I would like to continue improving and adding to TouchCode, but my time is finite and I’m unable to work on it as much as I would like. So when I do work on TouchCode, I appreciate that other people rely on the code and as such I make it a priority to fix bugs before adding new features or components. Other contributors to TouchCode have helped a lot. A lot of bugs and memory leaks have been found and fixed. This is all great. But it is obvious that TouchCode needs more work, it especially needs more unit tests and documentation. To help make time available to improve this I’ve decided to ask TouchCode users for donations via PayPal.

• You do NOT need to donate to use TouchCode (the code is still Open Source under very permissive licenses).
• TouchCode will always remain Open Source. Donations will not change that.
• Donations will be set aside and will allow me to spend more time working on TouchCode – especially the less sexy fun of TouchCode. I will not be using the funds to buy a new MacBook Pro (however tempting that may be).
• Donations will be made with no strings attached. I will not be adding feature X to component Y just because you’ve donated to the project. However if you have an urgent need for something in TouchCode (output support in NSXMLDocument perhaps?) contact me and we can talk.
• No donation too small, no donation too big. Every donation appreciated.

And here’s the PayPal donate button:

TouchMap.mov

While it was really gratifying to be recognised by the judges of the competition, it was even more gratifying to see portions of TouchCode in use by the some of other winning contestants. The Taxi application in particular stood out as a great use-case for TouchJSON and I really expect Taxi to sell like hot cakes when it gets uploaded to the AppStore.

I had a great time talking to other iPhoneDevCamp attendees, some of which wanted to thank me for parts of TouchCode. Other attendees were interested in the project and I relished the chance to tell them all about. Hopefully I’ll be able to add more projects to my “who uses TouchCode” blog post.

So far I’ve added three projects to the repository:

• TouchXML: A Foundation NSXML style API for parsing XML files (based on libxml2)

• TouchSQL: Yet another library for talking to sqlite databases. This is actually old code that I’m bringing up to date for 10.5, the iPhone and objc-2.0

• TouchJSON: My [CocoaJSON] project brought up to date.

I’m trying to add Unit Tests and documentation to all three projects so they’ll be suitable for public consumption.

Tim Burks has also graciously added nu makefiles and unit tests for each project too. Thanks Tim.

Oh and…

Yes I am potentially interested in iPhone related consulting work. jwight@mac.com