Busyness
It’s been a busy week!
The biggest event was announcing the departure of my friend and Calf Trail co-founder Hjon from the company. It’s been in the works for a while, but this week we officially transferred the iPhone half of our work over to Hjon’s new LLC: Pseudorandom Software. (If you use FogBugz, be sure to check out his great Inbugz app. Despite keeping busy with other jobs, he’s got some useful new features in the works.)
The other big announcement was Sesamouse, a free utility to send real gestures and touches from the Magic Mouse. Translation into dev-speak: Sesamouse gives legitimate applications access to the Magic Mouse’s otherwise-crippled multitouch hardware features. It contains the private/undocumented API gunk within its own process, interpreting gestures and sending the system its results. Applications that use the publicly supported NSEvent and NSTouch APIs then work with the Magic Mouse automatically. Accomplishing this involved many hours staring at hex dumps and learning to read assembly, with a helpful boost of UTSL. Quite a fun challenge!
In the midst of all this, I also made some great strides on another iPhoto-related app this week. It currently lacks the finishing touches, but my wife and I already have fun testing it. Plans call for a beta release next week.
I’m hoping to give Calf Trail’s lineup of Mac products a big boost during the early part of this year. That way, even if sales don’t pick up, I’ll have some good stuff sitting out there while I’m busy finding paid work. I’ve been thinking a lot about the last two years’ investments…but that’s a topic for another post.