words by patrick

It’s been almost 2 months since my last post, so I thought I’d make a status update on what I’ve been up to.

I finished my 4th year of my program, with one more to go. Next year I’m going to get to take some awesome courses, included another Advanced Artificial Intelligence course and more importantly, my final project / research project. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do for that. Being partial to Mac OS X, I’d like to do something that I could write a nice Cocoa interface for. I’m kind interested in doing something with OCR (Wouldn’t it be great to break all those stupid captcha image fields?), AI, Neural Nets, or HCI (Mmm, pie menus). If you have suggestions please let me know.

This summer is shaping up to be pretty awesome. Although my Google Summer of Code application to write unit tests for Adium was accepted, I had to turn it down as I was offered an internship with Apple. As honoured as I would be to get a chance to work with the Adium team, the opportunity to work at “the mothership” is one of that no CS student can turn down. It is certainly a huge opportunity for me, and I hope to do my best to impress, learn and produce at Apple. That being said, I’m taking off for Cupertino, CA, on Sunday. I’m very excited to meet all the other interns and start work.

Further, I’ve also been lucky enough to receive a WWDC Scholarship. I don’t know how much of the conference I’ll be able to attend while working, but I’ll certainly be around. It sounds like a couple members of the Adium team are going to be there, so if a meet-up happens, you can count on me to get some photos.

That’s all for now, more updates to follow.

So, I started up a blog again. You’re looking at it. It’s pretty snazzy, I have to say. Wordpress (and the associated K2 bundle) have come a long way since I first touched them years ago. I swore off blogging a long time ago, so you might be wondering – like I was – what the hell I’m doing with yet another blog, contributing to mindless, useless mess that has become… “The Blogosphere”.

Well, good call. I’m glad you are concerned with the state of the internet as well. There are way too many people who just don’t seem to care, and feel that it is somehow useful (even though it isn’t, at all), to post about how cute their cat is or what they ate for lunch. So to answer the question, what is it that I’m doing here? Well, I thought it would be useful to have this site so that I can document and contribute my discoveries and knowledge to the growing Mac OS X developer community. It’s somewhat of a specialized field, and sometimes it can be hard to find the information you want, so if it’s not already out there, my goal is going to be to try and put it out there.

I’m just a student, and I’m learning constantly, as are most devs, so I won’t claim to know everything or try to answer every question. I’m going to post when I stumble across interesting information, and do things as I go.

I’ve set up a bunch of useful links to the best OS X Dev resources on the internet, and hope to publish my first article soon.

Hopefully this site will end up proving useful to my fellow OS X developers. Wish me luck, here I go.