I just stumbled into this amazing TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert via James Duncan Davidson (@duncan in Twitter) and I want to share it with you with some very personal thoughts below.
Category Archives: Code
10 iPhone Memory Management Tips
Memory management in the iPhone is a hot topic. And since tonight I’m talking about it on tonight’s monthly meetup of the French-speaking Swiss iPhone Developers group, I might as well share some tips here from my own experience.
I won’t go dive through the basics; I think that Scott Stevenson did a great job in his “Learn Objective-C” tutorial at CocoaDevCentral, from where the image below comes. I’m just going to highlight some iPhone-specific issues here and there, and provide some hints on how to solve them.
Best books of 2008
You might remember my beloved mantras: learning a new programming language and reading at least 6 relevant books every year. Following the 2007 edition, here’s the list of the 8 books I have enjoyed most in 2008, ordered by a purely subjective and absolutely irrational decreasing preference. I strongly recommend all of them!
Winner: Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software by David Rice
Runner-up: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert I. Sutton, PhD
And 6 more:
- Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell
- Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied by Andrei Alexandrescu
- It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden
- RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby
- JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
- Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran
The Dirty Little Secret of iPhone Development
This is happening right now, at a web agency near you.
The dot-com boom of the 90′s spawned a brand new generation of coders and software developers, including me, by the way. While before that time the term of “software developer” might have been reserved to system programmers fluent in C, COBOL, C++ or other languages, right now the vast majority of developers I know spend their time writing web applications, either public or in a private intranet, in J2EE, ASP.NET, Rails, PHP, you name it.
I have said before that writing web applications should be taken as seriously as writing desktop systems. Call me names if you want, but I’m a big fan of Joel’s Test.
However, after all this years, after the Chaos reports, after Peopleware, after the Mythical Man Month, people still treat quality as an afterthought. And also complain about how much software sucks, how expensive it is, and how late it arrives, by the way. Now that the iPhone SDK is widely available, that the App Store is selling more apps that we could have had imagined 6 months ago, many web agencies want to jump to native iPhone development contracts, which are hype and nice and pricey and whatnot. Which is only going to make things worse.
The dirty little secret in this story is this: iPhone development looks more like developing applications for a desktop operating system, and less, much less than web development. And I’m frightened to see some small shops (and even bigger ones), who never attained a real level of professionalism or quality in their software tasks, starting projects and realizing, later, when they are over budget and behind schedule, that this kind of applications requires a different mindset.
REST and Objective-C, again
I’ve just uploaded some code derived from the Objective-C wrapper I’ve shown in this post. You can find it in the “Projects” section, as usual and it’s simply a wrapper around the URL loading system of Cocoa, both for Macs and iPhones, providing a custom delegate protocol, so that you can handle the events raised by the wrapper:
[source:C::firstline(13)] @protocol WrapperDelegate
@required - (void)wrapper:(Wrapper *)wrapper didRetrieveData:(NSData *)data;
@optional - (void)wrapperHasBadCredentials:(Wrapper *)wrapper; - (void)wrapper:(Wrapper *)wrapper didCreateResourceAtURL:(NSString *)url; - (void)wrapper:(Wrapper *)wrapper didFailWithError:(NSError *)error; - (void)wrapper:(Wrapper *)wrapper didReceiveStatusCode:(int)statusCode;
@end [/source]
The sample project, available in the zip file, shows how a simple Cocoa controller can interact with the Wrapper class as required. Enjoy!
Update, 2008-10-26: After a bug report from StuFF mc I’ve updated the code for a better support of POST and PUT requests, and also added a sample PHP file for a quick test of the functionalities.
The beauty of Cocoa
(Highly geeky post ahead. You’ve been warned!)
I have found the very message that summarizes the beauty of Cocoa in a single word; see by yourselves, hereunder in line 47:
[source:c]
import
// The interface of a person @interface Person : NSObject { NSString* firstName; NSString* lastName; int age; } @end
// The implementation of the Person @implementation Person -(id)init { if (self = [super init]) { firstName = @”"; lastName = @”"; age = 0; } return self; }
-(void)dealloc { [firstName release]; [lastName release]; [super dealloc]; }
-(NSString*)description { return [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@”Name: %@ %@, %d years old”, firstName, lastName, age]; } @end
// Some code using the Person class int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) { NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
NSMutableDictionary* dict = [[[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init] autorelease];
[dict setObject:@"Teto" forKey:@"firstName"];
[dict setObject:@"Rodriguez" forKey:@"lastName"];
[dict setObject:[[NSNumber alloc] initWithInt:34] forKey:@"age"];
Person* person = [[[Person alloc] init] autorelease];
// The beauty of Cocoa can be resumed to this very line:
[person setValuesForKeysWithDictionary:dict];
// Now sit back and relax:
NSLog([person description]);
[pool drain];
return 0;
} [/source]
Amazing Xcode
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.
ImageMagick
ImageMagick is a cool toolkit; not only it’s a complete set of command-line applications, ported to Windows, Mac and Linux, supporting hundreds of different image formats, it’s also a C++ library that you can use in your own applications!
On Mac OS X, I installed it via MacPorts using the all-time classic:
sudo port install ImageMagickThen I created a C++ command-line application with Xcode, set the header and library paths in the target properties (/opt/local/include/ImageMagick and /opt/local/lib in this case) and I was ready to code. The API documentation and the tutorial give some hints, and using those examples I’ve cooked a quick image transformation utility to play with:
[source:c]
include
using Magick::Image; using Magick::Geometry; using Magick::Blob;
int main (int argc, char * const argv[]) { Blob blob;
Image png;
png.read("pic.png");
png.write(&blob);
Image jpg(blob);
jpg.magick("jpg");
jpg.zoom(Geometry(100, 200));
jpg.write("newpic.jpg");
Image tiff(blob);
tiff.magick("tiff");
tiff.zoom(Geometry(3000, 84000));
tiff.write("newpic.tiff");
Image gif(blob);
png.magick("pdf");
png.write("newpic.pdf");
return 0;
} [/source]
Interesting stuff indeed! The API provides a complete set of “Photoshop-like” operations on images, which I plan to study further in the near future.
Symfony con MAMP
estuve jugando un rato con symfony y MAMP, y esta bastante bueno, aunque hay un par de cosas que no me gustaron. aqui van unos comentarios que te podran ser utiles.
me puse a leer las instrucciones de instalacion, y despues encontre el tutorial, de donde saco gran parte de lo que escribire en este articulo.
ahi dice que hay un archivo tgz que podes bajar de aca. se llama “sandbox” (caja de arena) y tiene todo listo y esta especialmente destinado para principiantes.
lo baje y lo descomprimi (haciendo doble click) en el web root – yo lo tengo seteado en ~/Sites, mira esta pantalla de configuracion de MAMP:
entonces puse la carpeta sf_sandbox en ~/Sites/sf_sandbox.
como tengo el MAMP andando abris un browser y te vas a http://localhost/sf_sandbox/web/index.php/
primero no me anduvo porque tenia MAMP con la opcion “PHP 4″, y la cambie a “PHP 5″ y anduvo:
On the Need of Minimalist Polyglots
Many companies, at some point of their history, ask themselves a simple question: what programming language should I use? The answer to this question is tricky, and has big, big consequences, for every single line of code of your future products will be written, read and suffered by it. This single choice defines the level of salaries you will have to pay, the skills of programmers you will have to deal with, the relative length and performance of your systems, the availability of tools (or lack thereof), the kind of support you will get (or not), the number of operating systems your code will work in, etc.
Given the fact that Web Development equals Software Development, this discussion will be of interest to those building the smallest websites, as well as old desktop-intensive apps. It will not be a “Tell me what programming language you use, and I will tell you who you are” type of article, though it may look like one, because that is something you have to figure out all by yourself.
If you take a look at the list of programming languages, any business person would have an instant headache. There are lots of them. With the strangest names. You cannot possibly guess which one to pick from such a list, obviously. So, how do companies choose the languages they use? There are some straightforward methods that I have seen so far, in no particular order:
- Looking at what other companies use (typically Google, Microsoft, Apple or Sun, but it could be 37signals too).
- Following the advice of the CIO, the Lead Architect or some other politically-powered person, which might or might not have read this article ;)
- Looking at what the current pool of programmers in the company know how to use. Rinse, wash, repeat.
- Following hype.
- Because there is a market plenty of available, cheap programmers that I could use for this project.
- Taking into account the characteristics of the languages themselves (static vs. dynamic, etc).
- Following the company’s history of past projects (successful or not).
- Following what your the client suggests (or mandates).
I think that it is a very bad idea to take any of the above methods in isolation, without considering other factors. Doing so is a path to self-destruction in the medium to long term, even if you succeed in the short term.