Professionally I’ve been writing a ton of JavaScript lately, but in my free time I took a detour into the land of Cocoa to develop a tiny little Mac app. It only does one thing, but hopefully it does it well enough to get some use.

Detours is a GUI to manage your Mac’s host lookups. Yes, you can already do this by manually editing /etc/hosts, but I find that method difficult to explain to others, somewhat cumbersome and not very portable. Here’s a shot of Detours in action:

Please give it a try if you’re on a Mac. I’d love some feedback.

Overall I really like developing for the Mac and have a few ideas of apps I might try to get in the upcoming App Store. There are a few pain points for me, but most of them are alleviated by the very exciting MacRuby project.

I’d like to give a huge THANKS to Cody Peterson of Secret Penguin for donating his time & skills to produce the Detours icon & website. To be quite honest, I believe the artwork outshines the app itself. And I’m okay with that :)