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I’m going to talk about one of the many causes of software monopolies, which are closed file formats. We all know that if an application can generate data that no other application can understand, the user will be forced to stick with said application if he happened to do some work it. What are the problems of this?

It seem pretty obvious that this kind of locking is a good way to instaurate a monopoly, you can just look at Microsoft Office for an example. The other problem is obsolescence. What happens if you use a product from a company to do your work, stored in a closed file format and the company closes? You can just stick using the product you bought with no problems, but you have no guarantee that it will work on later computers and soon or later you will just have to redo your work.

As an user of software product, you should try your best to use software which uses open and well documented formats to store data. I know this is not what you usually look for when you buy software, but hey, it will come to (y)our favour.

As developers, what should we do? If our applications are going to produce some kind of content i think we should document the file structures we are going to use to store it. Either that, or use an existing open format (which would be the best option, but not always possible).
Also, a big advantage of using a documented file format, even when you wrote that documentation, is that you are less likely to screw up in the implementation because you have a reference to work with. I’m assuming you document the file format BEFORE using it, which is the way you should do anyways. Also important: code is no documentation. I know of some open source applications who claim they use open file formats because you can figure out from the implementation. That’s not true, when no documentation is provided a format is still closed, no matter how many different implementations you have access to.

But there is another entity which in my opinion should regulate these issues. Maybe is too early, but i think governments should force interoperability and the use of open file formats with laws. I know we all dislike government control, but it controls many aspect of our life and business. Computer business should not be any different and some regulations would advantage small companies which currently cannot emerge.

New version of Camouflage has just been released today. On of the new things was have the windows not fading out while Exposé is used. To add this functionality is quite interesting, but not so easy when using an undocumented API. This post will show how to use that API and why it’s not really difficult to change the window tags.

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Tomorrow i’m finally leaving for a vacation, going to Vienna, i’ve been told is a very beautiful city. We all deserve a vacation once in a while.

I’m sorry for all those who will try to contact me by email but until 24th December i won’t answer to emails.

These days there have been long discussions about the MacHeist bundle and its effects on the involved developers. For the few that still don’t know what the MacHeist bundle is, it is a collection of applications sold at an extremely discounted price.

Here is my take on it. I’m not going to talk wether MacHeist offered or not a good deal to developers. Lets pretend MacHeist offered a good deal. The real damage is to the perceived value of the involved software after the promotion ends. If it can be sold for few dollars, its worth a few dollars! Will the developers still be able to sell said software at regular price at the same rate they did before the promotion? Or will user start complaining it is too expensive? I hope the answers are (in order) yes and no, but i have my reasonable doubts.

Unfortunately this doesn’t affect only the involved software, but the whole independent mac software scene, especially because the software involved (this surprised me a lot) was already pretty famous and some even won awards! I think we should avoid depreciating our software with these kind of offers or we’ll soon be forced to do it constantly. This is also diseducative, if you remember my post about software piracy, my point was that we must teach user that software HAS a value, not the opposite.

This said, i don’t want to say these kind of promotion is inherently bad. Offering your 1.0 (or otherwise not popular) application on sites like MacZOT for 1 day at discounted price should cause no harm, the promotion of a new product is something we are used to. What is to avoid is the continuos depreciation of software, especially if it is already well known.

One thing i hate of the NSTextField is that while you can’t use the “enter” key to insert newlines characters you still can insert them, for example, by copying in them text which contains newlines characters. This is plain annoying sometimes! I made this NSFormatter that can be attached to an NSTextField and will just strip the newlines found in input, so if you paste multiple lines they will all be merged on a single line.

Download the BRSingleLineFormatter Class

Like every developer blog worth of this name, it needs an article on software piracy. This is going to be rather long. I’ll start by talking about the causes of software piracy, its effects and what we can (and cannot) do to limit its damages.

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A new version is out and it fixes a very crazy bug that could consume hell of a lot ram when icons were shown and hidden often.

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We are proud to present you the restyled briksoftware.com! Hope you like it!

Otx is a disassembler based on Apple’s otool, it has some really funky features, but why should a normal developer need such a tool?

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Today I tested Tangerine! a tool to generate iTunes playlists.

Well generating playlists doesn’t make it special yet, but the way Tangerine! is doing it, does! Tangerine! is generating the playlists based on the beats per minute of each song. So if you’re jogging and listen to music from your iPod, you may never again listen to a song that is way to slow for you. Try it out, it just rocks and is absolutely easy to use!