Our pal Brent Simmons, noted developer of the renowned NetNewsWire for the for the Mac and iPhone, has just released his latest NewsGator project into the wild : TapLynx.

TapLynx lets you create an iPhone media application without a lick of Objective-C or Cocoa code. Using the SDK you can link against the TapLynx library, configure a plist, edit a few HTML files and in an amazingly short amount of time you’ll have a custom application presenting content from a variety of sources. The framework is adept at displaying, text, image and video content. The user interface is highly configurable and offers a variety hooks to customize the appearance.

I took it for a spin this morning and was able to produce this RogueSheep vanity application that featured content from this blog as well as the @postageapp twitter feed in something like 15 or 20 minutes :

Two nifty features :

• You can add custom tabs running your own code if you have Cocoa expertise.
• The application configuration can come from a URL, allowing the content and style to update dynamically without submitting a new application instance to the App Store. You can even add new tabs this way!

This is a great addition to any iPhone developer’s toolbox. We are already looking at ways this can help us with several of our clients. Thanks Brent!

The University of Washington is now offering a certificate course in Macintosh and iPhone programming.

This program is offered in 3 parts, with the first class that introduces objective-C and Cocoa starting this fall. Our good friend Hal Mueller is teaching the first course. The advisory board for this program is comprised of many of the best and well-known Mac and iPhone developers in the region, so you know the content is going to be great.

If you are in the Seattle area and looking to become a master of Cocoa and Objective-C, you don’t want to miss out on this opportunity. I know that the classes will fill up quick, so apply soon.

RogueSheep is sending a small contingent of the flock next week to the annual Apple Developer conference, WWDC. Our UI whiz and graphic artist, Brad, will be there and of course I will be representing the business and engineering factions. We plan on giving away a few of our new Postage t-shirts as well as some reprints of our old company shirt from last year with our updated logo. Follow

on twitter if you’d like to keep up with where we will be at the conference and to find out how to get a shirt if you are going.

Should be an exciting time for Apple fans with a new MacOS, likely new iPhone hardware and the fresh iPhone OS 3.0. Who knows, maybe even Steve Jobs will descend from the heavens in a divine return to the the helm of the big fruit? I hope to see many of you reading this there.

for the RogueSheep Army.

Things are really starting to cook around here lately. We have a variety of new clients discussing fresh projects and long-term partners coming back with some exciting plans for the remainder of this year. We are also fully engaged in work on our own technology platform that is centered around automated publishing. It has been a busy year and I think I can still see January back there not too far down the timeline.

Those of you that know me, know that I hate saying no. Having to turn down excellent opportunities and slowing down work on our internal projects one to many times has finally tipped the balance. We are ready to shepherd in a new engineer in the Seattle office in the very near future. The full details and job application form are available online.

Send us your résumé if you are interested or pass the word on to anyone you know that might be a good fit. I’m really looking forward to seeing a few fresh muzzles around here.

Attention Macintosh Programmers : Iron Coder 7 has been scheduled. Clear your weekend and put on your creative-codin’ hat. I think 7 may be my new lucky number…

Update : IC VII is going to be 9 days long and the Grand Prize is now an 8GB iPod Touch! Thanks to our Seattle brethren at Brain Murmurs for providing this enticing booty. Look for the API and theme at 7PM CST on 11.09.2007.

IronCoder V came to a close last Sunday. The theme for the 48 hour hacking marathon was Life and the required API was the ScreenSaver.framework. Congratulations to Ben Gottlieb for winning with his clever screen saver, WikiPath. Hope to see you at C4 this year!

Oddly, I found it difficult to come up with anything terribly interesting around the theme this time. I’m a bit afraid to contemplate what it means when ‘Life’ isn’t inspiring! When inspiration finally did hit the requirements called for some 3-D graphics, which left me with two obvious choices : Quartz Composer or OpenGL. Having had some previous Quartz Composer experience I opted for this route, rather than a crash-course in OpenGL.

Interestingly, I quickly ran up against some of the more difficult sorts of tasks to accomplish in Quartz Composer. In the end I had something that was close to the original idea, but no where near as dynamic as I would have liked. I’m definitely more conversant in the visual language of Quartz Composer than I was before the contest. I’m also inclined to try and find a nice little OpenGL project to tackle in the near future…perhaps for Iron Coder VI?

Tree of Life is a simple screen saver that scans your Pictures folder and uses the images in it as leaves on a tree. The leaves, sprout and then fall to the ground as the cycle of life churns.

I cleaned up the code and fixed a few problems that I just didn’t have time to address before the contest deadline. I also added the ability to point it to a folder of your own choosing. There are a lot of features that didn’t make it in that might make it more compelling including :

• Choose iPhoto albums as source
• Cycle through all images in folder
• Accent the images with a frame or border ( think green )
• Maintain aspect of original image
• More variety in leaf growth and movement
• Control # of leaves with preference
• Fix falling animation to have proper start position
• Hook up sudden-motion-sensor to ‘shake’ the leaves off the tree!

Perhaps someone else will feel like adding features? If so the source code and screen saver are available here.

I had not really been a regular podcast subscriber in the past. Once the phenomenon reached critical mass and earned a spot in iTunes source list, I took a spin through the directory and added a few of the selections that looked appealing to my subscription list. Between a flaky first generation iPod and an average 15 minute commute, I never really found the time to keep up. It wasn’t long until all my subscriptions were branded with the lonely, gray exclamation of neglect in the list.

Fast-forward some months and I have found myself actually making it to the gym regularly as well as the owner of a cheap, refurbished iPod shuffle. The opportunity to rediscover podcasting has arrived and so far I’m more or less keeping up with the handful of regular updates to my subscription list.

One of my favorites right now is Late Night Cocoa, hosted by Steve Scott. Each episode showcases ‘Scotty’ chatting with experienced Cocoa developers on a specific development topic. Besides managing to land Mac development all-stars like Aaron Hillegass and Mark Dalrymple, Scotty brings great production values to each interview. Clear audio, focused questions and regular summaries make this fairly technical talk actually work as a learning tool, despite the potential limitations of the audio-only format.

If you have any interest in Cocoa development and haven’t given it a shot yet, head on over to Late Night Cocoa and check out the archives. RogueSheep buddy Gus Mueller is slated for the upcoming episode, surely one you don’t want to miss.

Last week I gave an introductory talk about Quartz Composer to the Seattle Xcoders group. If you are an OS X developer and haven’t spent any time yet looking into Quartz Composer yet, I encourage you to check out the technology and companion framework. Using its intuitive and interesting visual programming metaphor it is fairly simple to rapidly create some very sophisticated animations or graphics processing pipelines. Using these compositions in your own applications and development projects is a snap with the provided framework.

The talk materials are available here. There are a few sample compositions and an Xcode project that demonstrates how to use the Quartz Composer API, including the use of bindings to control the properties of compositions.