Bowtie is a new OS X app brought to you by Laurent Baumann from Slightly Pretentious Software (from Façade, which is coming soon, and Architect, which is currently in public beta). I’m a big fan of Slighty Pretentious because they’re going to bring big change in the way skinning is done since Leopard came along. I’ll blog about those other 2 jewels later, back to Bowtie!

Bowtie is an application silimar to CoverSutra and CoverStream, it allows you to control iTunes with shortcuts, submit your songs to Last.fm, it has a supereasy xHTML+CSS+JavaScript based theming system and it’s FREE. It’s still in Beta, I’m using it for a couple of days now and I’m liking this so far. It’s lightweight, scrobbles to Last.fm seamlessly, and I’m loving the themes! It’s also extremely simple to make your own? I’m especially liking this one: 

This theme fits in very nicely with my neat desk. It slides to the side when you double click it, and when you need it, just click it once and there it is again. I’ll be making my own Bowtie theme anytime soon to really meet my personal needs.

Needless to say, I’m really loving this app right here, and all of you should check it out as well ! It’s free, why wouldn’t you. Start using Bowtie today! Get it here! Get the unbearable theme pack by Lauren Baumann on MacThemes, a great resource for all your skinning and wallpaper needs!

Greets.

I’m getting fairly excited about the iPhone project I’m working on and I wanted to share it with you all. Me and my project partners are getting closer and closer to determining the final form of the application(s) and it’s functionalities. That is on paper of course. I’ll give out more details about the exact functionalities later on. We are currently presenting a keynote to a couple of interested individuals and companies who could be of great help in the development. But more about that later, as I said before. What I can share with you is a couple of my favourite resources.

RESOURCES (Part 1):

- As I mentioned before, I’m reading this great book by Erica Sadun called “The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook, Building Applications With The iPhone SDK”. This book has been a great help to me this far. Well structured, well documented and full of useful recipes and source code. Get it at Amazon, Play.com or Bol.com.

- I found that they give iPhone Developer classes at the university of Stanford. How cool is that? Wish they had classes like that at our school Anyway, they have an online resource site where you can check out source files, class material and more. I have to say it’s quite impressive. See for yourself.

- The iCodeBlog is cool aswell to check out a random tutorial. This dude owns FreshApps.com aswell, a site where you can rate iPhone applications.

I’ll tell you more about other resources along the way.

MOBISTAR AND THE IPHONE

When I heard Mobistar was going provide the iPhone on the Belgian market I was a little pissed, their 3G-network isn’t as good as Proximus’.

When I heard Mobistar was pricing the iPhone at €525 (8GB) and €615 (16GB) I was even more pissed. These prices are far to high in comparison with other countries.

And now Mobistar is offering the iPhone at €99 + a €25 payment each month during 18 months. I’m guessing a lot of impulsive people will jump on this deal but who wants to pay €25 each month without even having some kind of data plan. This is another nasty trick by Mobistar. They’ll probably fool a lot of people. I read about this on Ronny Welter’s blog, I just wanted to post my own opinion about this.

Anyway, this has been written quite fast after my first post about this subject. I guess I’ll never be able to keep up posting at this rate. I hope some of you actually read this, give me some feedback.

Thanx

This is the first in a series of many blogposts about me getting into developing for the iPhone. The iPhone is a very appealing platform, it has a beautiful big screen and a lovely multi-touch interface. I’m not going to go into the advantages of the iPhone because we all now what those are. I was interested in developing for the iPhone as soon as the SDK came out, but why do I really want to get started right now?

The reason for that is quite easy. In school we have this subject called SBP (Small Business Project). It was created to give young people some sense of doing business. Maybe we’ll want to start our own company in a couple of years and this will surely make that process easier. So you have to choose a product of which you think would appeal to a lot of people. Then you have to make sure that your idea looks good on paper (having a good business plan, cost analysis,…). And the last step is to really go out and produce the product.

I (and some fellow students) have the idea of developing an iPhone app. I will tell you more about the functionalities later. The main idea for this application isn’t really new, but we have quite a few tricks up our sleeves to make this application attractive. My job is to create the iPhone app. My partner in crime, Miquël Vermeulen, is going to develop the Windows Mobile version of the app.

How did i get started?

• I downloaded the iPhone SDK from the Apple developer website.
  The SDK is stunning to say the least. It provides you with the all tools you need. It has a very good IDE called XCode, the iPhone Simulator, Instruments (a tool to check the performance of your app so you can quickly see where the app needs some more work) and Interface Builder.
• I bought the book “The iPhone Developer Cookbook” by Erica Sadun.
  This book is very well structured and well documented. It helps you to get started quickly. This book suggests that you have knowledge of Objective C, the main programming language used on the Macintosh platform. I don’t have that knowledge but I’m quite sure my knowledge of Java will get me somewhere.

But it’s not only the development of the app that is going to take some time. We also have to get some people interested in our idea and project because all of this costs money, money we don’t have being poor students. So far it’s been fun to get in touch with all these interesting people. I’m sure I will learn a lot through this project and from these people. This will surely be a very important period in my further career as a developer. That’s it for the first post. Check back later to keep in touch with how things are developing.

Greets

Brecht