Hack a lil game or two

Hydra Console Game Dev. Kit - Cool!

Xerox/Apple/Microsoft and stealing TVs

A Rich Neighbor Named Xerox is a fun (and quick) read.

Using the Mac's built-in camera to auto scroll text I'm reading on the screen? Impossible! :D

Cocoa

I've been reading up on building Cocoa apps for OS X lately. I have a great idea which involves writing a free version of something like Spanning Sync. It's a great app, but I'll be buggered if I'm going to pay a yearly fee to use it! My app might not be as groovy, or as feature rich, but it'll work, and at the very least I'll use it. Also, I won't charge other people to use it, in fact it'll be open source so everyone can laugh at how badly it's written, or help me fix it.

Anyway, back to Cocoa - what a great application framework! I'm loving the interface builder, and connecting interface components to underlying code (and vice versa) using actions and outlets seems so natural and powerful. Considering how long this has been around (NeXT interface builder) this really must have been way ahead of it's time. Objective-C syntax seems quite clunky, but the fact that I'm not used to it probably has quite a bit to do with that. I have a lot more to learn about it's capabilities before I can make any kind of educated comment on that :) So far so good I say!

I'd recommend that anyone even vaguely interested in developing for OS X or just learning about OS X's application architecture check out the great developer resources available on the Apple Developer Connection website. It's really a very neat development environment. Very nice.

Useful/interesting links:

• Cocoa Application Tutorial
• Getting Started with Cocoa
• The NeXTonian

Web application idea

A framework to host screencasts of programmers at work, discussing their code and throught process as they go. How best to do that. But surely a great way to share information and knowledge, particularly about the act and process of creation.

Hope

It seems to me that hope is of central importance because it creates a "reality potential difference".

Dangerous ideas

Zen habits?

How can someone so "Zen" have so many habits?

Lift whoosh

Lift is comparatively efficient. Hard to believe how much it wees all over RoR.

simple is best

If you were going to write a web server I think it'd pay to check out simple.

Forget that they run their site using PHP on top of Apache 1.3 :)

Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) PHP/4.3.10
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10

I reckon it's a pretty impressive treament of the "web server" though. Someone needs to write a web server in Scala. (I'm sure it's been done?)

Click, ding!

I wasn't aware of this - Google Search Box Earns Millions for Mozilla. Gruber makes a good point that this is presumably why Safari on Windows is a good financial decision for Apple as well.

There's no SDK that you need...

I agree with these guys about the announcement of "There's no SDK that you need!" for the iPhone at the WWDC 2007 keynote.

In hindsight the iPhone announcements seemed to go like:

And now, for the news you've all been waiting for...

The sound of restlessness developers...

iPhone news...

The sound of excited nervous energy...

We don't have an SDK for you!

A collective WTF?!

No no, you don't need one! You have Safari and web technologies!

I can't help feeling that sounds like a let down. It's so bad it's funny. Hey developers, thanks for coming. Go learn WebKit. Brilliant.

For the people who don't get why some developers are having a problem with this announcement, I think this comment snippet sums it up nicely:

For those that don't get what the contradiction is:

Steve Job talks about the Map application on the iPhone, and quotes: "And you can’t do that stuff in a browser."

Steve Job then announces at WWDC: "You can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone."

If you still don't get it, then you don't need to.

Repeat after me: "You don't need an SDK"... "You don't need an SDK"...

Ermm, excuse me Steve, where's Firefox?

I finally watched the WWDC 2007 keynote (though not via that link) - I ended up having to download it via BitTorrent. I still can't connect to watch that stream. Anyway, I too noticed what surely must have been a discrepancy on the part of Steve Jobs while he was presenting the Safari on Windows story.

I'm sure it's obvious to most people that this world view of Safari/IE isn't going to happen and I'm not sure that's what Apple was trying to show anyway. If we give them the benefit of the doubt here though, the least they've been is careless. I think it's fairly self evident that there will always be free software and choice, or if not free software then at least open source :) If I don't like the way someone does something I will go and do a better job. That's why I did a Computer Science degree. That's why I learn everything I can get my hands on about technology, and particularly the craft of creating good software. It's a little hard to believe Apple could be so naive as to exclude the current cream of the crop (FireFox) from the picture.

Apple knows the art of presenting information, they do it better than most. I just find the potential conclusions begging to be drawn here a little disturbing^*.

^*Though perhaps not very surprising.

Simple fractals in 5 minutes!

Nodebox is pretty cool. You can make very simple fractals in 5 minutes! :)



And now for some interesting fractals. Check out the google video here. Very nicely!

Xerox and Ethernet

Interesting snippet on Xerox and the history of Ethernet over at byteCoder - Xerox 1974: “[Ethernet] would be a failure”.

WiTricity

WiTricity. Read about it a while ago - but thought it was blog worthy. I can't wait for this to hit. I wonder how efficient it is though?

I greatly dislike reality at times.

Music bits

Golan Levin: The truly soft side of software

What a fucking _name_. Pretty interesting music demo though!

Google tick-tock

Google quotes from Inside the Google machine

We're able to make money largely through advertising, and one of the benefits that I didn't expect from that was that we're able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about places that don't have that much money.

We have a tremendous ability and responsiblity to provide people with the right information, and we view ourselves like a magazine or newspaper that we should provide very objective information, and so in our search results we never accept payment for our search results we accept payment for advertising and we market it as such."

"magazine".. "newspaper".. "responsbility". Ok. I knew these guys were on to something.

E.T. go home

Why bother sending off a probe into space to communicate with other intelligent life? Why not leave a message on earth to communicate with ourselves in a couple of billion years. We'll be equally as strange and "otherwordly" as anything else "out there".

So much TED goodness

Sir Martin Rees: Earth in its final century?
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

James Watson on the double helix

Another TED talk, James Watson: The double helix and today. Very funny man. Absolutely brilliant talk. One of "those" learning experiences.

Pond universe

Why _not_ use the analogy of blustering wind whipping ripples in the surface of a pond to understand cosmic microwave background radiation? Surely the fish aren't theorising about the wind, but rather the ripples.

Who's to say the pond wouldn't be rippling without the wind anyway?

"Everyone should just try and make Rails faster"

Umm.. no.

lift/scala for web apps

A Real-World Use of Lift, a Scala Web Application Framework

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

The full transcript is a good read.