Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

It looks like a new Nike iPod product is due to be released soon, according to tuaw.com:

The Nike Amp+ is a wrist band which communicates with your iPod (with Bluetooth, I assume) so that you can start, stop, and browse your tunes. That’s not all! It also talks to the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, so you [...]

Tara Hunt posted a great article on Vitamin today about the role of community in software development. Although written for the web 2.0 app crowd, the same philosophy applies to any platform.

Principle #2. Design to delight
There are plenty of great articles on Vitamin that help you with this, but a really good rule of thumb [...]

John Gruber talked about software pricing a few times this week, which is a subject I’ve been thinking of lately as well. Finding the “sweet spot” is always a tricky issue, and pricing your application too low can hurt just as much as pricing it too high. The assumption is that if your application costs [...]

Microsoft released Windows PowerShell 1.0 a week or two ago, and I’ve heard a lot of positive things about it so far. The easiest way to describe PowerShell is to imagine a Unix command line shell, but with all kinds of design hints and functionality from the .NET programming language and Windows administration tools.
I was [...]

A new installment of the Leopard Technology Series for Developers was posted today, showcasing Xcode and the rest of the developer tools. Xcode seems to have taken a few hints from Visual Studio for its next release, and the improvements to the code editor and debugger look nice. Perhaps more importantly, speed and code completion [...]

As an IT developer, the .NET 2.0 System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping class is extremely useful. Many times I’ll need to see if a server is reachable, or whether something exists at an IP address before sending another network request (say, a WMI query) with a long timeout delay. Although the Ping class works great (and is much easier [...]

I saw this in Apple’s Cocoa-dev mailing list recently and thought it was clever. It’s a hack, and I don’t know of any situation off the top of my head where I’d use it, but if you need an instance variable in one of your categories ((For non-Cocoa programmers, a category is a powerful Objective-C [...]

.NET 3.0 was released earlier this week, to very little fanfare. I haven’t done much to prepare for it, and from what I’ve read so far there’s not much reason to unless you’re already building applications for Vista. The Windows Presentation Framework looks neat, but not something I’d use at work, where I do nearly [...]

Right on the heels of MacHeist, there’s Mac App A Day, offering a free shareware OSX application each and every day through the month of December.
I don’t know where this trend came from, or if the developers are getting enough free exposure to make it worthwhile, but I know I’m enjoying it. When My Dream [...]

Phill Ryu started his follow-up to My Dream App last week, MacHeist. Phill is a genius at viral marketing, and I couldn’t help getting a bit excited about what’s in store with MacHeist (hint: it involves free OSX software). The official start date is Wednesday (although there’s already one freebie, if you hunt for it), [...]