Posts tagged opensource

Open source is one of the great things about software development. Even if you are building commercial software like the products at Second Gear, it’s great to be able to share a piece of code you’ve developed with other developers to hopefully save them a bit of pain down the road. More often than not, that reciprocates back to you as a piece of code someone else has shared publicly will help you out along the way.

Many of our products make use of great open source code. When you send in a feature request or bug report in Today, you’re using Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s most excellent JRFeedbackProvider. If you happen upon a crash in either Check Off or Today, you’re presented with Stephen F Booth’s SFBCrashReporter.

For a while I have had various projects sprinkled around the Internet. The problem was that it was hard to find it as some of the code was linked on this blog, while others code was stored on my personal Github account. It wasn’t too much effort to find with a bit of Google searching, but it wasn’t as meticulously organized as I’d like.

With Github’s recent Organizations feature I finally took an afternoon to get everything neatly organized into a single location. plus add some new goodies to the bunch.

Second Gear now has its own page on Github that lists all of our open source contributions. Here you will find:

• SGMimiMailer — Our Objective-C wrapper that lets you prompt users to subscribe to your newsletter using the MadMimi service.
• SGHotKeysLib — Our modernized fork of PTHotKeysLib that lets you create global hotkeys for your Mac applications.

I’ve also published two new repositories:

• xcode-templates — These are the Xcode templates I use to build our upcoming iOS products. They are pretty similar to the ones that ship with Xcode 3, but adjustments to match my preferred formatting and coding style. My code has been described as insanely organized, which I think was a compliment…
• SGSplitViewController — This is a replacement for iOS 3.2’s UISplitViewController that allows for side-by-side views in portrait mode a la Settings.app for the iPad. I’m hoping that the next version of the iPad SDK will render this class useless in the future, but for now it’s a decent solution for the problem.

Down the road, I’d like to add more information about our open source offerings on the proper Second Gear site, but for now I hope this new Github account will prove useful to many of the other developers out there.