The Mac developer community is one of the best communities around. Unfortunately most of the major conferences for Mac developers are in the US. This means that on top of the conference ticket and accommodation, those of us in Europe have to also afford a transatlantic flight (as well as get over the jet lag). Enter MacDev 2009.

MacDev is being organised by Steve Scott and Tim Isted from the Mac Developer Network and is a Mac developer conference based in the UK being held on the 16th-17th of April. It has a brilliant line up, including Fraser Spiers, Bill Dudney, Matt Gemmell, Mike Lee and many more, covering areas as diverse as UI design, CoreAnimation, F-Script, CoreData, Performance and Application Security.

On top of this there will be a live recording of the Mac Developer Roundtable podcast (which is a great podcast which I recommend all developers should listen to) as well as a conference dinner. All this starts at £399 (+ VAT) for the 2 day conference and includes your meals and accommodation. Don't forget, you're getting, lunch and dinner the Thursday and breakfast and lunch the Friday as well as overnight accommodation. With all this included the price is a bargain, but is only this cheap until the end of January, after which it goes up to £499 (+ VAT).

And if the conference alone isn't enough, there is also a set of workshops on the Wednesday and include UI design with Mike Lee, Core Data with Marcus Zarra and iPhone Development with Bill Dudney. These guys literally wrote the books on these subjects. These workshops cost just £185 (+VAT) for the workshop, lunch, dinner and Wednesday night accommodation.

I strongly urge any and all Mac devs in Europe to sign up for this. It will truly be a great event and provide a brilliant opportunity for Mac devs on this side of the pond to get together in big numbers. And if that isn't a good enough reason to go, I'll be there! So go book now and get your early booking discount.

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Code Collector Pro 1.3.2 is now ready for your consumption. It offers context menus for snippets, a whole host of bug fixes and best of all, a brand new icon. My thanks to Louis Harboe for working on this, it has turned out great.

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Earlier today I sent out the January edition of the M Cubed Newsletter. In it I detailed what to expect from M Cubed in 2009. As not everyone is subscribed to the newsletter I thought I'd reproduce it here.

Code Collector Pro's 2009

Code Collector Pro 1.3.2 will be the first update to be released this year and I'm hoping to have it out in about 2 weeks. For the most part it's just a collection of bug fixes, but it will be a significant release as it will feature a brand new icon.

The next major release of CCP will be version 1.4. Unfortunately this won't appear until much later this year (possibly around summer). I won't get into what it will involve in too much detail as it could change, but the aim will be to make moving your snippets around a lot easier. It will also coincide with a major update to codecollector.net which has unfortunately been languishing a bit as other projects have got in the way.

I will hopefully be finishing the year off with version 1.5 which I'm hoping to use to build in a lot of scriptability support and also prepare for version 2.0.

Lighthouse Keeper's 2009

Lighthouse Keeper 1.1 will be the first major update to an app this year. It will focus on providing better feedback to what LHK is doing, improving tag support and adding support for adding, editing and deleting projects. I'm hoping to have this finished before the end of January so keep an eye out for update notifications.

I am also hoping to get version 1.2 and 1.3 out this year. I haven't yet set a timeframe for these versions, nor finalised what they will contain, but their aim will be to provide more power that is only possible in a desktop app to make using Lighthouse even easier.

Time permitting there may also be a version of Lighthouse Keeper released for the iPhone this year. It's still in the very early planning stages and is very much a side project at this point but I would like to try and get it out by the end of the year.

Minim's 2009

Minim has been feeling a bit neglected for quite a while. 2009 will change that with the release of version 2.0. Minim 1.x has always been a bit of a mish mash of various technologies with no real focus to the application. Minim 2.0 will almost be a brand new application, built with all the latest technologies and all of the experience I've gained over the past few years to make it into what it should be: the best tool for musicians to organise their songs and ideas.

Minim 2.0 will feature a completely redesigned interface to make organising and managing your songs much easier. It will also have many new features to help you get ideas down. The idea bin will be a place where you can store bits of ideas that aren't yet complete but could be useful in the future. These could be interesting melodies, lyrical ideas, chord progressions etc. To add to this, Minim will feature a quick record feature that will let you start recording audio into Minim with the click of a button, which is great for those times when you get an idea into your head you don't want to lose.

I'm also wanting to get Minim 2.1 out this year. I haven't finalised what it will contain but it will feature integration with a new application I'm writing this year....

Project X's 2009

2009 will feature M Cubed's 4th application. I'm going to refer to it as Project X for now as the name isn't quite finalised yet. There will be much more information coming out over the coming months about what it is, but it will be of interest to the following groups of people:

• Authors
• Bloggers
• Directors
• Music Producers
• Composers
• Presenters
• Musicians
• Designers
• Developers
• Theatre Producers

... and basically anyone doing anything vaguely creative. I'm hoping to have 1.0 out by summer and a private beta out by sometime this spring so keep an eye out.

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