Matt Mower has just announced the release of his first publicly available software tool for MacOSX. It’s called Diffly and is a productivity app for software programmers. Matt has a long history of developing productivity tools for niche environments. I’ve used several over the years and always found the functionality and UI to be well thought out. Diffly is the first product Matt’s released for general consumption. But since I’m not a programmer, I’m already looking forward to the next one! Congratulations, Matt.

Pain can be a great motivator (to finish your first Mac application!)

Not the best weekend on record as I seem to have developed an ear infection which is both very painful and very uncomfortable (my jaw isn’t working properly). I decided that, rather than spending the day waiting in casualty to be seen by a doctor, I would take my mind off it by debugging the problem with my first MacOSX app that has been preventing me from releasing it these last few (okay 8) weeks.

So I’m quite pleased to be able to announce Diffly my first real MacOSX application written in Objective-C using the beautiful Cocoa framework.

Diffly in action

If you’re a developer, use MacOSX, and use Subversion you might want to take a look.

Several years ago I purchased a mid-range laser printer – a Brother HL-6050DN. My work requires that I review hundreds of documents for some projects and trying to do that on a screen, no matter how big and nice, is an awful experience. So I print them. I don’t know how many pages I’ve printed, but I’ve gone through dozens of cases of cheap copier paper since I bought it in mid-2004.

Today I got a warning message on the printer control panel:
“WARNING: TONER LEVEL LOW. REPLACE TONER UNIT.”

Wow! I had forgotten you have to do that with laser printers. I guess I thought it would run forever like some perpetual motion machine. Good thing I got a couple of spares when I bought the printer. At this rate parts will be discontinued before I have to buy more. In fact, toner itself may become obsolete.

That’s the kind of product I like to buy – works great, never breaks, and runs (nearly) forever before you have to fill it up.