when my grandfather passed away and we found my father's comic book collection when we were cleaning out my grandfather's basement. There were a number of early issues in that stash, such as Fantastic Four number one, The Amazing Spider-Man number one, number 22 of the Uncanny X-Men... and others. So needless to say, I was hooked.

After high school I stopped collecting - college, drinking and woman took priority (not necessarily in that order) over visiting the local comic book shop. Now that I have 2 kids of my own, I've gotten back into collecting.

Cuckoo for SproutCore!


SproutCore LogoAs you no doubt have heard by now (and shame on you if you haven’t) Apple will be using SproutCore to develop (at least part of) their MobileMe offering (the upcoming .Mac replacement).

SproutCore is a JavaScript based framework that allows you to create AJAX applications that look and function just as good as desktop applications. Just check out their demo photo application, looks as good as iPhoto no? SproutCore uses a MVC (model, view, controller) programming model and allows you to implement an application in just a few lines of code. The developers of the frame work SproutIt say its loosely based on Apple’s Cocoa framework.

I’ve spent a few hours over at their web site, downloaded the framework and development tools (which are based on Ruby, they are very slick!) and created my obligatory SproutCore Hello World program.

You should definitely check this framework out!

Here are some links about the SproutCore framework: