Late Night Cocoa - CA Podcast Online
Scotty of Late Night Cocoa podcast was kind enough to have me on. His interview of me is online here.
We talked about a ton of stuff but mostly Core Animation.
Permalink Add A CommentHe's dead Jim!
Just checked in the last errata pass, last chapter, last verse. It's finito. I still have the iPhone chapter to do but i'm going to take a breather for a few days and get in some very nice spring skiing at Breck.
Permalink 3 Comments - Add YoursMaking Sausage er um a Book
Making a book is always a huge undertaking. The reviewers really help make the book, helping the author notice where a faulty assumption is made or some such. I have been very fortunate to have a great set of reviewers for my Core Animation book. I wanted to say a special thanks though to Chris Adamson for really digging into the QuickTime capture layer code and helping me make the best example possible.
Thanks Chris!
Permalink Add A CommentPrag Prog Podcast
I seem to be podcasting a bunch lately, which is really fun.
The latest entry into that is here.
Permalink 1 Comment - Add YoursBrainwashed into acting ordinary?
I just found this on Seth Godin's blog. If you have not read it you should (both this entry and his blog in general).
So many people don't get it. Do something, do your best, put it out there, get criticized, suck it up, do better, don't give up. As Churchill said 'Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts'. This is one of my favorite things about the mac indie community. People dare great things.
WWDC 2007 I went to the indie talk that Scott Stevenson put together and blogged about it here. It was packed with people daring great things.
Going back to Seth's post, he says have a great project, a blog, a reputation whatever. He is talking about daring great things, risking something, going public. This as much a reminder to me as it is a pleading with others. Dare great things. Go for it, just do it. If you don't ever step out on a limb and risk then you will not ever achieve great things.
If you have not watched this;
You should.
Make something outstanding, stop acting ordinary.
Permalink Add A CommentMac Developer Round Table
Scotty was kind enough to have me on the Mac Developer Roundtable tonight. If you are interested in WWDC or iPhone SDK please have a listen. It was tons of fun! Thanks again Scotty!
Permalink Add A CommentNew Beta Release
Well on the way to being done a new beta of the book has just been pushed. Everyone who has bought the book (thanks, BTW!) you can grab an updated copy on your account page here. For everyone else you can grab a copy here.
I'm hard at work on the last chapter covering what is different in the newly announced SDK and the existing CA stuff on Leopard. Can't say more but you should check out the announcement.
Permalink 6 Comments - Add YoursNew iPhone Game - iScramble
My wife just released her 5th iPhone game here. Its a word scramble game that has several different themes and really nice pics in the background. Some of them might take a while to load over Edge (where is 3G anyway?:). If anything is particularly bad please let us know.
Permalink Add A CommentJava On iPhone...
So I read the news that Sun was going to put Java on the iPhone and thought, great!
What I'd really rather see though is Sun put the engineering resources behind putting Java 6 on the Mac and take that responsibility off Apple's plate. Apple is slow to get Java out the door and honestly as a long time Java guy on the Mac I don't really care that Swing looks 'like a mac' on the Mac. Sun could just port the 'native' Swing look and feel (on top of Carbon or Cocoa which ever is easier) and call it a day. Very few Java apps are visual anyway, in my experience it is primarily used to build web sites not fat clients.
I know most Cocoa/Mac programmers don't really care about Java anyway but over the years Mac's have become ubiquitous at Java conferences and I'd hate to see Mac loose the geek chic that its won in the hearts and minds of the Java crowd because there is no Java 6. So anyway here is my small voice saying get the JDK on the Mac and then we can worry about Java on the iPhone.
Permalink 3 Comments - Add YoursiPhone Apps
I am totally excited about the iPhone Roadmap. The 'enterprise' level features will get the iPhone in more people's hands in more businesses. More halo effect here we come. I could see this even being part of a push to get Mac's into the enterprise as a unix box that 'just works'. Despite the general lameness of the corp environment selling Macs is good for Apple and good for us so I for one am all over the concept of the 'enterprise mac'. I started my professional software life building custom IT software on NeXTStep on the first round of slabs and that was none too shabby of a gig...
On the other hand, enterprise mac thoughts are not the really exciting thing for me. I am really pumped about the SDK and the fact that Core Animation is there. From looking at the iPhone its kind of obvious that CA is a big part of the UI but its great to see that the API is exposed in the SDK. At about 25:30 in the keynote Scott Forestall says 'we built it in may ways for the iPhone' and 'almost every animation you see on the iPhone is built on top of CA'. That is great news! When you learn CA you will be able to transfer that knowledge straight into building iPhone Apps. There is of course a lot of detail (and I can't talk about it cause of the NDA, sigh...)
Apple doing the App Store as a distribution system is going to be a game changer. We no longer have to worry about hosting, payment infrastructure etc etc. The fact that it costs 30% is cheap IMO having had to deal with a sudden uptick in my bandwidth and server requirements. Jens Alfke has an interesting post about doing apps for 99 cents. That is an impulse buy point for sure. I'm not sure that I'd want to build something useful and sell it for 99 cents though. Sure in 2 days you could crank out a simple app that does one thing, but I don't think it could be made to do it well in 2 days. There are all those pesky power and low memory considerations among others that make building for the iPhone different enough from what we are used to... In any event 99 cents or $5.99 the App Store is going to be a whole new world.
I for one can't wait...
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