Sunday, July 26, 2009

Clarus 1.0: A Development Postmortem

On Friday, June 5th we released Clarus - a Mac only application designed to keep track of your pets’ lives. Clarus has had the quickest idea to released product turnaround in the history of my career as a programmer. I started work on Clarus in Feburary, officially pronounced the program “done” on the 21st of May, and spent the time between then and now sorting out non-code stuff, like the new website, localisations, updating our online store and so on.

This is partly down to how cool Core Data is in Cocoa. Thanks to Core Data and a few other technologies built in to Cocoa, the base functionality - the ability to enter details into the program and save them - was done very quickly indeed. The majority of the development time was taken with making the program look great and integrate with the rest of the system (iCal, Address Book, AppleScript, printing, etc).