What will be coming up next year in Cocoa Samurai

Well everybody it’s the holidays and I hope your all doing OK. I just wanted to wish you all well and let you all know what’s coming up. It seems this blog as been doing extraordinarily well from the statistics I’ve seen on Google Analytics. But I hope starting in January I can make it do even better. When I first started this blog it was really just something for me and a few of my friends around here mainly in AmesMUG (Ames Mac Users Group) but then It started getting picked up by a few other people... then came Scott Stevenson and CocoaDevCentral. That completely changed my audience overnight. Certainly the new Cocoa Blogs page lists this as a Cocoa Blog focused on beginners and certainly from the articles i’ve done I don’t fault Scott for coming to that conclusion. When I started writing this blog I had the intention of writing a few things at first that simply spelled out how to do some things I had wanted to know when learning Cocoa. Things like the pragma mark I actually learned by digging through Adium source code, other things I had to dig through pages and pages of material to find it. This blog was to end that. You wanna know how to do gradient backgrounds? Here's how you do it simple and easy, save you the time and effort of digging up pages and pages of stuff to maybe find nothing or find it after a much longer time. I wanted to save developers the time and trouble and spill it out in an easy to follow format. However that will begin to change in January. I will begin to do some intermediate to advanced articles as I can and instead focus on general Cocoa Development and likely Core Data. The reason I haven’t done any as of yet is (1) I’ve been focusing a lot of time on learning new things by reading the Documentation and by experimenting like crazy more than any other time as a developer (2) Im a Student still and I have an Open Source project AssignmentTracker X that I take seriously and another one I plan on starting soon. This project demands that I sacrifice a lot of my free time outside school and work to maintain it decently because I genuinely care about it (I use it myself) and I view it as a big part of my resume when I begin to apply anywhere for a job and as of yet I haven’t gotten that much done on the latest incarnation of it right now (3) My tech support job working with Windows 98 POS (Point of Sale) Registers and Linux this fall has been more demanding than previously before (hey some things got easier, but still theres no patch for human stupidity) seriously though it's not that bad a gig... better than my job before that... Wendys...mmm guess what I did there (4) As of late i’ve been doing a ton of time preparing to go to school full time, where before I was going part time and working a ton. (5) In depth articles take time to write and i’ve been interrupted by all the above items I hope that in January i’ll be able to arrange my schedule as such that I can have some dedicated blocks of time to work on my Open Source project and writing articles for Cocoa Samurai. For now my tech support will be a BIG drain on me which is why I haven’t done much for December and why Im not planning on doing any more articles for December. I simply need dedicated blocks of time to really get stuff done and having the phone interrupt every 5-10-15 minutes at work or when im at my apartment on pager is just annoying. Plus Im sure all you are either busy with finals or traveling around or preparing to travel regardless of where you are in life. Now don’t think that the nice simple articles will vanish overnight because they won’t, but I hope to make this blog more appealing to all ranges of Cocoa Developers which is what I’ve intended from the beginning. Lastly Happy Holidays everybody!!! I hope you all get what you want for Christmas or whatever you celebrate. Im just hoping to get that DS Lite and Brain Age :) And maybe the next article you read will have been written on a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (finally making the intel switch) instead of my current 1.25Ghz Powerbook G4 with 512MB ram :) Yes that’s how bad im off right now, on the other hand i’ve gotten good at optimizing my apps and finding what speeds up all the apps im using ( I just wish NeoOffice wasn’t so RAM hungry.) We’ll see what happens... have a great time everybody and a happy new year!