I don’t intend for this to become a link blog–not because of some high-falutin’ ideals, but because I assume most potential readers are at least as connected into the Mac dev community as I am and will have already heard the latest cool news.

But the latest post by Glen Aspeslagh describes Ecamm Network’s usage of a project which seems to deserve increased exposure: Cocotron, “an open source project which aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc.’s Cocoa documentation.” Or, as glibly summarized by the Ecammeratus: “Wrote a Cocoa app? Just add a new Xcode target, hit compile and out shoots a Windows version.”

Sure, it doesn’t work perfectly, but Glen’s warts-and-all description sounds promising. If you have a product that could benefit from a Windows equivalent please give Cocotron a look and contribute code–so it will be easier for me to use when I come up with a product that could benefit from it.

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Hooray, Apple has decided to lift the long-in-the-tooth NDA on the iPhone SDK!

I can’t imagine anyone will be hearing that news from this blog first, but I do want to acknowledge and take advantage of it. My last post felt a bit vague, even to me, about my definition of “iPhone black” and that was partly due to dancing around the NDA. While it was really tempting to be provocative, I felt it would be irresponsible for my current contract work to risk getting smacked with an NDA violation (even though I have yet to hear of an instance) and have the client’s product suffer as a result. I considered screenshots, but felt they were either singling out someone else’s application, or a simplistic straw man if I just used an Interface Builder mockup.

The definition I had in mind of “iPhone black UI” is not simply “any view whose background is black”; it is a UINavigationController whose UINavigationBar's barStyle is UIBarStyleBlackOpaque (instead of UIBarStyleDefault) and is controlling a UITableViewController whose controlled UITableView's rows have either a white or black background. If a UIToolbar is present, its barStyle is also UIBarStyleBlackOpaque. I think most people understood that, but I still prefer to be explicit.

Wow, that feels great to type all those UI* prefixes in public–I encourage everyone to do so!

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