I work, live, and play in technology. My job today is in technology – doing software to run software (a bit cyclical, yes) - operations, in short. Almost everyone surrounding me at work is technical, smart, detailed, and very, very into computing and what it can do. To be honest, I’m mostly surrounded at work by people who happily use and understand Windows as a common operating system.
They’ve all been buzzing about the iPad. Shit, anyone in technology has been buzzing about it. Microsoft and HP (or laptop/tablet vendor of choice) had a decade to break this code and didn’t manage it. I’ve been hearing almost exclusively around why Apple fucked up, blew it, and why the Kindle and netbooks will continue to rule the roost. I won’t even go near the whole “Flash thing”.
I think they’re all dead fuckin’ wrong. Pardon the vuglarity, or not, as you please. It’s needed on this one. The iPad is a sign post. A marker of where we’re heading, and a sign of the change to come. I saw the preso, reading a few IRC channels and frantically refreshing web pages – and my thought was “Holy shit! I’m seeing something just like the first copy of NCSA Mosaic running on a Mac. This is going to change the world…”
And I found that I was completely unable to articulate this in any way that I could present to my coworkers. I didn’t bother demanding they listen, or that I was right, or any of that nonsense. I see it coming – they will too, eventually. In the past day or two, however, some very articulate fellows have done an amazing job putting down into text what I couldn’t. If you haven’t read these – do.
Thanks gents – I appreciate the words and thoughts – especially since I couldn’t seem to articulate them.
Looking through a set of podcasts I haven’t listened to yet, I noticed that Matt Drance is up on IT Conversations. The show notes report that it’s a general mish-mash of topics – all around Cocoa programming.
I’ll definitely have to check this one out this coming week on the commute into work.
Acorn 2.0 has been released – and be aware, it is Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) only! You can get a whole slew of details on Gus’ blog post about the 2.0 release of Acorn.
I’ve been impatiently awaiting this day for a while. I promised Gus I wouldn’t talk about features or the code or whatever while it was in beta, but now it’s out! The handy little feature that Gus posted (Command-Shift-6) a little while back has been my virtual life saver while making screen shots for classes. The new feature (my favorite, clearly) not only makes a snapshot but brings ALL the windows on your system in as layers in an Acorn document.
You can navigate down a great little hierarchy to find the one you can, select and copy the layer, and then paste directly into Keynote. Getting “just the right” shot is a hell of lot easier now: no trimming or dealing with that shadow effect (a real PITA for screenshots), you don’t have to worry about what background you have on your desktop, and even the windows of a given application are nicely sorted out into their own layers. You can merge them back together, or just grab the specific window you need (Hello Interface Builder!).
If you’re doing anything with screenshots on the Macintosh – get this program now! The minor cost will get paid back time on the first project you do with it.
Rand’s post from last week was pretty darn interesting. For me, “your people” are the regulars from Seattle Xcoders.
The bullet points really define it well. Just go read Rand’s post. Heh – and his blog, if you don’t already.
My favorite feature of Acorn is listed on Gus’ blog today. It’s completely changed how I’m doing screenshots for classes and instructions.
class-dump 3.3 is now available:
A new version of class-dump is now available. You can download it from the links on the class-dump project page. It is built for Mac OS X 10.5 or later.
Version 3.3 adds support for Snow Leopard, improves property handling, improves structure/union handling, fixes a bunch of bugs (including two crashers), and no doubt adds some new bugs.
(Via Steve Nygard’s Weblog.)
About a year ago, when the iPhone 3G came out, I had that conversation with Karen – “Do you want to upgrade?”. We knew we wanted to get her an iPhone… so how to arrange it. I was betting then that there’d be another upgrade this summer (June), so we got her a 3G and I waited. Yesterday, after the lines had died down and initial flurry was over, I went and purchased an iPhone 3GS to replace my original, bought-the-first-day iPhone.
(Yeah, I’ve been playing with it pretty solidly – what’d you expect?)
So my impressions a day later?
- It is noticeably faster. I upgraded my first gen phone to iPhone OS 3.0 and it was a bit pokey in places. Particularly the email and the first unlock screen. Seemed like it always paused on the unlock, which really screwed up my patterns of using the phone for a while. With the 3GS, the email is really quick – much more like whipping through email on a desktop machine, and there is zero pause in the unlock panel.
- That video thing is cool. Had to try it out – so I went outside and captured a bit of video with a honeybee in our front yard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scMgmByu97c. The sharing from the phone right into YouTube was really nice too. I’m not much of a YouTube user, but I can see where I might start using a lot more. Never thought I’d want a camera on my phone either… I’m looking forward to the moment when I get the facebook video upload integration too – that’s where I’m thinking I’ll share most of the videos to be honest.
- Speaking of cameras, the new one is a LOT better. The light balance is greatly improved, and while it was interesting to work the original iphone camera around to avoid that terrible white-light bloom problem, it was a pain. The new camera makes that really easy.
There’s a lot more that I’m sure I’m missing from the phone as yet – things I’ll learn from watching Brad do some crazy ass thing with his phone at the Luau some thursday night, and then I’ll be all over him asking “Awright you – how’d ya do that”. Apple even sent me a nice email today saying “Thanks for buying a new iPhone, here’s some cool things you can do with it”. That’s pretty cool outreach.
So I’m happy with, and very glad I waited for the upgrade. I do wonder what’ll come out next year….
Oh yeah – all iPhone this time. I’ve been a bit incommunicado of late – just darned busy. Spending a bit of weekend time teaching iPhone for OReilly, which has been interesting as well as rewarding. This past weekend was at Loyola in Chicago with 9 students – again a whole different kind of crowd from the folks I taught in either San Francisco or here in Seattle.
While I’ve been working on this coursework, Beth has been learning about iPhone development, sometimes helping at the classes and other times working on her own. It’s been really interesting to see the responses to her emails on the cocoa-dev mailing list. Some incredibly good help, a few jerks and their responses.
Beth’s made a screen cast talking about one of her challenges: doing the Interface Builder work to put together a TabBarController and a NavController. A common enough pattern for utility iPhone applications, and one that isn’t easy to explain or see when it comes to Interface Builder.
I think getting people used to using Interface Builder, including learning how to debug it and what happens when you make mistakes, is one of the biggest bonus’ of the in-person class. There’s a huge amount to that tool that just isn’t obvious until you see someone do it.
Heh – it’d be nice if the refactoring tools in Xcode would understand when you’d renamed an outlet too. That’s an interesting error for a newbie to run into. All of a sudden they’re going “Hey, what’s the key value coding thing and what did I do to make an undefined key?!?!”.
Anyway, check out Beth’s screencast if you’re interested in iPhone development. It’s well done.
Kris Markel let me know today via Twitter that Seattle Bus made Todd Bishop’s Top 5 list of iPhone apps. A very nice to thing to hear indeed!
It’s especially nice news coming back from WWDC where my good friends at Rogue Sheep won the Apple Design Award for .
For the past several months, I’ve been coding away madly for a new iPhone application – a course to teach other folks the basics of programming on the iPhone. I’m developing the course for OReilly Media and will be teaching at least the first few iterations of it – probably more.
My first course is now available for signup if you’re interested:
http://youriphoneapp.eventbrite.com/. It’s a two day course – April 25th and 26th, from 8am to 5pm.
UPDATE:
If you’re interested in attending this beta course, use the discount code “iphonedev” when signing up – that should give you $900 off, reducing the cost of the beta session to $300.
We were going to try and provide the first course at no-cost to attendees in return for feedback, but the realities of today’s economic situation mean that we’ve got to cover at least the basic costs for this one. I’m really jazzed about getting this out there – I’ve been working for quite a while to make this as absolutely stellar as I can manage!
