Thanks for checking out my blog. You are probably reading this because you have poor taste. Aside from this fact, you are reading this because things are exciting enough in the Mac OS X programming world to trigger my “I’ve got to tell someone about this” reflex.

In a way, this blog is a sort of reboot for my small business, Kaboomerang LLC. Kaboomerang started out as a consulting business with a few valuable clients and an hourly rate that seemed to help both sides move right along. The output was mostly in the form of web applications, usually in Java.

While all of this has been enjoyable, one of the prime motivators for doing anything in my world — a creative outlet — has been slowly diminished by the inevitable rise of frameworks that do everything from display to persistence to dependency injection, etc. While these are all fine and good, and just what a risk-averse corporation might need, the combination of their massive adoption and their Always Repeat Yourself philosophy has squeezed out the remaining fun in these areas.

And when I say “fun,” what I really mean is challenge or depth or discovery.

I won’t bore you with specifics but here is one small example. Using the leading frameworks at this time (Struts, Spring and Hibernate) a simple and common change such as adding a new required field to a database requires about ten mind numbing steps that have very little to do with the real meat of the problem at hand. (Yes, killer frameworks like RIFE do away with this silliness and introduce agile goodness, but try convincing your crusty architecture team of this and the need to re-educate a possibly massive IT force already using these older dinosaurs.)

Another aspect of this reboot has been a move from an hourly service-based model to a product-based model. On the Mac platform, it is possible to build a business as an independent developer in a way that is far more attractive than the same route on the Windows side of things.

So, I am jumping right in, and blogging all of it live, right here. I have a solid C background and the layer of Objective-C on top of it fits right in with my OO design instincts. On top of this, the Cocoa API and Apple’s beautiful XCode environment make hacking fun again.

Aaron Hillegass has an excellent book that I would recommend to anyone starting out with Cocoa programming. It is called “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.” Check it out. I will be blogging along as I work through this book.

As an outcome of this adventure, I will be building an application that has been forming on paper for some time, waiting to see the light of day when inspiration struck. Well, struck it has, and here we go.