Which, for me isn’t a big deal at all – I had only signed up for it years ago to try the food.
But I wanted to say – wow, what a great conversation – the lady who called was genuinely happy about me coming, and excited for next week. And she’d happily turn off that flag for me in my account.
A pleasant change from faceless application rejections (of which I have not yet experienced).
I’ve been writing a LOT of code these days.. it’s great actually, I have loads of responsibly and freedom.. and a paycheck, which is good in this depression.
I just ran across this wiki about the Newton 2010 date problem (Props to StevenF) – after 18:48:31 on January 5, 2010 a NewtonScript int variable overflows, and well, problems happen.
I know when we were working on the Newton in the late 90′s, we weren’t really considering 2010 – in reality who really does? That was 14 years away, we were bound to still be around by then, right?
Well, maybe not. Maybe your code is going to last that long. Maybe some structures or patterns you’ve designed seem fine, but have some upper boundary that you’d NEVER HIT.
Start looking for those problems now. If you find them, stop, and spend the time to fix them. If you can’t because of a fixed API… well.. what do you do then? Make sure you fail gracefully.
All I need a super job to convince Jennifer that it would be good to do.. heh heh.
I had the opportunity to attend my last CocoaHeads Portland meeting tonight (more about that later perhaps), and I am continually amazed by the development talent and skill that is in Portland.
Even more impressive is the excitement people have over developing for the Macintosh/iPhone these days, and how they want to share that excitement with others by attending meetings like this.. I wonder if big CocoaHeads meetings like the Silicon valley chapter have that same feel?
Thanks all for a great night!
Yojimbo is a great Macintosh organizer of information – and, as I found out yesterday, a ninja movie.
I found this in Powells in Beaverton yesterday….
(Via rentzsch.com: Tales from the Red Shed.)
I went last year, and I highly recommend it if you are an indie developer, or want to be an indie developer. This year, I won’t be able to attend, for a very good reason of which I will get into later on in the month.
Update: Ya, I should get caught up on things – it’s sold out… at least the videos should be available later on in the year.
This morning when I started reading rumors of Apple announcing 10.6 at WWDC on Monday, I thought “not gonna happen”.
My reasoning was the following:
Then John Gruber posted a few interesting comments – first to an article about Snow Leopard being ‘pure Cocoa‘. This makes complete sense to me – see the QTKit as an example of the start of that. Having a consistent Cocoa API for everything is a win for newer developers who don’t know (or care) about Carbon.
Gruber also points to TUAW’s post on the subject, in which they comment that it’s a stability and performance release, and even perhaps a grand unifying OS release (Touch/Macintosh/Apple TV).
This unifying theory more than anything makes the most sense to me. Apple, like every Mac programming company these days, is hurting for good people. When they try and hire folks, it’s often a hard sell to get someone to move to the bay area given it’s high cost of living. So, why not consolidate the code, and have one repository containing all three from which you can build off of, with a shared base of source. It would alleviate having to build three large teams, or even three medium teams. One core OS team, and then three smaller teams to do the respective UI and platform specific frameworks.
What would this allow them to provide? Well, we’ve seen two – AppKit and UIKit. How about a third? AppleTVKit? I wonder if one of the unannounced sessions is one on the programming environment for the next release of the Apple TV ‘operating system’? I wonder if Apple will have a built in application store? It would be a fantastic opportunity for Apple to pull ahead in the set top box arena. Netflix Player anyone?
Here’s hoping….
(Via Downshift.)
Justin of Second Gear posts a great article on how to have a healthy WWDC. Wise words if you are going.
This Wednesday CocoaHeads Portland will meet at 6pm at Extensis in downtown Portland.
I’ll be giving a small presentation on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue, two really useful classes that are available in Leopard for doing background operations. They are particularly important in todays’ day and age of multi-core Macintoshes, and useful for doing background processing in a nice manner on an iPhone or iPod touch.
5:30 pm – snack and chatting before we start
6:00 pm – Q&A Session (bring your Cocoa questions)
6:30 ish – Presentation on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue
7:30 ish – finished, hang out time, show cool things time, show iPhone apps??
Feel free to arrive at 5:30 pm for some snacks and chatting before we start up.
Extensis Portland (Google Map Link) – 1800 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR – Suite 500
The Newton Team Way Back When, originally uploaded by Lucien W. Dupont.
Man.. this brings back a flood of really good memories of my time at Apple, and all the friends I still have from way back when. Click through to see a few notes.
