Archives: 2009 August

Archive for August, 2009

Why Use XTabulator?

A well-known player in independent Mac developer circles recently told me he didn’t get why you’d use XTabulator over Excel for CSV, TAB, etc. I thought I’d share (the relevant parts of) my tongue-in-cheek response.
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2009: 08/30
CATEGORY: Bartas Technologies
XTabulator
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Snow Leopard & Consistency

Even after using it for months, I’m still noticing things on Snow Leopard that make me wonder if 10A432 really should have been the GM release. I think a little bit more polishing should’ve been done before release. My list of (mostly nontrivial) bugs are still “open”.
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2009: 08/30
CATEGORY: Cocoa Programming
Rant
Usability
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Bioinformatics Festival

This past Thursday, my group had its first annual “Bioinformatics Festival”.
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2009: 08/29
CATEGORY: Bioinformatics
PaVE
Spice
Work
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District 9

Matt and I watched District 9 last night. I’ll be blunt: those who proclaimed it “the best SciFi movie of 2009″ are either smoking crack or drinking “the fluid”. I enjoyed the Star Trek film far more.
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2009: 08/23
CATEGORY: Personal Note
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On Morons

Personally, I think Barney Frank’s response to the moron at the town hall meeting was perfect. These people – morons like the woman in question , I mean – have no problem whatsoever lobbing strong, hateful missiles to promote their views. Why the hell shouldn’t we respond just as strongly?
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2009: 08/21
CATEGORY: Hahaha
Politics & Religion
Rant
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(Re)Introducing XTabulator

You might be familiar with XTabulator. It lets you sling CSV, TAB, and other tabular data files around, massaging these inherently structureless data files to your own needs. Indeed that’s the point of, say, a CSV (comma-separated value) file. In the years since I’ve released 1.0, I’ve used XTabulator extensively in my own work for a number of reasons. You could say I eat my own dog food, if you were given to tired phrases.

As I write this, I’m on the verge of releasing XTabulator 2. It almost didn’t happen.
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2009: 08/20
CATEGORY: Bartas Technologies
Cocoa Programming
XTabulator
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Private APIs & the Skanks Who Love Them

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a fairly authoritative voice on the topic of <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Scott-Anguish/dp/0672322307/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250700375&sr=1-5″ target=”_blank”>Cocoa Programming</a> when I mentioned a third-party developer’s custom UI toolkit. When I mentioned it, my friend said matter-of-factly, “I’ve heard it uses private API.” Instantly (as often happens), a little scene played out in my head in response.