I’ve still got an original Apple Airport Graphite in the basement, serving up 802.11b goodness for house. Only it’s starting to not serve up so much goodness. I’ve carefully checked against the neighbor’s wifi - and we’re on different channels, but the WIFI is dropping out around the house periodically, only to come back on in a few minutes.
At first I thought it was the latest upgrade to Leopard (10.5.3), but I’m quite sure it’s not now - as other OS’s (Win XP and my 10.4 desktop) are seeing the same issues. I did the usual routine of power-cycling the unit to see if that would help - nope, to no avail.
I even tried to hook up to it with Apple’s airport utility but the unit is so old that the current utilities won’t even recognize it. I didn’t realize that the device was released in 1999 until I looked it up. The particular device has been in operation for 9 1/2 years now. I had it before coming to Seattle - bought it with an original tangerine iBook. (I still have that iBook - still works too). 10 years for a wireless base station - not too shabby.
I think this frustrating intermittent lack of connectivity is a sign. That and I’ve been wanting 802.11n connectivity for a while anyway. I’m leaning towards investing in a Time Capsule - which combines a backup disk that works with Leopard’s time machine as well as the full airport connectivity setup. The vast majority of the network connections in the house are all wireless - we need something that’s stable if I’m going to avoid running a huge amount of random Cat5E cabling through the house. And on this house, I really really want to avoid doing that. We have plaster and lathe walls - incredible pain in the butt the patch once you’ve put a hole in it…
It won’t be this weekend - I’m doing errands and so forth before I head back down to San Francisco for the Velocity conference early part of next week. Probably some time after I get back.
I can’t help but think that this next week is going to be like switching from high octane to diesel mechanics - technically speaking. Or maybe it’s a more appropriate metaphor to say I’m moving from the edge to the core.
I’ve finished up with WWDC 2008, where I spent the week with some incredible developers. Steve Weller has a great set of shots up on SmugMug of these folks. Fraser, Deric, Gus, Blake, Daniel, Brent, and so many more. They all work on or with the folks who make Macintosh desktop (and now iPhone/iPod) software. They tune, tweak, and polish like mad fiends - the quality and time effort involved is just incredible.
I spend a week back in Seattle at home base (I’ve got a few things to nail down and a few others to pick up), and then I’m out again - this time for a shorter period of time - attending the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Where everything at WWDC (for me, anyway) was about programming the devices on the edge, Velocity is all about the engines at the core. The “giant diesels” that keep everything out here on the edge fed with data.
I’m not sure what exactly to expect at Velocity - it’s a fairly new conference setup. I really liked the focus of the conference though - it’s about the “how” in dealing with web performance and scaling for internet operations. It’s something I’ve been involved with for a goodly number of years - the most recent few a bit more on the engineering side of the house. Although I’ve worked far more deeply in both operations and engineering, I tend to migrate to an area somewhere in the middle. Pretty much what my current job is all about. I’m coming away from WWDC with at least two key topics to go back and evangelize to my comrades in Seattle, and I rather expect I’ll be coming back from Velocity with another couple - albeit very different in topic, scope, and audience.
It’s the end of the week and I’m bushed. I suspect there’s a few folks even more “bushed” than me - it’s been an intense week of talking, learning, and “socializing”. I ran across a bunch of folks I’ve seen before, and I think I was introduced to an equally huge number of folks. Hooking up with some other geeks from work was really interesting as well. Sitting around chatting with Michael Johnson about web applications and codecs used in video production may not sound all that interesting, but he’s a funny dude.
The pieces that excited me the most from the conference is the detail that we learned about “Grand Central” and some of the associated componentry within the next release of the OS: Snow Leopard. Outside of the NDA boundary, there’s not a lot of information - but I walked away from the sessions with a deep appreciation for Apple’s forethought and insight into how to not only keep up, but take full advantage of the concurrent/multi-core world that we’re heading into.
Outside of Snow Leopard I spent a huge amount of time focused on the various iPhone technologies and details. The labs and UI review at the conference are amazing wells of technical help that I wish were available more often. Priceless help, to be honest. I’m glad that I spent the time to get myself into a state where I could take advantage of it. I actually walked away this afternoon wishing I’d done more so that I could take even greater advantage of what was available.
In addition to my own work, I saw a lot of fantastic applications that are going to be great to get out into the market. Nobody was committing to a date on the App Store launching, but there was an intense amount of interest on who would have applications ready to roll for launch, with the understanding that it was coming up pretty darn quickly in the future. My own personal bet is July 11th, but I’m not convinced as I think Apple will have their hands full with the new iPhone launch at that time as well. So if not then, shortly thereafter I guess.
And no - I didn’t see any 3G iPhones. I’ll be waiting with the rest of the masses to get my grubby paws on one.
Apple’s definitely getting prepped up this year. The WWDC keynote link on iTunes is available (found at iLounge). I expect that sometime around Monday Noon, that subscription list will include the WWDC keynote and whatever details they’re announcing.
In this morning’s “waiting for the next load of laundry so I’ll check my RSS feeds” reading Mark Bessey wrote about looking forward to WWDC 2008 - this time NOT as an Apple employee. I think the following paragraph best sums up my continuing interest in the OS X platform:
More interesting to me is that Apple has really started to embrace having a single platform that supports multiple kinds of products. I wrote a whole blog post on that subject a while back, but the fact that Apple can now get a microprocessor for $10 or so that’ll run OS X means that they can aggressively move into whatever new kinds of products they want, based on variations of the new iPhone platform. It’s an exciting time to be a developer for Apple’s platform.
OS X on a $10 chip. Granted that’s not typically in the hacker range (look to the Arduino for some fun there), but it definitely reflects a breaking barrier point where the cost of putting in more serious compute to devices is here. I think it’s also clear that we’re seeing the initial serious stabs into a new realm of user interfaces with touch. Voice remains a bit of a dream, but slowly computers are becoming more and more invisible.
With WWDC 2008 right around the corner, I’m mentally already on the plane.
Aside from a few niggling details (like thinking I need to get laundry done tomorrow…) I’m focused on next week. Coordinating with a few folks - exchanging cell #’s, coordinating some times to head to the keynote, and double checking the planning for the social events in the evenings.
While I’ve got a pretty iPhone heavy focus right now, I’m also looking forward to seeing what happens with rumors of Snow Leopard and the next rev of MacOS X. I do hope it’s primarily a performance, tuning release - I really loved the early days of Mac OS X where every release made my machine feel *faster*.
Most importantly, I think I’ve got SeattleBus to the point where I can really get some useful information from the labs. I’ll have it with me on an iPod touch (not that it’ll be that useful in San Francisco). I’ve got some UI components that I’m not happy with, so I’m looking forward to getting some sage advice (from my compadre’s there as well Apple engineers) on how I might want to tweak things up.
I’ll also be hooking up with some fellow Disney employees down there. I’d love to babble more about what they’ve been working on, but that’s quite verbotten, so I’ll have to refrain. It’ll be cool hooking up with them and getting the latest and greatest.
The start of WWDC is nine days away… Some folks say it starts on Monday morning with the keynotes that have, without a doubt, become a marketing splash message time for Apple, but the reality is that it’ll be kicking up on Sunday evening with the inevitable dinner chats and the first of many social nights.
I excited, but also a bit frenetic, for this one. I’ve been working on my iPhone application and now that time is coming closer, I really want to have my application nailed down enough to take advantage of the labs available. I’ll have a copy of everything (including the application) with me, although it won’t do much good in that area since it’s made to be so geographically specific to Seattle.
I did a presentation for the Xcoders group a week or so back laying out the story of getting it developed. I’ll be making parts of that available as a blog post later. It’s a pretty good tale - working through the SDK’s and vagaries of systems failures that you’ve just got to expect with a hybrid application.
Gus has already mentioned something about this (I figure anyone interested in Mac programming that reads this blog has definitely read Gus’)… but Jens released his BLIP code today which looks really, really interesting.
It’s exactly the kind of library I don’t think I’d tend to tackle at all, and for which I’m very grateful that Jens made his implementation available. I don’t have any particular “ooh, ooh… I’ll use it to do…” sorts of ideas, but I’m definitely stashing it away against a future need.
Thanks Jens!
I’ve been working on a couple of applications for the iPhone, both of which are “scratch my itch” sorts of things. One was a simple little nonsense thingy for calculating tips. The second is meant to let me know when the next bus was going to be hitting the stop at which I am waiting.
The bus app has undergone several names, starting with “Where’s the damn bus” and currently residing a “SeattleBus”. I took out the somewhat more profane project and class names when I thought “Hey, maybe I’ll enter this into the Apple Design Awards“. Last thursday, I was thinking “Yeah, maybe…” and after the encouragement from some of the guys figured I’d jump into it this weekend and see what came out.
What came out is a reminder that the first app you write will often be thrown away. After I sat down with the functioning app and showed it to some friends (unfamiliar with iPhone programming) it became pretty clear that while what I had functioned, it wasn’t anywhere near the smooth flow and effect that I think I’d really want to have for something to be submitted to the ADA.
In fact, after a few days to really sleep on it, I’ve redesigned the whole flow of the application - hopefully for the better. I’d had a completely navigation bar driven style of working through the application, and that’s getting completely gutted in favor of a tab-bar setup and a bit more automatic capability in trying to determine what bus stop you’re sitting at when you invoke the app. Turns out the whole “what’s coming next and when will it be here” is the easy part… it’s getting to that information and displaying it efficiently that’s the bitch.
What’s really interesting is most folks that I show this application too instantly want another, completely different application to go with it. An application for route finding - not even necessarily related to busses. I hadn’t quite realized how much of a demand there was for something like that. That application is a bit beyond what I’m interested in making - at this point I want to dive in to recode my bus application with the new flow. Not a chance it’ll get submitted to the ADA - at least not this year.
I am really looking forward to seeing what does get mentioned from the awards for the iPhone. Just four weeks away now…
It’s probably no surprise that there has been a deluge of folks asking “Hey, what’s the best way to learn to program the iPhone”. Since I set up and run the Seattle XCoder’s group, I’ve been getting my fair share of those.
Some folks have traditional programming/CS backgrounds, and it’s easy enough to redirect them to some good resources to learn. It’s the folks that have little or no programming background, but who want to get into the game anyway that I’ve been finding harder to help. Much as we’re a great bunch of folks to ask questions and get tips, Seattle XCoders isn’t a tutorial house.
I’ve had several folks come to me with a programming background in javascript and nothing else. Javascript is clearly the new “BASIC” - probably has been for a while, and I haven’t been paying attention. I actually think that’s really cool on a bunch of different levels, but it makes explaining Objective-C, C, and memory management quite a bit more difficult. For a lot of those folks, I’ve had to punt - not much to help them. I suggest that they get a basic course in C programming and build up from there. I don’t think that’s really doing the whole setup justice, but it’s the best I could wrangle out.
As of yesterday, I might have a new tactic. Uli Kusterer has put up a “Learning C on the Macintosh” tutorial site called Masters of the Void. Uli’s done some really great things in Mac programming, and definitely know’s his stuff. Way better than me, definitely - and quite a bit more in depth than many I’ve run into. That being the case, I’m hoping it translates well into a tutorial on C for the Macintosh. The examples, details, and so forth in the site all point to using Xcode. I don’t know that it takes anyone beyond strict “C” programming, but it’s a hell of a jump start, and freely available.
So if you’re hunting around for a start on programming for the iPhone and you haven’t ever touched C, I’d say start with Masters of the Void and build up from there.
It’s hard to write about what you’ve been doing when most of the time it’s been involved with an SDK from Apple that’s buried under an NDA agreement.
So… I’m not dead - I’ve just been head’s down with coding. I’ve found a few bugs, filed quite a pile (mostly enhancement requests), and have written a pile of toy programs trying out the new pieces and parts available.
The two bugs that top my list are (not surprisingly) duplicates. radr://problem/5789981 is so obvious… a forum for discussing NDA products where developers can share notes on what they’ve got working and what they don’t. It’s surprisingly frustrating to not be sure if you’re just missing something or if there’s an actual issue that others have run into. That’s the original bug number, by the way - not my bug report for this “issue” with the SDK.
The other is a crashing problem with the development environment. radr://problem/5795236 is apparently the master issue - I guess several folks have been talking about this issue on forums and such. It’s annoying, but hey - it’s beta software.
Without getting into specifics, the SDK is clearly got some serious traction and attention. It is a wonderful bit of code made available, and one of the easiest mechanisms I’ve ever experienced for getting code onto a mobile device. Granted my other experience is hacking in linux and related software on to an HP iPAQ handheld at a previous job - it involved an unholy combinations of tftp, very specific network settings, and carefully timed physical buttons presses.
The folks who’ve been working on this project have done an incredible, bang-up job with it. I’m really looking forward to the next steps in the beta program, and the additional pieces and tweaks that come along.
