reesesWeb

Prior to the release of QuickSilver, I was annoyed with the lack of a Windows "Start Menu" type facility under Mac OS X. I had converted from Windows, and I was used to having a lot of applications ready to launch. I don't like a cluttered Dock, so putting every single application there wasn't an option. Since I was new to the Mac, I was promiscuously trying just about every application that crossed my path, and I needed a more scalable solution.

I wrote this in Objective C, then realised Boehm GC, while a godsend, was just a little too much overhead for me. Not so much computationally, but in terms of configuration management, since ObjC doesn't have GC out of the box. Besides, Objective C is no longer my biggest development strength.

I had heard many good things about the Java-Cocoa bridge from people, most of whom turn out to be dirty liars. Sure, Java-Cocoa is cool and works better than the equivalent on Windows (is there one?), but the lack of documentation is staggering.

That said, I successfully completed development in Java of a simple Cocoa app that adds a menu item to the system task bar, stores and retrieves user preferences (ok, one user preference), and traverses the Mac filesystem and retrieves properties of bound applications. Once past the documentation hurdle, things work pretty well. I actually think it works better than QuickSilver when trying random things in /Applications, for example, on a new machine, or trying to remember all the silly cutesy apps I downloaded, installed, and forgot about.

Grab the disc image, or if you want to see how this was achieved (or just to fix the myriad problems), grab the source.

Oh, and if you couldn't tell -- I made all the icons myself.

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