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The First steps with Cocoa, Objective-C, Xcode, and Interface Builder

I took the plunge and spent my precious Sunday afternoon exploring the world of Apple software development. I hunkered down and completed the simple Currency Converter Guide from Apple’s Developer Connection website. I thought that the guide was well organized and covered most of the important topics and design decisions regarding object oriented programming and the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern. The information from the ADC website is not nearly sufficient to replace a good old written textbook but it is good enough to give an idea of what programming on the Mac OS X platform is like.

My prior experience with C/C++ was mostly in Microsoft Visual Studio so I’m a little spoiled when it comes to debugging and project management. Fortunately I didn’t run into any compilation errors and the program worked flawlessly on the first compile and run (first time that has ever happened to me!) so I can’t give any comparison to debugging in Xcode yet. This was also my first experience with GUI programming since all of my previous work was command line interface only. Interface Builder made linking into the controller a piece of cake and I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to design the interface. It was nowhere near as painful as my attempts with Python and wxWidgets and the buggy IDE.

I’m looking forward to playing around with some more complex applications, hopefully some of them will even be useful

Advertisement Free Google Searches!

I recently discovered this URL: http://google.com/ie Essentially it is a no frills version of Google Search. There are no advertisements and results are displayed as a list of links. Speeds are surprisingly even faster than the normal Google search.

I came about this information when viewing Fravia’s web site about search techniques. A very interesting read (and some videos), if you would like to more efficiently exploit the internet while avoiding commercialism. Here’s a quick sample of his rules and advice to searching and hitting the jackpots.

My Thoughts on Macworld 2008

This was the first Macworld (Steve Jobs Keynote) that I actually kept tabs on since switching over to Apple hardware last year. I had watched recordings of the previous events and this year definitely did not top the last 2. I mean, Randy Newman was the one more thing which I thought was pretty lame and didn’t really serve any purpose to the event. Nonetheless I’m really happy about about a couple of the new things:

iPhone Update 1.1.3

I got an iPhone for Christmas and have been extremely happy with it and the new update (1.1.3) brings even more to the table than I originally had. The triangulation feature added to the maps was a big plus. It’s not nearly as accurate as my Garmin GPS but it works pretty well and got my location down to a couple of blocks. Even so, it’s a whole lot better than trying to figure out what intersection you are on for manual input. I have not noticed any differences after enabling “Show Traffic” on the maps but my college town probably isn’t big enough to have that monitored anyways. I will have to give it a try next time I go home in Denver. Other than that, the functionality is now on par with Google’s web interface with the ability to change between 4 different views (map, satellite, hybrid, and list), and easier searching.

iTunes Movie Rentals

I am excited about this. I find that I usually only watch a movie once so buying movies from iTunes is ridiculously expensive if I’m only going to watch it once, so this cheaper alternative will be a welcome thing. With the added bonus of being able to add it to my iPhone it sweetens the deal even more. For example, I could spool up a couple of movie rentals to watch over a flight and not have to pack anything besides my phone. Of course that is theoretical, I would probably still lug around my 80GB iPod for my music collection.

Other Thoughts

MacBook Air

There certainly was something in the air and the MacBook Air is another computer that I can’t afford but can drool at along with the new Mac Pro lineup. It’s brings pretty impressive specs to the table considering it’s small package. If I was made of money I would definitely snatch one up and make it my class and travel computer so I wouldn’t have to carry my 17″ MacBook Pro everywhere. Because of the high prices (especially with a solid state drive), I think it may be a little difficult for this product to take. It’s catering to a very specific set of customer, one that travels a lot and needs portability over functionality.

I only have one gripe about the MacBook Air–there doesn’t appear to be user serviceable parts. From what I can tell I would not be able to easily add my own after market, reasonably priced solid state hard drive without voiding the warranty. That’s something I would not feel comfortable doing after dropping over $1,500. Other than that I would be able to get used to the limited number of ports and processing power. This is intended to be used an ultra-portable computer, not a desktop replacement!

All in all, even though it wasn’t the best keynote there’s still some cool technology coming out of Cupertino and I’m excited to see what’s yet to come as the year progresses. I’m especially looking towards more applications for the iPhone.

Getting Around a College Firewall and Bandwidth Throttling

My college, like most others across America employ a restrictive firewall and limit bandwidth for certain file transfers. YouTube in particular is severely limited on my campus making viewing virtually impossible on weekends and painfully slow any other time. Fortunately though, I learned a little more about the network setup and how they prioritize different kinds of network traffic and tunneled my way out to achieve surprisingly snappy YouTube playback and unrestricted access to the internet. Read more

I Predict the Blu-Ray Disc Format Will Be the Winner

We have repeated history and now have another format war much like VHS vs. Betamax, but now with digital technology instead analog. The uncertainty about which format would receive mainstream adoption has made most people avoid the move to high definition altogether until everything is sorted out. After all, to most people including myself, High Definition content is good looking and nice to have but there is no reason to go out and drop several hundred dollars when current standard definition is not unbearable and easily accessible without considerable investments in technology that may whither and die by next year.

Time Warner, knowing this, has recently decided to only release their HD movies in the Blu-Ray Disc Format. Until this point, the battle seemed to hang in the balance, but this recent move I feel will put the final weight on the Blu-Ray side, despite it’s more expensive manufacturing costs. With the majority of content providers behind Blu-Ray it will become increasingly difficult for HD-DVD backers.

There are still two ways that this can finish. The first way is a Blu-Ray only future, much like VHS overtook the market against Betamax. Sure, HD-DVD will still be around, but the majority will choose Blu-Ray. Or the alternative, a multi-format future which would end up being more expensive in the long run for both content providers and consumers.