11
Jun
Checkout is the powerful, easy to use point of sale system for the Mac. Use Checkout to take orders, make sales, print invoices and accept payments. Together with a Mac and the right peripherals, Checkout offers a perfect retail solution.
The greatest privilege of designing a point of sale application is that many of its users will spend several hours a day with your creation. Strangely enough, we never got the impression that most other point of sale software vendors felt about it that way.
Checkout brings point of sale software to the level of ease of use and attention to detail that Mac users have come to expect.
Checkout was internally developed by Sofa and sparked the idea to found our own company. Checkout is now the center-piece of a joint venture between Sofa and MYOB US. This joint venture, named Werck, will continue to develop and support future versions of Checkout.
www.checkoutapp.com
Versions provides a pleasant way to work with Subversion on your Mac. Whether you’re a hardcore SVN user or new to version control systems, Versions will help streamline your workflow. The beta is out now.
Designing front-end software around complex systems like Subversion is tricky. It’s tempting to oversimplify the interface and obscure —rather than clarify— what's going on under the hood. Versions sticks close to the structure of Subversion, while ironing out the learning curve.
The end result is a great collaborative tool that makes versioning accessible to a wider audience, without repelling experienced users.
Versions is the result of a collaboration between Pico and Sofa that started with a request to Sofa from Pico's founder, João Pavão, to create an icon for a Subversion client he was working on.
www.versionsapp.com
Disco is the CD and DVD burning app that anyone can make sense of. With its unique workflow-based design, Disco assists you through every step of the process with a beautiful and animated interface.
Quickly after CD burners became ordinary, disc burning was relegated to the domain of boring and tedious tasks. By combining a clear workflow with a refreshing interface, Disco brings some fun back into burning CDs and DVDs.
Automatic disc spanning, multi-session support, a searchable catalogue of all your burned discs, and other advanced features are at hand but never get in your way.
Disco is a project of Sofa's Jasper Hauser and Austin Sarner. The initial idea for Disco as well as a large amount of Disco’s code and visual elements came to life in the first two Sofa headquarters.
www.discoapp.com
What We Do
Next to making our own products, we help others design and refine theirs. We are specialized in Mac desktop software design (from app icons to entire interfaces) and web design, but we have experience designing for other platforms as well.
With the never-ending evolution of development tools, implementing raw features in products is becoming less and less expensive. As a result, the best way to make a product stand out from it’s competitors is by combining excellent easy of use with an appealing interface. This is where Sofa excels. We enjoy working with large, as well as smaller clients from all over the world, either at their offices, ours, or over the internet.
Although close collaborations over the entire course of a product’s development cycle often yield the best results, we can deliver highly specific services as well. Anything from a mockup to a final product or website, or maybe just as set of graphical elements to be implemented by your own team, we can deliver it acording to your specification. Please contact Hugo van Heuven at for inquiries.
Who We Work for
We enjoy working on projects that excite us, with assignments that let us add significant value to the end-result. Our primary interest goes out to larger projects that let us seriously get to know the product we're working on and the people we work for. Two of our current clients are TomTom and Last.fm.
We have a team of fulltime professionals supplemented with a pool of highly qualified freelancers, that can deliver pixel perfect graphic design, photo realistic 3d design and standards based web design and development. Everyone in our team shares a love for great interaction and stunning visual design, so nothing makes us happier than delivering outstanding work within your deadlines.
Last.fm
Interface elements for the new last.fm website.
Icons: AppZapper
Is your drive full with apps you don't want? Zap em! AppZapper deletes unwanted apps and everything that belongs to them. AppZapper is the brain child of Austin Sarner, a young and skilled developer with great ideas. The AppZapper icon is based on a 3d model, but is hand crafted mainly in Photoshop.
Tom Tom
Project still in progress. Check back soon for updates.
Nike Global
Project still in progress. Check back soon for updates.
Sites: Checkout
Product website for our own product Checkout. Visit at checkoutapp.com
Background
Sofa was founded November 2006, shortly before we were ready to release Checkout 1.0. Since then, our team has doubled in size and we now combine developing our products with providing design services to a select group of customers with great ideas.
For the best possible user experience, designers and engineers need to work closely together, iteratively shaping a product from idea to release. Our biggest passion is to make beautiful things that are pleasant to use. We put this passion into practice by making software for markets that can use a better, user-friendly option. By offering our services to others, we frequently get the privilege to help some of the brightest minds in the industry make their products even better.
In 2007, Sofa and Acclivity LLC (better known as MYOB US) forged a joint venture named Werck, with Checkout 2 as its first product. Werck will continue to develop, market and support Checkout. By letting both of us do what we're best at, Checkout has gained a certain future as a well supported and continuously evolving product.
We are always on the lookout for new ways to learn and to meet like-minded people. Feel free to email any one of us at our first names @madebysofa.com.
People
Koen Bok
Raised by marketeers. Python guru. Photomaker. Office daddy.
Hugo van Heuven
3D dude. Let's get it done. Illustration creator.
Jorn van Dijk
Pixel perfect. Tiny and tidy. Communicator. Music lover.
Dirk Stoop
Detail master. Experience expert. Codifier. Tech lover.
Jasper Hauser
Allergic to ugly. Icon visionary. Scaling expert. Form giver.
Oskar van Eeden
Finance philosopher.
Latest Post
PyObjC and Cocoa
Last night I gave a short presentation on Cocoa development using Python at the CocoaHeads meeting in the San Francisco Apple Store. First of all I’d like to thank Scott Stevenson for putting the event together and inviting me to speak there. It was great to share the stage with a bunch of developers who I respect a lot. And of course thanks to everyone who showed up to listen.
At the end of my talk I said there would be a blog post here with more information about PyObjC and a copy of my slides, this is it. Click here for a copy of the slides.
A short recap: PyObjC is a language bridge between the Objective-C runtime and Python. It allows you to create —and share data with— Objective-C objects from Python code. Even better, it lets you subclass Objective-C classes in Python, basically allowing you to do anything Cocoa-related in Python that you would normally only be able to do using Objective-C.
PyObjC is pre-installed on Leopard and now uses Apple’s BridgeSupport technology. This means that on Leopard, you can use PyObjC with almost all of Apple’s Frameworks out of the box. Additionally, when you want to ship a Leopard app that uses PyObjC, you don’t have to include an entire Python distribution anymore. On Tiger you had to due to issues with the Python build included with the OS.
We initially developed Checkout for Tiger when PyObjC wasn’t supported by Apple yet. There’s a pretty neat article on ADC about that experience.
To learn more about PyObjC, there’s an entire section of Apple’s online documentation that’s dedicated to Ruby and Python programming topics.
You can also find development news and sample code on the PyObjC project website.
Finally, if you have access to last year’s WWDC movies in ADC on iTunes, I highly recommend Bill Bumgarner’s talk on the topic: Session 140 - Developing Cocoa Applications with Python and Ruby.
Archive
04
Jun
First Post
We first decided to start a Sofa blog at least two years ago, but strangely enough there was always something else on our to do lists that seemed more important at the time. Thanks ...
