My last post was intended to be pretty tongue-in-cheek, but I’m guessing that a lot of people won’t get my dry humor, so I better explain.
First of all, I wasn’t complaining about Objective-C or saying there’s anything wrong with it. I love the language. It’s different, but it grows on you. Nor was I complaining about ActionScript.
If anything I was poking fun at the religiousness that finds its way into programming languages. The concept that strict typing is good, and vital, and you couldn’t possibly live without it and any language that isn’t strictly typed is a joke. Sure, strict typing has a lot of good points and great benefits like those I mentioned in the previous post. But dynamic typing certainly has its benefits too. Get off the “right” and “wrong” in programming. Languages are different. They do things differently. Different languages have different strengths. I’ve heard a few people suggest that eventually we’ll all be programming in a single language that will do everything. I think that’s incredibly naive. There are certain tasks you really NEED to do in a low level language like C of C++ or even lower like assembly. And there are a lot of other things that you absolutely DO NOT want to waste time programming in C for. I doubt there will ever be one language to rule them all.
Read more...When I started working with ActionScript, you could pretty much get away with anything. You had to screw up pretty bad to get a compiler error. If you got the thing to compile, you were golden. Your SWF might not do what you want it to do, but it would happily plug away doing its best. If it ran into something it couldn’t do, it shrugged its little virtual machine shoulders and moved on to the next thing. About the only thing you could do to take it down was an infinite loop. And when I say “infinite”, you know I mean “more than 15 seconds”.
Read more...A week ago I thought Sys-con was a somewhat seedy, maybe even just a sloppy publisher. “Oops! We just forget to get permission to use that photo / article. Sorry about that. Won’t happen again … til next time.”
Then they launched Ulitzer, set up 6000 unaware authors with profile pages, skim articles from their blogs and past magazine issues, Oh, yes, offered 200% adsense payments, but it kind of depended on you actually knowing that you were one of these 6000 authors and editing your profile to submit your adsense account number. Unfortunately, every “Ulitzer Author” I talked to or heard from had no idea that they were a “Ulitzer Author” and one for one wanted to be removed. I guess the old saying, “easier to ask forgiveness than permission” applies here, especially when you’re ripping off 6000 authors. Then again, that’s a lot of forgiveness to ask.
Read more...Yesterday, Aral Balkan started twittering like crazy about this site called Ulitzer. I was pretty busy at work so didn’t pay much attention, but then he mentioned my name in connection with it. It turns out that Ulitzer is a company that is owned by Sys-con. What they are doing is recycling content from Sys-con and publishing it as new articles. Then they put up a profile page for the author with a bio and all your articles and make is look like you are one of the contributors to this site. Aral started searching names in the Flash / Web community and twittering their pages. I don’t think any of us knew we were “Ulitzer authors”.
Read more...I wrote a lot of this entry right in San Jose as the conference was on-going. And finished most of it up on the flight home. That being the case, It doesn’t really make sense that it’s taken be a week and a half to post it, but … there’s the story of my life. Anyway, I went to the new iPhone conference, 360iDev a couple of weeks ago, out in San Jose. This is put on by John and Tom who do the 360Flex conferences. All in all, it was a good time. I learned a lot, made some cool contacts, and largely felt like I got a feel for this developing community. There is room for improvement. As you will see reading below, I was hoping for more code and technical data. But this was the first one, and it was kind of a test. I’m sure it has the potential to evolve into something great.
Read more...Vote here: https://www.25lines.com/?page_id=231
More info on what’s going on with it, here: https://www.25lines.com/?p=238
Read more...This report by CNET quotes a source that says Android sales will outstrip iPhone by 2012.
Ridiculous!!!
Why? Because I am invested in iPhone development? Because I don’t like Android? No. Because anyone who thinks they can predict this market 3 years into the future is on drugs. Or should be.
The iPhone did not exist 3 years ago in 2006. Android is less than a year old. Think back 3 years. Did these researchers predict that Apple would come up with the iPhone and that it would take the world by storm and a year and a half later Google would start being a phone company? NO! But I bet they were making bold predictions about Nokia and Motorola or whatever device manufacturers were hot back then.
Read more...In my previous post, I showed how you could set up a model and using key/value observing, know when various properties of the model were changed. There is one potential problem with this method, as Sam Wan brought up on the comments – you only get one method to respond to all the model changes: observeValueForKeyPath:ofObject:change:context:. So if you are observing many properties of the model, you wind up with a big if/else or switch statement to figure out what change just occurred. I was thinking about, and mentioned, the idea of passing in selectors as contexts when making the addObserver call. This post is about how you would go about doing this.
Read more...As promised.
https://www.bit-101.com/fitc/2009/fitc_ams_09.zip
Read more...Well, I’m back from Amsterdam and had quite an enjoyable time.
I wound up on the same flight as Chris and Rebecca Allen, though we didn’t sit near each other. But we hung out at Logan Airport beforehand and got the train into Amsterdam together on the other end. After I sat down, another guy squeezed in beside me and said, “I’ll apologize in advance. I have a really bad cough…” The flight was a red-eye, leaving at 7pm and getting into Amsterdam at 8am. He coughed the whole time. No rest for those sitting beside sick passengers.
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