Posts
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MinimalComps 0.9.6
It’s been a while, but I finally got around to doing some work on MinimalComps. I went through all the issues that people had entered in Google Code. Some were older and already handled. Some were requests for new features, which I’ve noted, but am not acting on just now. Several I could not reproduce and closed. But if you entered one of those and are still seeing an issue and can give reproduceable steps for it, please reopen it with those steps. And then there were a fair amount of real bugs. Many of these were related to the List and ComboBox controls. These wound up showing up several issues in lower level controls, down to PushButton. I think I have them pretty well cleaned up.
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Consumers vs. Creators
Great quote from Leo Laporte on this week’s Mac Break Weekly.
this is the risk inherent in treating your users as consumers as opposed to creators – is that you could actually breed the creaters out of userbase and by doing so, kill it.
Whole podcast is worth a listen. Leo states a lot of my own concerns with the future of the Mac platform.
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On the “death” of Silverlight
This week, Microsoft announced their changing strategy regarding Silverlight. You can read more about that here:
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-our-strategy-with-silverlight-has-shifted/7834.
[Edit: 10/01/2010]
Note, this post just came out today, which clarifies things a lot. https://team.silverlight.net/announcement/pdc-and-silverlight/
[/Edit]The key points are that going forward, Silverlight’s focus will be as the framework with which you will create Windows Phone 7 applications. As for Rich Internet/Interactive Applications on the web, Microsoft is going to start pushing HTML 5 as the solution.
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How to Run a Blog
Running a blog is easy. I’d love to come up with 10 rules for running a blog, but I couldn’t think of 10 really important ones. The ones I’m going to list are the bare minimum though.
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If you have a blog, you need to post occasionally. If you’re not going to post something at least once a month or so, then it confuses people. Is this blog alive or dead? There are some good posts here, but the last one is 4 months ago. Should I subscribe? Is the author going to say anything else this year? Also, watch out if you find yourself doing a post like this: “Wow, I haven’t posted here in 6 months. I’ve been so busy doing [whatever]. But I promise I’m going to start posting more often.” If you have two or more of those in a year, and not much else, it might be time to give it up.
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Java on OS X for the uninformed
By uninformed, I count myself as number one. I’m writing this because I didn’t really get the whole Apple deprecating Java situation. It sounded serious, so I educated myself a bit. This post might be helpful for people who don’t understand what the big deal is. Turns out it’s really pretty simple.
So last week, Apple came out with this little announcement, which states the following:
As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the Java runtime ported by Apple and that ships with Mac OS X is deprecated. Developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X.
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More thoughts on Mac
I’ve been thinking a lot more about yesterday’s thoughts, and it occurred to me I’ve maybe been thinking about it all wrong. I’ve been into computers since about 1986 when I gained control over a Commodore 64 at work. On that machine, I learned BASIC, and a while later bought my first computer, a Commodore Amiga 500. Got into programming on that even more, and dug the demo scene, though only as an observer, not a hacker. My first PC was home built from a friend’s spare parts, and I built every desktop pc I ever had after that, carefully picking out the best motherboard, CPU, memory and all components one by one. For me, using a computer has always meant programming, hacking, diving into the internals.
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Thoughts on the 10.7 App Store
Today Apple announced OS X 10.7, aka “Lion”. One line reaction: I’m really glad I switched back to Windows when I did.
The most troubling aspect of the whole announcement was the unveiling of the OS X App store. Why would this be troubling, you ask? It’s just a way to buy apps, right? No big deal. Perhaps not, but here’s where I see this going:
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Apple will make 30% of every sale of every app that is sold through the app store now, just as they do with the iOS app store. Wow. I mean seriously, considering this thing will almost certainly take off, Apple just increased their potential earnings by … er… a lot.
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Learning XNA 3.0
Since there are no XNA 4.0 books out there yet (lots due for release in the next 2 months though) I picked up a 3.0 one. This one had some really great reviews and just into Chapter 3, I’m really impressed.
Thus far, I don’t think I’ve seen any major differences between what the book describes (3.0) and what I’m using (4.0). I’m sure some will crop up, but I’m not worried.
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More Windows Phone 7 Development Resources
Windows Phone 7 Jump Start Training 12 videos with close to 10 hours of hands on training. I’ve gone through the first two. Very accessible so far.
Programming Windows Phone 7 by Charles Petzold. This guy has been writing Windows programming books since day one. This is a free preview version of his new WP7 book.
C# Yellow Book by Rob Miles, one of the trainers in the Jump Start series above. The basics on C Sharp.
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Amazing Math Tutorial Video Site
I don’t have much more to say about this. Do you need to learn or brush up on any subject related to math? You will find a wealth of data here in a massive number of videos, each 10 minutes or under. Seriously, anything you want to learn is here, from the basics to advanced calculus. Where does this guy find the time?
I got the link from Brook Andrus’ site, where
Read more...sheHE (sorry, man!) gives a bit more info on the author. Pretty amazing guy.
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