Vacations reading hijacked!

From the very moment I saw that the paperback edition of the latest Dune universe novel was out (while purchasing Aaron Hillegass' book), I knew that there was no way I would take advantage of my vacations to read more about Cocoa. What can I said, I'm a sucker for Dune novels ... Over the years, I have come to appreciate many of the books authored by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, even if some, like Sandworms of Dune, feel a little weak (to be honest, I also found some of the original Dune novels to be also not that great ...). Anyhow, I finished it yesterday so hopefully I can resume climbing the learning curve ... I just hope I didn't lose too much *:o)

Raiders of the Lost Creativity

I have been struggling some lately with my attempt to convert myself as an indie developer on the Mac/iPhone platform. The problem that I face isn't technical (e.g learning Cocoa) but rather psychological ... Dude, where's my creativity? In my previous experiences (Newton, BeOS, QNX), I always had a very clear goals in mind when starting up, even if (in retrospect) they didn't turn out to been successful ... (but that's another story). This time around, I found my-self very excited by the platform ... but without any concrete idea of what the heck to do ... Meanwhile, the iTunes app store is filling up with some great pieces (and some crappies one apparently) of software (like Intua's BeatMaker), and I can't help feeling like I'm missing the boat or something ... :-\ Anyhow, I'm still committed albeit not overly motivated. I dropped tonight at my locale Chapters and grabbed the 3rd edition of Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. For once, they had it in stock. I actually also have (I should said had, since it's now in the recycling bin) the 1st edition, which have been collecting dust on my bookshelf for the past 5 years (it's so out of sync with the current version of Cocoa that it's not usable). Since I'm on holiday all next week, I'll try to set some time away from all the fun to read it and who knows maybe get some inspiration. In any case, if you've reading this and got some ideas ... let's get in touch 8-)

iPhone : D+3

Well it's out, and in force, according to Apple which apparently got over 1 million activations over the week-end ... Wow, that's huge! However, the downloads from the Application store is actually even more impressive (10 Millions) and include not just the iPhone users but also the iPod touch users ... I was kind of hoping that the launch will be a flop in Canada, thanks to Rogers, but it seems like it wasn't the case since they said that they are sold-out. That been said, since it was said that Apple reduced the amount of iPhone they sent to Canada, they could be indeed sold-out very quickly :-D ... Anyway, I had to opportunity to check out a little bit the 3G Sunday at my local mall and yes, it looks very nice and tempting ...

iPhone : D-2

Yep, only 48 hours away from the release of the iPhone 3G, and selfishly I don't really care since we won't be getting one, thanks to Rogers ultra-mega over-priced plan. Fact is that we don't really need a cell phone. We've been doing alright without one for the past 5-6 years, so there isn't much reason for us to get one ... except an iPhone at a decent price & plan, maybe? ...

What is more exciting, is the release of the iPhone/iTouch OS 2.0, and more specifically of the Application Store where one day (if I can get pass that reading documents stage I am in) I'll have some software released. Speaking of software and iPhone, the folks from touchArcade.com have put together an interesting article on the iPhone architecture, which is worth reading IMHO. If you are into gaming (even a little), it's a good idea to bookmark that site since they feature a lot of preview (with video) of games to come, as well as already available games for the jailbroken devices.

While I'm at it (giving links), I should mention that Wil Shipley have posted a new blog entry on his latest debugging adventures, and that if you are looking for Cocoa/Objective-C oriented blogs, you should look no further than Cocoa Blogs ... oh and keep reading this blog ;-)

Sunday procrastinating ...

YouTube is great when you feel like procrastinating ... it has so much contents that you can spend hours looking for (and at) videos on a subject that interest you, without feeling too guilty about how you should have been reading that Cocoa document instead ... For example Sunday, I found a video made by NeXT in 1992, which shows the advantage of NeXTSTEP over Sun. The competition is centered on 2 programmers building a business application from the exact same specs, one using NeXT solutions the other the Sun equivalent. Does it look rigged? Well no ... but the requirements sounds a lot like they were selected to showcase the capabilities of NeXTSTEP ... which isn't that un-fair for Sun since it all made sense in the context of the application. Needless to said, NeXT came out as the clear winner with the shortest development time and the most features completed. In fact, the developer had so much extra time that he implemented things that were not asked for, while the Sun based implementation was not even completed ... :-)

Here's the two parts of the video, for you viewing pleasure:

It's interesting to think that 16 years after, developers still use the same tools to build applications for Macs ... Now, I'm still not fully convince (yet) that using Interface Builder is the way to go. I like my UI done programmatically you see ...

YouTube night ...

Last night I stumbled on an interesting series of videos from the Computer History Museum, and watched the one featuring several of the key persons at Pixar including The Incredibles' director Bard Bird. Quite the interesting (and long by YouTube standards) talk. I don't think I caught the moderator's name but since he was talking about his book to be released "soon", at first I was thinking that it could be David Price (The Pixar touch) ... but then that book just got released, so since the video was recorded in 2005 that couldn't be. And it turns out that it was Michael Rubin, author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution ... Anyhow, that computer museum have a lot of good stuff on their web site, including (but not limited to) some old brochures downloadable in PDF format :-)

While on YouTube, I also found this funny video on Steve Jobs favorites expressions:

Pretty cool, uh? ;-)

Happy Cocoa Day! ... err Canada day ...

Not since my early days as a Symbian developer, have I spent so many days just reading documents without doing much coding. Since today is an holiday in Canada, I'm sizing the opportunity to finish reading Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa, and then hopefully start reading the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide. Early last week, I had finished reading the Objective-C 2.0 document from Apple, which (big surprise) is based on the original NeXT document I had read before, so yeah you can save yourself sometime by skipping that old document ... 9_9 Since I'm going over the memory management rules in use for Cocoa programming, I now realize (with some embarrassment) that my mistake with the exception from a couple of blog entries ago, was due to my ignorance of the common rule that a convenience constructor (such as +exceptionWith...) must autorelease the object that it creates.

Rogers have announced last week the pricing of the plans to go with the iPhone 3G in Canada. We were going to get an iPhone 3G (for my wife), but since, this is definitely way over-priced, we simply won't as she doesn't really need a cell phone. It's nice that the phone by it-self is much cheaper than a year ago, but the total cost of ownership is insane ... too bad for Rogers & Apple, since it looks like lots of people won't get it for the same reason.

We went to see Wall-E last night and really enjoyed it. I don't think it's the best ever Pixar movie in my book, but it is definitely a good one. The usual short movie, Presto, that is shown before the main attraction is most excellent :-) After the show, we were wondering what is the next movie to be released next year, and I though it will be Toy Story 3, but it turns out that it's one called Up ... and yes, there was no trailer for this up-coming movie before Wall-E :-(

Last but not least, Scott Stevenson has recently posted an article on Thinking like a Cocoa programmer, which is a good read for all Cocoa wannabee like myself :-)