Category Archives: Apple

Pastrami Sandwich

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I find many similarities between an event like WWDC and a similar one I’ve attended at Redmond long ago; both are big (huge!) events, with thousands of (men) engineers from around the world (and very few women), with a keynote by the founder, lots of events every morning and afternoon, and merchandasing stuff all over the way. And of course, in both cases you get food boxes for lunch.

However, there is one basic difference between both events. Apple not only has interesting technologies to show up, even bleeding edge ones, more often than not on the open and public domain (many of which I can not write about, and boy they are going to make a difference!), but even better than that, it has a vision.

And passion. Cocoa developers are among the most passionate I’ve ever met, and you just can’t find that in a Microsoft event. You can feel that in the (conditioned) air of the Moscone center, almost touch it. New projects everywhere. People discussing about their ideas. Lots of collaboration, openness and willingness to go further. Microsoft’s stuff is, well, boring at best; dull and gray. Enterprise IT is no fun, believe me, but there’s no reason to try to look at it in a different way. And faithful to its own way, Apple is precisely doing that, right now; and what’s about to come will reshape the industry forever. Continue reading →

WWDC 2008 Keynote Main Points

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The keynote is over, and I’m on the 2nd floor of the Moscone Center sipping a coffee and thinking about all the stuff that Steve and his team just presented:

  • The new iPhone 3G with GPS will go live on July 11th in several countries, including Switzerland! And best of all, the price of the 8 GB model drops to 199 USD, and the 16 GB model (in two different colors) will cost 299 USD. And even more important, is that the price will be 199 or 299 USD no matter what country you’re in! Given the low cost of the dollar these days, for me this simply means that Apple will grab a good slice of the market within a few months. This makes the platform all the more interesting!
  • The App Store will not be the only means of distribution for native applications using the SDK; enterprises will be able to distribute them to their own devices, and even common mortals will be able to enable up to 100 devices, and apps distributed this way will be able to be activated from e-mail, websites or whatever means you need. More ways to get your code through the door!
  • The iPhone becomes a serious enterprise platform; not only will enterprises be able to use their own distribution platforms, the integration with Exchange is complete, and the support for MS Office documents is there too. As well as native support for iWork apps!
  • .mac is replaced by mobileme; with a price tag of 99 per year, users get 20 GB of storage “on the cloud”, for storing images, e-mail, calendars or contacts, together with extremely advanced Web 2.0 applications, and integration with iPhone, Mac and PCs. “Exchange for the rest of us”, as they presented it! Instant sync from any device, anytime, anywhere.
  • There will be a notification service for apps, which will allow them to show status information for users, without resorting to background threads; this will apparently work with a central server (at Apple’s own premises?) with a single IP connection. In any case, they’ve listened to the concern of many developers; this feature is (in my opinion) the last bit that the platform lacked to be considered seriously.

This is for the main bits. Of course there was a lot more shown, but you’ll be able to watch it in its entirety in a few hours, since the keynote will be available on Apple’s site.

Incredible stuff. Stay tuned for more info!

Waiting for the Keynote

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Twitter’s down, but not my blog! I’m in the main Moscone conference room waiting for the start fo the keynote; there are thousands of people here! “Roll over Beethoven” is sounding all over the place…

The air is filled with electricity. This won’t last long. Just a few minutes more, and we’ll know what’s in the box.

Sunny WWDC

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Comparing Lausanne to San Francisco is a straightforward experiment:

By the way, I’m in SF. On Monday I’ll attend WWDC. But tomorrow Claudia and I are biking through the Golden Gate ;)

Amazing Xcode

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Xcode is amazing. Of all the IDEs I’ve used (and this is, as always, a personal opinion, having used Visual Studio since version 6, Eclipse, Kdevelop and others) it’s the one I prefer. And today I found another reason to like it.

I’ve noticed this: when I use Xcode on a single-processor machine (such as a Powerbook G4) and I rebuild my master thesis project (in C++) I see this build window:

No big deal: each file is compiled, one after the other. However, it seems that when I run it on a dual-processor machine (both in my dual G5 desktop and my Intel Core Duo 2 MacBook) I get a boost in compiling time, with parallel compilations! See this:

Then, coupled with Bonjour networks, you can even go faster, using the processing time of your peers’ computers to have smaller compilation times.

WWDC Schedules in iCal format

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For those attending WWDC, and wanting to have the module complete schedule in iCal (as suggested by TUAW), I’ve created a small script (using Prototype) that will transform the JSON data of the official WWDC schedule into calendar files, which you can save and load into iCal.

This script was featured in another TUAW entry! Thanks to Mat for the link!

Enjoy! I hope this will be useful to you. By the way, if you’re attending WWDC, just leave a comment below.

Update, 2008-05-26: Thanks to Jeff LaMarche for posting a link to the calendars from the cocoadev mailing list, and to Second Gear for using the calendars with their own products! :)

Steve Yegge on Apple APIs

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A comment at the bottom of his own lengthy but otherwise interesting article:

One more important point: I’m surprised that some people seem to think I’m implying some programming studliness from my little 3-day excursion. Not so: any first-year college student or intern, or heck, self-taught dude in his basement, could have done exactly what I did. I failed utterly to convey the right point here, by unfortunately being way too subtle about it. The recounting of total hours spent was a hats-off compliment to Apple for having written such great APIs, documentation, and tools. Let me be clearer about it, then: Apple’s development environment is nothing short of amazing, which I fully expected, knowing it derived originally from NeXTStep and has had fifteen or twenty years of innovations piled on. The APIs are _clean_. This is why I was able to narrow down the APIs I needed so quickly. The whole thing I got working was no more than 50 lines of code, most of it error-handling. That’s C code, so it’s impressive how much it accomplishes in so little space. The takeaway here is that more programmers ought to jump in and start playing with OS X. You get results faster than you’d think.

How to build ohcount on Leopard

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If you do not know ohcount, you should; the guys at ohloh.net have GPL’d one of their core components, namely the one that allows you to perform source code line counts in your own projects. Neat and useful!

However, the current ohcount distribution (which you can download from this link) does not build out-of-the-box in Leopard. Here’s how I made it work in my own Leopard G4 PowerBook (PPC) computer. Continue reading →

WWDC 2008: I’ll be there!

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I’ve just bought my e-ticket for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2008! This one will be the first one featuring iPhone developer tracks, and that’s one of the main reasons for me to go. Another good one is that neither Claudia nor me know San Francisco, so it’ll be a great time to hang out and visit the city.

Will you be there? Feel free to leave me a comment and we’ll meet at San Francisco, from June 9th to 13th!