CocoaCoderBlog

I found out Saturday that Anthony Sloan, an old friend from my U. Texas Sailing Club days with whom I had lost touch, had passed away in his sleep on Wednesday night at the age of 37 of an enlarged heart.

I can almost remember the first and last time I saw Anthony. When I first met him, he was the skinny, lanky guy who was always cheerful. When he found out I had taken a liking to Scotch, he would joke about it while making salient points about the good and bad of Scottish Fire Water. The last time I saw him, I had just driven in from West Texas, heard there was a party at the Sloans, and drove over. Anthony kidded me as always. I never saw that guy in a bad mood. He was fun.

Everyone was notified yesterday that his family is not going to have a funeral or other ceremony in Anthony’s honor, though some friends in the local mountain biking community are going to have a ride in his honor this Friday.

Given the chance, I think all of us who knew him would have deeply appreciated the chance to meet each other, to meet Anthony’s family, to honor him before them and to say good-bye to Anthony together. I write that as a person who has buried a loved-one. May you rest in peace, Anthony.

cocoacoder Friends

A long time ago, I worked on Mac OS X application that downloded data from an online source in ASCII form. To parse that data into my class, let’s call it “Worlds”, I used NSScanner. It worked great since the data I was parsing was of a known format, was always in text, and was only changed at the source. Ahhh…life was simple in those days.

No more! These days, data has to move across a network, be readable in different locals, be platform agnostic, and be storable on a cloud. Whither NSScanner and the trusty ASCII text file? Is NSCoding the only way I should play with data for my objects?

Maybe.

Certain data, such as data of known formats or that should be viewable even if a computer user doesn’t have an XML reader to decipher a plist, never mind if it’s a binary plist, can still be a full partner in the net-cloud-centric world. The use is key.

I am faced with three choices presently. I could download the data, store it, and send it across the net as a humble text file. I could also download the text data, parse it with NSScanner, and then encode (serialize) the data using NSCoding. Lastly, I could parse the text data with NSScanner and then write it back in using CoreData.

Choices, choices, choices…

Still not sure what I’m going to do.

cocoacoder Uncategorized cocoa iphone cocoa touch nsscanner nscoding

NYTimes blog post on Gadgetwise on Blu-ray titled, “Rethinking Blu-ray” about Blu-ray picking-up but still asking if it will go the way of the Do Do bird. Really, this was a puff-piece by Eric Taub to help Blu-ray, which he apparently really likes.

Here’s my take… Read more…

cocoacoder Consumer

In what is now considered by all to be a vain attempt at being pithy, I wrote the following on the iPhoneDevCampAustin.org site,

The Advanced track will continue to work on its GameShow app–or if they like, some other app. A good way to tell if you should consider the Advanced track is if you know why

@property (nonatomic, assign) UILabel *myLabel;

is not the correct property attribute. And if you don’t know it, but want to find out the difference between “assign” and “retain”, and what all of this means, then you should be in this track.

Instead, what this post did was create a great, albeit academic, discussion on @property attributes and their meaning in the world of iPhone and Mac development. Read more…

cocoacoder Code

iPhone innovation in Austin is moving fast enough that a once or twice yearly iPhoneDevCamp has not been enough to meet the needs of local developers, so, after much begging, Andrew Donoho, the originator of iPhoneDevCamp-Austin, is having a mini-iPhoneDevCamp today. And CocoaCoder.org is helping to sponsor this event. And 22 of our members have signed-up to attend, making this event larger than the iPhoneDevCamp-Austin in July. What that means for the iPhoneDevCamp-Austin in March is only good.

Today’s event is at Austin’s first co-working entity, Conjuctured, which is located at 1309 East 7th Street. Coding sessions start at 1 PM and roll until 5 PM. There are beginner and advanced sessions for iPhone application development. We also have Sherry Lowry, an excellent start-up consultant, talking about how to start a company and keep it well run. To cap the day, at 5:30 PM is drinks and dinner at Nuevo León, a good TexMex restaurant just a block and a half from Conjunctured.

Lastly, I will be updating this blog to WordPress 2.7 tomorrow. Yes, yes, I’m excited too.

cocoacoder Code, Community

I’m a mere mortal. I am unable to divine things such as whether a particular View in a Xib should be set to the corresponding Controller class when the Nib for the View has already been set.

But after my Demo at last Thursday’s CocoaCoder meeting blew up, and it took 5 experienced programmers 15-20 minutes to figure out that the problem was that the Class Identity Attribute of the View was not properly set, I know one thing. It will be a very cold day in Hell before I make that mistake again.

Setting the Controller class in the Class Identity seems to be necessary only when there are methods that need to be accessed from that Controller class in that View…ummm…now that I write that, that seems to be a sort of, “Duh!!!” point. Otherwise, in the View, just set the Nib (Xib) in the View Controller Attributes, and you should be good to go.

Back to basics.

But, you know, Apple could make things a bit more Drunk Monkey Simple. For example, why not have pop-up windows, little hints, as to what a particular controller does and how actually to work with different controllers together? Interface Builder is a bear. Yes, if I learn it well, it will make my future efforts go much faster while making updating the UI of existing apps much easier. It’s just that the ramp-up time is long and torturous. iPhone Bootcamp is next week. Really psyched!

cocoacoder Code

12 months ago, I had the pleasure of taking Big Nerd Ranch’s OpenGL Bootcamp. It was a great deal of fun as much as it was educational. What I learned in 5 days allowed me to blast forward on a software project that had interested me for years. Unfortunately, the Presidential campaign season intervened for 11 month, so I never finished my project. But I’ve been poking on it since the General Election, so who knows.

But during the time of my on-again-off-again relationship with the McCain campaign, Apple announced the iPhone SDK and a revolution was created. iPhone development has exploded since that day in early 2008 when Steve Jobs made the announcement that after the iPhone OS 2.0 update, iPhone users would be able to purchase and download wirelessly applications for their iPhone. Since late June 2008, Apple’s AppStore has sold over 6 million iPhone apps. That’s a lot of apps. I have to admit that during my down-times with the campaign I began trying to bone-up on iPhone development. But it was tough to make much progress. If you’ve ever worked for, or hopefully get the chance to work for, a Presidential campaign, you’ll understand why I didn’t make much progress. Others did, and that was fine.

But on top of wanting to be an iPhone application developer, I am the organizer, for lack of a better title, for CoocaCoder.org, a Cocoa development group in Austin, Texas. Not being a capable and proficient iPhone programmer in a group consisting of programmers working on Mac and iPhone apps has been a problem, at least for me. There is a lot of Cocoa talent in Austin, Texas, but to promote CocoaCoder to programmers, it would be helpful if the founder of CocoaCoder (me) was cranking out iPhone and Mac apps at least on an occasional basis.

After our candidates defeat, I took a few weeks off to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of the year, 5 years, decade and…well, who knows. While working on that, I came up with some fun application ideas and decided that, since I think of most problems having a software/hardware solution, I should get back into application work. But the really hot market is the iPhone, which I’m not that proficient in.

Now, I could work myself into a lather trying to teach myself iPhone programming with the few books, the Apple developer resources, which nicely don’t demo how to use Interface Building in making any iPhone apps, and working the discussion boards. Very high crap-to-effort ratio. Or, I could pony-up my $3,500 for another Big Nerd Ranch Bootcamp. Being at a BNR Bootcamp is like being in the Matrix and learning to fly the helicopter in 10 seconds, or in 5 days in this case. You walk-in an idiot and you walk-out a savant.

So, back to the Big Nerd Ranch for their iPhone Bootcamp. I can’t wait!!!

cocoacoder Code

Is Apple scared of RIM? | The Digital Home - CNET News

Note to CNet: Don Reisinger does not know what he is writing about.

How do I know this?

Because iPhone/iPod Touch OS 2.2 has been in the works since last summer and is merely a refinement on iPhone OS 2.0. There may be more refinement on iPhone OS 2.0 to come, none of which is because Jobs, Fadell, or Forstall are loosing sleep over RIM’s plans, esp. if the Storm is their answer to the iPhone. Clickable display? Nuts!

But, to Reisinger’s point, how will Apple respond to RIM and other competitors? Read more…

cocoacoder Apple

Holy mackrel! Update your iPhone to 2.2 and then check out Google Map. OK, so Street View is great, where it does exist. What’s really cool is the new features in the Directions menu.

I live in Austin, Texas (Keep Austin Weird!) and, like most Austinites, I live in my car. To get around town any other way isn’t really practical. Oh, I’ve tried biking, but didn’t want to give my life in the service of lowering my gasoline bill or carbon footprint like I’ve nearly done on West 5th and 6th Street on more than one occasion.

And then of course, there’s public transit. In Texas, even in Austin, public transit is not…, let’s just leave it with the word popular. And Capitol Metro has not made things better through superb customer outreach. For example, Cap Metro has not yet been nice enough to build an iPhone app that shows routes and times, so taking public transportation is a non-starter since I don’t know the times when Bus A’s drops me off and Bus B picks me up. Or was it Bus D that I needed? Wait! I need Bus E to get to…and so on. And then, it would really rock if all the buses had some form of WiFi, but I digress. So, back to why public transportation has not been an option for me–lack of route & time info.

Until now.

Grab you’re newly updated iPhone, start Google Map, go to Directions in your town that has public trans, and notice there are new buttons in the Menu bar with icons for Car, Bus, or Walking.

Very, very cool.

And under the public transportation button, there is a route and schedule available for where you are trying to go to.

How cool is that?

cocoacoder Apple, iPhone

Over at Silicon Alley Insider, there’s a post about the coming Google Android phone. It certainly looks like something Google would cook up. I’m just guessing that Google helped design this since it’s ugly and Google’s interface designs so far are ugly, since ugly begets ugly, I’m thinking. Look at the sketches and you see a thick thing that is 4 mm thicker than the iPhone. Is that really a Android that’s bulging in your pocket? And you gotta love the usability. To type a message, so you shift up the display and rotate 90° counter clock-wise and merrily type away. Oh, but last night’s hot date just called, so now you slide the display back down and pivot again. But that took too long and you just blew her off. Brilliant!

Apple’s secret? Make it thin, make it elegant, make it beautiful. Instead, they have made a phone that is thick, cluttered, and ugly. Yes, Jobs is shaking with worry…paleese. Why can’t Google do good interface/usability?

cocoacoder Apple