Daniel Kennett

Moonlighting in .NET Part 1: Living in the Bubble

Posted in Programming/Work on 09. Mar, 2010 | 0 Comments

Bubble I’m a Cocoa developer first and foremost, but for the next few months I’ll be moonlighting as a C#.NET developer, writing version 5.0 of my Music Rescue application from scratch. I actually have version 4.0 in Visual Basic.NET, but, you know — Visual Basic is for chumps.

Writing in C#.NET is an… interesting experience for someone used to Objective-C. This series of posts will discuss .NET from the perspective of a Cocoa developer — what’s good, bad, and just different.

Playing the Game… And Losing

Daniel Jalkut wrote an excellent piece on his blog entitled Only A Game. He talks about how running an indie business is like playing a game — you have to make decisions that you know might make you lose. Unfortunately, that’s what happened to me last year — I made a gamble, and I lost.

Things are getting better. Slowly. Nine months ago, I wrote this post essentially about how I sucked at being a businessman. Since then, things got much much worse. This post is an account of what I’ve been through in these past few months. Everything I talk about was caused directly by the fall in income I suffered due to the my gamble failing.

Why crashing your car on purpose is a smart thing to do… Sometimes.

Stuck in the Snow Many people I know will tell me I’m being irresponsible for doing this myself, let alone telling others to do it. However, I saw one of those people nearly trash £55,000 worth of Porsche by simply letting go of the wheel and hitting the brakes when the back end broke loose, so what the hell do they know?

When you’re dealing with a car that’s losing control, you need to know how the car behaves in order to concentrate on getting it back in check. When you start losing control, you have seconds to react and fix it before you go past the point of no return. If you’re already compensating for your car’s tendency to pull right under heavy braking in the snow by the time it happens and putting in exactly the right amount of steering in to stabilise the car and allow stability control to do its job, you have a much better chance of coming out of it without a dented car or skull than someone who’s thinking “Shit, what’s what crunching sound?! Why is my car pulling to the left? Why has my car lost power?”

iPhone Companion Apps: New Project to App Store in Two Months

Normally, I write a “Postmortem” blog post after each product I ship. However, recently I got the chance to give a talk at CocoaHeads Swindon, and chose to talk about my trials and tribulations when writing Clarus for iPhone (iTunes Link). The other day it struck me that this actually turned out to be a great postmortem, so instead of writing a blog post I sat at my computer and recorded a video of my slides and commentary.

An Eternal Headache: Core Data, Undo and Files

Core Data is awesome. One of the most awesome things about it is that you get free undo/redo. Of course, you wouldn’t actually ship anything but the simplest of applications with the undo Core Data provides, but getting it up to scratch it pretty simple — most of my additions in Clarus are simply putting certain operations into undo groups.

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Reinventing the Wheel

Posted in Programming/Work on 08. Mar, 2010 | No Comments

Over the past week or two, I’ve been working exclusively in Visual Studio on Windows, writing the core components of the next version of my Music Rescue application.

I’ve been fairly vocal on Twitter about my experiences, from bitching about C# to actually hailing how good the experience is compared to WinForms and .NET 2.0. What seems to have got a lot of attention, particularly from .NET developers, is the fact that I’m reimplmenting a portion of Cocoa’s Foundation framework in .NET. People don’t seem to see the point, and I’ve been asked why I’m not using the stuff built in to .NET instead.

In this post, I’m going to talk about why I’m reimplementing bits of Cocoa in .NET, and why I’m doing it this way around instead of implementing bits of .NET into Cocoa.?

Preparing for Winter Veil

Posted in General on 15. Dec, 2009 | No Comments

Winter is my favourite season, by far. Yes, summer is “warm”, but there’s nothing as great as being outside in a crisp winter’s day before coming home and sitting by the fire.

My childhood is filled with memories like these. It was pretty routine, especially in the winter, to take the dogs out with my Dad for a several miles hike before coming home, chopping up logs and burning them in the huge fireplace our countryside cottage had. When we ran out of logs, we’d take his 1930’s era truck to the local wood processing plant and fill it up with logs.

An Epiphany, Of Sorts

Posted in General on 06. Dec, 2009 | No Comments

In 1999, I discovered two bands that remain at the core of my love of music today — Counting Crows and Barenaked Ladies. I can’t actually remember how I found Barenaked Ladies, but I heard a Counting Crows track (Hangin’ Around) playing in the local branch of the now-defunct MVC and bought it there and then.

Those two bands changed the way I perceive music. Counting Crows especially is a band whose music can make you laugh, cry and everything in between if you’re in the right place. In time, I started to reject any band whose music I couldn’t ‘connect’ with, and my discography was very small.

The Devolution of Communication, Pt. Deux

Posted in General on 01. Oct, 2009 | No Comments

Since my last display of how bad our communication can be, I thought that I could try harder to not pipe random crap through the SMS app. Unfortunately, that meant most of the messages sent between us were either teasing one another or, again, status updates — hopefully with better grammar, though.

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