Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

The new MacBook Pros aren’t just a faster processor in the same old wrapping, as this Engadget post shows. Little touches like this are the reason I bought my own PowerBook years ago.

If your company runs on Exchange (and who doesn’t), there will come a day when you’ll need to gather or modify data from an external application or a web page you’re building. There are many tools for doing this, from expensive third-party libraries to dead technologies buried in MSDN. The method I found best was [...]

A new technology article from Apple Developer Connection today, explaining what developers can expect to see in Leopard:
Leopard is the sixth major version of Mac OS X and it will be the most advanced and powerful version yet. For users, it is full of new features and elegant user experience improvements that will make it [...]

It’s been a busy month here (not that it ever isn’t). When I haven’t been distracted by Lost or Battlestar Galactica, I’ve been focusing on completing Runner’s Log, my upcoming OSX application. The past two weeks have been spent fixing the remaining bugs, cleaning parts of the code and generally making sure things are working [...]

I noticed a free PDF eBook by CocoaLab today, Become an Xcoder. It covers everything from variables and control loops, to more advanced topics like pointers and Objective-C memory management. Pretty basic overall, but it seems like a friendly introduction for any Mac user who wants to jump into programming for the first time.
On a [...]

Potion Factory released their newest application today, Tangerine. In short, it analyzes the beats per minute of songs in your iTunes library, which you can use to generate custom playlists. You might use it to create a playlist of fast songs for your workout, slow songs to listen to before you go to bed, or [...]

I haven’t used Internet Explorer for years, but as a part time web designer I’m glad IE7 is finally out (and soon to be included in Windows Update). When I write HTML or CSS I try to keep everything neat, simple and standards compliant, but there always seems to be something that didn’t work quite [...]

For a lot of programmers, no matter what language or technology you’re working with the hardest part of developing an application isn’t just writing code, but making the end result look nice as well. Those of us who prefer an IDE to Photoshop are pretty much reliant on what we can find on the internet, [...]

Take some really complex random mathematical algorithms, throw in some subtle colors, and you get the Gallery of Computation by J. Tarbell. As a computer science major this kind of stuff is very interesting to me, especially since the generated patterns look, well, really nice; enough that I might buy a print once they’re available.

My [...]

I’m a huge fan of “pre-built” Linux servers, which let you jump right in to the fun of *nix software without worrying about installation or configuration. One I recently came across is Buildix, a Linux version control server running Subversion, Trac and Cruise Control. Although I haven’t really heard of many people using Cruise Control, [...]