Progress Update

Its been quite some time since my original post soliciting ideas for a Mac OS X application to develop. Since then I decided to heed the advice I’ve read in several places and to just implement something simple that I want. That ended up being an audio file splitter. The app is currently nicknamed Chopper, which aside from the obvious cutting meaning also has a bit of meaning in Australian culture as a reference to Mark “Chopper” Read.

In July I also changed jobs. As part of accepting the new role I asked to work a four day week, with the intention of dedicating the fifth day to Mac development. A day a week turned out to be too much but they did accept a day a fortnight, written into my contract, so I always get it.

With that day a fortnight I’ve done such things as:

• Come up with an overview of requirements
• Sketch out several possible UI designs
• Benchmark MP3 decoders
• Learn and use the new features in Obj-C 2.0
• Learn OCUint and add unit tests to the project
• Implement an MPEG header parser
• Implement MPEG file splitting
• Implement a CUE sheet parser
• Implement splitting on CUE sheet track boundaries
• Hook up a basic UI that uses bindings

The todo list is still quite large. I will continue plugging away and one day it will be ready. In the meantime I’m aiming to post more frequent updates on this site and maybe cover some of the things that I’ve learnt such as unit testing Cocoa classes.