In an effort to learn more about Objective-C programming I have created a simple OSX Application that mimics one of my more popular widgets the Dog Age Widget. Its a native Objective-C Animal Age calculator that allows you to convert the ages of various animals against human lifespans and see life expectancies based on different breeds of animals.
While this may not seem like an exciting or useful application I am using it as a tool to learn more about GIT how it works and also to learn more about the native Objective-C language. To that end I have made this project open source. Since its my first open source full application my hopes are that I can learn to code in a fun collaborative environment.
Features
So far my app consists of multiple views that allow the user to select the type of animal that they want to calculate their age against and it calculates automatically below and shows the user the results.
There is a graph view that shows different life expectancies for different breeds of the animal that was chosen to give some kind of reference to how long humans live versus other Animals.
The Xcode Project consists of 2 build targets 1 website target with a Sparkle Framework, the other is a Mac App Store target that does not include said framework.
Roadmap
Right now the plan is to have the following features in by version 2.0
- Allow users the ability to convert animal age against human age, currently its human to animal only.
- Create a more native graph view with either NSRect or OpenGL
Contributions
Contributions to this project are welcomed! I will be continually updating the GIT repository for this project and will be sharing my code here for various parts of the project either through Cocoa Controls or directly on my site for the benefit of the entire community.
I hope that you enjoy me sharing my code with the community and I welcome your feedback!
AI Usage Transparency Report
Pre-AI Era · Written before widespread use of generative AI tools
AI Signal Composition
Score: 0.02 · Low AI Influence
Summary
A simple OSX Application that mimics one of my more popular widgets the Dog Age Widget. It's a native Objective-C Animal Age calculator that allows you to convert the ages of various animals against human lifespans and see life expectancies based on different breeds of animals.
Related Posts
Fontrestore, Apple’s fix for your fonts
FontAgent Pro is a great font management solution for OS X. One of the best things about it is that its 100% cloud based. You can run the entire thing hosted in their cloud instance or you can run it on your own server. It's a great solution for font management, and does everything from managing your font licenses, users, libraries, and sets. The one problem however is the fact that when deploying a new font solution, you find yourself in a quandary over the right way to deploy it....
Cocoa Control: Horizontal Graph View
I have been struggling for years trying to get NSRect to play nicely and draw a cool looking responsive graph in a Cocoa application. I was trying to create a controller that could be used with iOS and Mac OSX, but the two platforms had too many internal differences for one controller class to make sense. The discrepancies between the frameworks made it difficult to share code between the two platforms, forcing me to maintain separate implementations for each.
Cocoa Control: Print View
Apple has changed decades ago by introducing to the world single window applications. Ever since we have seen tremendous applications all taking advantage of this form. Functionality that compliments that form are things like window sheets, those cool pop-under windows that slide up and down from the top of the application top bar. Sheets magically show us controls when we need them and then whoosh them away when we don’t.
Cocoa Control: iTunes Style Application
Recently I have become more and more interested with the wonderful world of Objective-C and C. For the last couple years I have been a hobbyist developer and still am today. I never really felt that my development skills had reached any level of real skill and so I have been an active member on websites like Stack overflow, Apple Developer Forums and more asking over and over the answers to what were probably very simple issues and questions that I hurdled over while learning.
