Is that Cocoa I Smell or are you Brewing Up Shareware?
There are some really cool small-but-kick-ass shareware apps taking full advantage of Mac OS X’s excellent Aqua GUI and integrated Cocoa environment brewing up these days. Here’s a few that I’ve downloaded and played with in just the last hour:
- NetNewsWire – Now a full-on 1.0 application costing just $30, this useful app is much more than its little brother, NetNewsWire Lite, aspired to be. It raises the ante beyond being just a simple RSS/XML reader (an application that allows a viewer to peruse content on sites such as this one without the need for a web browser). Its most interesting feature, in my opinion, is the new Weblog editor, which gives blogging software such as Moveable Type and pMachine, traditionally administrated over the web, a pretty GUI. However, admittedly, I’ve been unable to get this feature to work just yet. But once I do, I am certain that the on-the-fly spell checking and superior implementation of HTML code input will end up being a godsend.
- Trade Strategist – I’ve got no head for the stock market, but this little app looks like it could teach anyone, even misguided money miscreants such as myself, a buy/sell strategy if used properly. The author is a quantum chemist who does Cocoa development and trade stock analysis in his spare time. Damn, I love the eclectic nature this marriage between UNIX and Mac has created. Check out his most recent article at the O’Reilly MacDevCenter.
- Konfabulator – This hard to explain number is more of a development environment than an actual program. Using something called Widgets, which are basically downloadable mini-apps created with JavaScript, RSS, and some hefty work in Photoshop, these little darlings present information in a new and interesting way—something the Mac platform is seeing a lot of these days because of the great work of a few dedicated fans.
