netsmith

Good discussion around Objective C blocks: http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.html

Having a few apps on the store, and having closely followed rankings, popularity and pricing over the past couple of monthes, here are a couple observations:

• There are still plenty of business issues (mktg, customer service, ip, taxes, etc) to deal with even though Apple takes care of some (distribution, payment, part of taxes). I think there's some opportunity there (publishing houses, co-ops?, consolidation?), but I'm not sure what yet.
• 'mimic' apps are making there way on to the store...sometimes better, sometimes not, often stealing wording and sample data straight from other apps and cross-posting reviews to drive traffic to their apps
• Not a lot of apps that access critical consumer data (i.e. - my bank, my frequent travler info, etc) -- slow-moving large corps [opportunity]
• Surprise market for apps for 'little kids' (parents appear to gladly pay 99c-4.99 to keep a kid busy for some period of time)
• Great market for taking something that's specialized and mechanical (sleep sounds, chess clock, specialized calculator) and making a cheap digital version.
• Still lots of new game concepts that haven't been tapped . . .
  
• When you have something that's selling all over the world, it's a challenge to keep up with what's going on in all the different country-based app stores, and partitioning feedback, marketing, and sales to drive prioritization.

Apple is starting a free program for universities and students: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/university.html that will let them openly discuss and collaborate on iphone/touch development.

However, the NDA is still in effect for experienced developers and publishers, though the enforcement seems erratic (some developers are openly violating it in discussion forums, app descriptions, blogs, tweets, etc).

feed://webobjects.mdimension.com/iPhoneApps.rss

Wow.  Synergy + Marco Polo = Lots of automatic goodness.

Git interactive rocks!

I've either been living on an island, or I'm guilty of being a slowly boiled frog depending on how you look at it.  

I just got back from WWDC 2008 . . .  Unfortunately there is a confidentiality agreement that prevents me from posting any technical details here, but if you hop around the rumors/news sites, you can find most of the juicy details.

Cool GIT feature of the moment:   Content based tracking of files.

This guy is one hell of a speaker and he has a really great (pragmatic) perspective on innovation.   The idea that people sometimes tend to look back at innovations without considering any hard facts is something of an understatement.  Scott explains that true innovation comes from rigorous habits, not doing what you're told sometimes, and not letting past failures stop you.    It's also interesting how people sometimes think innovations come entirely from 'magic moments'/epiphanies.   Best example Scott uses:  How they teach you in school that Newton came up with the idea of gravity when an apple fell on his head.   HA!  Listen to Scott's talk to hear the real story.  Fascinating stuff.

Great video with CEO Eric Schmidt on a variety of mgmt topics, challenges he faces at google, and how he tries to facilitate the focusing of the energies of passionate engineers and founders.  He alludes to what he thinks would be hard for others to copy, and what wouldn't.

Here's a thought that has been bouncing around my head:

Well, I finally bit the bullet and got Leopard at home (on a mac mini).    So far, the transition from Tiger has been relatively painless. 

Stumbled on this interesting work going on around Maven 2.  Don claims to have reduced some maven build times significantly.

Tutorial on writing a custom wicket accordion/outlook style menu component: http://karthikg.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/developing-a-custom-apache-wicket-component/

Options for showing an ajaxy 'wait' indicator in wicket:
http://www.nabble.com/best-practice-for-a-wait-page-td15070792.html

Last.fm announced you can now stream full songs and albums (from all major labels) for free...
http://www.last.fm

If you're familiar with Maven, I'd say you can have a wicket template project up and running with IDE support (if desired), in much less than 5 minutes. The magic is here:

http://wicket.apache.org/quickstart.html

It uses a maven archetype to generate the project structure, and then you can use the typical mvn eclipse:eclipse or idea:idea to get your project into an IDE. 2 methods for running jetty are automatically built in as well:

1. Start.java
   
2. mvn jetty:run.

It's soooo much better than piecing together your first wicket project by hand. Believe me! (These aren't the droids you're looking for)

Now, I'm generally of the opinion that template based code generation can only take an application so far... which is why it's exciting to see extensible code based approaches to sharing behaviors across pages in a web app --> Wicket Web Beans . Next time I build a data-entry app, I'll definitely consider WWB.

After some vigorous hand wringing and what I thought was thorough forum searching, it turns out that no custom behavior/code is necessary to handle adding a browser-cache-stopping-but-not-totally-random-or-once-in-a-while-new-when-it-shouldn't-be url parameter onto JS and CSS links in Wicket.

The magic line of wicket code which eludes forums and wiki documentation follows...drum roll...

In your Application's init() method add the following. :

getResourceSettings().setAddLastModifiedTimeToResourceReferenceUrl(true);

Hmph... method names don't get much clearer than that do they?

This causes a 'wicket:lm=######' (lm stands for lastModified) url parm to be appended to package resource url's that are rendered. Now the browser has a url based clue as to when it REALLY needs to refresh from the server.

It's nice that it can be turned on in one place for all generated package resource url's.

After recently acquiring an Eye-fi SD card for my camera, I decided to take the plunge and figure out a photo backup/sharing solution. I have relatives and friends that share photos using the various photo sharing sites (which inevitably try to make you pay for prints, shoot spam or advertising at you, and/or reduce the photos to a size that doesn't allow you to print a high-res version on your color printer).

Couple that with the fact that I've had 2 external hard drives die in the last 7 years, I'm tired of burning CD/DVD backups ad nauseam, I'm lazy when it comes to posting and sharing photos, and you can see my dilemma

In walks the solution . . .

As I'm setting up the Eye-fi, I see that they've done their homework and offered out-of-the-box integration with 15+ photo sharing sites. One of the sites they integrate with is phenomenal -- unlimited high-res photo sharing (SmugMug). I set my Eye-fi up to automatically create galleries on SmugMug. Here's how it works now:

1. My wife and I take some pictures at some event (wedding/family get-together/etc)
2. We come home, turn on the camera. The camera automatically, wirelessly (802.11 - no special camera usb cables!) transmits the high-resolution (8megapixel) photos to my computer. During transmission, a new SmugMug gallery is automatically created with a default name like "Photos taken on January 27th, 2007". The photos are automatically uploaded to that gallery.
   
3. If the photos are ones I want to share, I only have to flip a switch on that gallery and give it a name. If they are photos I don't want to share, I simply leave the gallery as is.

I set up a memorable smugmug url that I share with friends and family (thus reducing the e-mailing step normally necessary for sharing photos). The url is set up to not be indexed by google, not be visible to other smugmug users, or any searches otherwise. You have to know the magic url to get there. It's your own private, spamless, no-login, photo sharing site.
Now inevitably, the people that I've explained this process to so far have responded in one of the following ways:

1. I back my photos up to an external hard drive.
2. I don't trust photo sites . . .they've disappeared on me . . . How do you know they won't go out of business?
3. How do they make money?
4. That's cool. But still a look a of skepticism -- as if you have to be some tech guru to set this all up.
5. They store the full res photos????? (i.e. - How can they afford that?)

Here are my answers:

1. Hard drives have a limited life span. It will die eventually. What happens if your house burns down?
   
2. This is a profitable business focused on a discriminating user. They are a standalone company who's entire consumer base has bought into the specific services they offer. Go read about them and see what you think. Also, you can order a DVD backup of your photos at anytime (about $20). If you use the Eye-fi approach I'm describing, you'll have a backup on your computer anyway. For the more technical, you can mount your photo site as a virtual drive (WebDAV) and drag and drop backup photos to whatever other format you like at any time. They are not free. They are, however, fairly priced. $40/year for unlimited high-res photo storage and spam-free, login-free sharing. They claim the photos are backed up in three different states.
   
3. You pay them $40/year.
4. The Eye-fi makes it simple to get the photos there. You still have to learn a little SmugMug to get your sharing settings right, but it's quick once you get familiar.
   
5. You pay them $40/year. Hard disk space is cheaper than it has ever been.

To be fair, of the people I've described this backup/sharing solution to, two of them did have a geographically redundant backup solution -- Backup CD's in safety deposit boxes/relatives' houses.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for shiny things, but the almost effortless instant wireless photo sharing and backup at full resolution, for the cost of an Eye-fi ($99) and SmugMug ($40/yr) feels like a heck of a deal.

I've been successfully using iCalViewer for a little while now. See those nice little bubbles that are semi-transperant over my desktop background in the video below? -- those are upcoming appointments/meetings. I've found that this nearly eliminates the need for me to manually check my calendar on any regular basis. There are features to toggle which iCal calendars' events are displayed and provide a global hotkey you can use to see upcoming calendar events (without kicking off iCal!).

So I finally got around to checking out Visor. I'm already an avid user of Quicksilver which gives me speedy keyboard access to anything I can remember the name of. Since I use terminal so often though, it only makes sense to have a single hotkey which can summon and dismiss a large, visible terminal session. Here's what it looks like when you hit the hot-key (I choose Command-Tilde). Try to ignore the demo marker in the center of the screen.... I'm trying a tool called Screenflick, and other than that demo marker, so far so good. Video after the break (if you're getting this as rss)




after the post notes: hmmm..looks like blogger downsized my video. doh :)

A recent post on Patrick Kua's blog about explaining rituals compelled me to go add a link to my personal development philosophy page on my wikispace. That compelled me to review my wikispace. After reviewing my booklist , meetings , interviewing , and presentations philsophy pages, I had a realization. I have not been doing a good job of updating those pages with things I have learned and resources I have found in the past year. Not only that, but the declining rate at which I seem to be consuming literature (and producing content) suggests that I might be getting dumber by the minute. This must be addressed! No more. Oh I could come up with a litany of excuses (new house, new job, WoW, TF2, Mario Galaxy, Guitar Hero 3, that hilarious youtube video), but they are just that -- excuses. This is my public commitment to myself to do a better job of learning and sharing useful development practices this year.

That's right, now you are on the hook. And by you, I mean me.

Here are exciting things I got to play with first hand this holiday season:

RocketFM - turns your pc/mac into an FM broadcaster. Any set of speakers with an FM tuner can now become a jukebox if I just set my laptop near it.

Super Mario Galaxy - 5 stars !

• Good variety in level design and difficulty progression (easy if you've played mario games in the past though)
• Good intentional use of the wii controller -- i.e. - flick of wrist throws a turtle shell, shake of wrist causes spin attacks, etc.
  

Guitar Hero 3 - 5 stars !

• Fun whether or not you have played guitar before.
• Good difficulty progression (even guitar shredders can get to something challenging).
• Good re-use of the wii controller wireless/sensors. The Wiimote plugs right into the plastic guitar body. Uses tilt sensor to switch into rock-out mode :)
  

Line6 Toneport UX2 - low-latency guitar/mic recording solution for the pc -- jury still out.

Eye-fi - 802.11 + SD memory in the footprint of an SD card that plugs in to your existing digital camera. It wirelessly syncs to your computer and nearly any photo site you might want to use. Set up was very smooth -- didn't even have to type in my wireless security info. Only known negative so far: not Camino compatible.

Nike + IPod - wireless accelerometer/pedometer for the ipod. We're going to try one of the clip adapters on ebay which purports to bypass the need for the $100 pair of specialized Nike's.

And here are some things I discovered I'd like to keep my eye on for 2008:
Asus eee pc
Amazon Kindle - ebook reader with online purchasing, backup, no connectivity fees, and paper-like screen (claims to read well under bright light).
OLPC pc
next gen Apple iPhone (currently vapor)
next gen Apple portable (tablet?/ultralite notebook?) (currently vapor)

Finally a java collections library that takes advantage of java 5 features to make code more expressive and concise!

Some quick examples: Coding in the small with Google Collections

Statement: A
We, responsible software development professionals, MUST build sustainable, realistic software.

I've intentionally chosen not to use the word 'working' in that statement. 'Working' seems to be a word that is easily perverted to alternate definitions. It's not enough to build software that works once! It's not enough to build software that can be judged as working after several weeks of manual testing! Sustainable, and realistic might be better adjectives. I've never been on a project where there was no expectation of being able to enhance the software that was initially delivered, or that the software being delivered not be something which serve the needs of the person it was written for (though that does get confused easily it seems).

Statement: B
In order for software to be enhance-able (in any reasonable time frames, with a high truck-number) a powerful suite a autos (automated/executable tests) is required.

The more diverse the types of autos (unit/integration/acceptance/etc), the better. The more realistic paths exercised, the better. The faster that auto suite can run, the better. The less autos you have, the more risky it is to make changes. The less autos you have, the harder it is to introduce new developers.

Statement: If (A and B) then C
Being a software professional requires that you build autos with your software. Doing anything less is unprofessional.

I am guilty of not building autos in the past. But I hope I have learned from my mistakes. As responsible developers, we absolutely must make it a regular part of development to build autos for our companies, our clients, and each other. It is the professional thing to do.