Joe Hewitt, creator of the iPhone Facebook application and Three20 framework, has moved back to web development. A blog post explains, placing on Apple’s App Store process without using so many words. But he makes an observation on how little it means on his way out.
November 14, 2009
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Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, following an egregious Apple rejection.
November 12, 2009
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Joshua Kaufman interviews Loren Brichter on Tweetie’s reload gesture. A good, non-technical read on finding the right way to present a feature, adding a custom gesture, and providing feedback.
November 11, 2009
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Cocoa With Love (Matt Gallagher): Memory and thread-safe custom property methods
October 26, 2009
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Learning a new programming language
It took me a while to learn Objective-C.
I started at the most basic level, wondering at the language. What are these brackets? What’s with the @ signs? What’s the difference between a – and a +? These aren’t hard things to learn, but understanding the reasoning behind them helps. And then there’s a point where it suddenly makes sense.
But the framework was confusing. How do I do this? Though I was less confused, this one isn’t solved directly. I became competent. And I started to ask the best question: “Why?”
The patterns were still confusing. Why does this work this way? What’s the purpose of this? Why is this done, but not this other thing?
And then there was a point where the patterns became obvious. More, the pattern in the patterns became obvious to me. And now, I look to find more examples of patterns, and patterns of patterns, to better build my knowledge.
It took me a while to get here, and it’s the same for every language. I’m feeling pretty confident about Objective-C now.
Back on the first day, I was confused and lost.
The secret to enjoying Xcode
One of the things that made me like Xcode more and become more efficient with it is realizing that while all coders are insane, me and Xcode’s designers are insane in different ways.
By that, I mean that aside from the standard keyboard shortcuts (Save, Copy… that sort of thing), none of the keyboard shortcuts made sense to me.
So I duplicated one of the keyboard shortcut profiles and deleted most of the keyboard bindings. I was brutal with it — if the combination didn’t make sense to me OR it was something I’d rarely use it was removed. Then I added keyboard shortcuts that I needed. By using about an hour to customize these settings, I ended up having keyboard shortcuts that I fully understood and rolled off my fingertips.
At this point — and this is where it became a useful exercise — I added my ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode to version control so I could easily sync it between computers. So when I find something that isn’t quite working out for me, I make a change and propagate it to my other system.
Am I going to share what I ended up with? No, because that’s not the point of this. Rather, I want to point out a simple fact of Xcode: Xcode will adapt to how you want to use it, and if you feel like you’re suffering at all with it you should spend the time it to takes to make it enjoyable to use.
And when someone tells me I can do something with a particular keyboard shortcut, I switch back to the defaults and see what it’s bound to.
iTunes zoom behavior
iTunes prior to 9.0 used a click on the zoom widget to convert to the mini player, leaving people like me who actually like to zoom a window option-clicking it.
iTunes 9.0 finally fixed this. A click on the zoom widget actually zoomed the window!
iTunes 9.0.1 changed it back to the old behavior. Many people were happy, I imagine. But people who wanted to zoom iTunes windows (or, I imagine, valued standard behavior) were left sad.
It turns out you can get the click-to-zoom behavior back:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes zoom-to-window -bool true
Tip of the hat to zadr on Twitter for this tweet.
Minimized iTunes player
Paste this into AppleScript Editor:
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with b in browser windows
set the minimized of b to true
end repeat
end tell
1 2 3 4 5 |
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with b in browser windows
set the minimized of b to true
end repeat
end tell
|
Save it in ~/Library/Scripts. And while you’re in AppleScript Editor, turn on Show Script menu in menu bar and Show Computer scripts. Now you have a command to show iTunes’s mini player at any time.
If you’ve got a good way to launch AppleScripts, you can install it there, too.
Update: Apple has changed this back in iTunes 9.0.1. See iTunes zoom behavior if you liked the iTunes 9.0 way.
John Siracusa: Ars Technica review of Snow Leopard. Includes a discussion of some of the file system’s new tricks and QuickTime X’s secrets, which you’ll probably never need to know. But don’t you want to know?
August 31, 2009
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Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster): Snow Leopard is built for the future. A short overview of what Snow Leopard’s new technologies mean from an application developer’s perspective.
August 28, 2009
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