Long Pointers

This was posted on cocoalab back in October and I’m just now seeing it, but this online book BecomeAnXCoder looks fantastic! I will start pointing people who are interested in Mac OSX programming who have no programming experience there from now on. I hope these guys can continue to produce high-quality content. Which appears debatable–not because they don’t have the ability to create quality content–clearly they do, but because they seem to be having trouble supporting it.

I noticed when I visited the site this note in bold at the top:

Please Donate! Our bandwidth is at record levels: 29 GB in March, and donations do not even come close to covering our costs. If you appreciate our work, please take a minute to send a donation.

I do appreciate their work myself, but it’s mainly because I would send more people, new programmers that is, to them–which in turn is what is giving them the problem of using too much bandwidth in the first place.

To the folks over at Cocoa Lab, this statement really makes you sound desperate. I hope you can get the support you need, but when you give away content for free, a statement like this suggests that maybe your ultimate intention wasn’t to give it away, but rather to give it first so that people may donate. If this is a business model for you, it looks like it’s not working out the way you expected, so, with the deepest sincerity, I thought I might offer a few possible solutions to your predicament.

• Talk to a publisher. This is really good content that you could probably sell. Show it to a publisher and see what they think. I’ve heard of publishers that *may* be accepting proposals from Mac Programming authors
• Get cheaper webhosting. There is this company called 1and1 that provides shared hosting (which would work fine for the content you are providing) and give you 2.5TB, yes that was TERABYTES!!, of transfer bandwidth per month for the affordable price of $9.99 per month. You can sign up at 1and1 now. And yes that link is my affiliate link. I will get a kickback if you sign up!! That’s not a sales pitch–just a disclaimer.
• Convert the site to a blog site. If you make your site into a blog rather than a book and continue to add new content, the benefit to the Cocoa development community continues to grow. It’s great with the content that’s there now, and to those who haven’t checked it out yet there is a *ton* of content, but keep it coming.

I write this not to chastise, but to be helpful. I hate to see good content producers go un-rewarded for their efforts. The solution, however, is either to change your approach, or change your expectations. Best regards to the BecomeAnXCoder writers. Keep up the great work.

For those who, like me, hear lyrics incorrectly on a regular basis and if you blog, you may be able to appreciate my most recent mistake. I heard the song Bring On the Comets by VHS Or BETA and started to ask my wife when the song got to the chorus, “what are they saying?” “Bring on the comments?”. “Are these guys bloggers?”

Well, my wife laughed (ok, laughed is a little strong. I think she smiled… maybe), but now every time I do a blog post I get this song in my head. So, without further ado, this post is live, bring on the comments… Listen to it on iTunes.

For other misheard songs, check out KissThisGuy - The Archive of Misheard Lyrics

Scott Stevenson, webmaster and author for his Cocoa development site Cocoa Dev Central and weblog Theocacao, has written a new post on writing copy for product pages. The ‘keep it simple’ meme is the gist, but read what he has to say.

This is quite interesting to me as I have a product release that is imminent. Well, maybe not imminent. The code is almost done. Now I need to write some copy, figure out the PayPal IPN, incorporate Sparkle… etc. etc. Ok. Nevermind. It’s not imminent.

Anyhow, thanks for the post Scott. This is good stuff.

So we drove up to Denver this morning for the Microsoft Product Launch they’ve dubbed Heroes Happen Here (exsqueeze me? What?). We all got signed up late so we had to do the morning sessions which weren’t the developer sessions.

That was really fine because we were all only going for the free software. I’ve gotta say, though, that the sessions were nothing but big snooze-fests. Maybe the developer track was better, but wow. ZZzzzzzzz.

After attending one session, we went to a different track to see if it was any better. Had to leave within a few minutes for fear that the enthusiasm with which these folks presented their topics was enough to make one’s mind seize up from inactivity (doesn’t work that way, but I’m bad at analogies. Work with me here).

Ok. I exaggerate. When we did duck out of the second session early, much to our surprise and delight, we found that they were handing out the goods without requiring the session evaluations. Sweet! We grabbed the software and got outta there. The software included Visual Studio 2008 (Standard), SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.

I haven’t done any Windows development in a while, but should the time come again that I need to, I will have the latest software. It was worth the trip, but only for that reason. The presentation was, well… lacking.

Don’t think they have that problem on that other platform.

I just finished another Core Animation tutorial and posted it at CIMGF over the weekend. This was a pretty fun one. I wanted to duplicate the effect of the Dashboard widgets flying in and out from off screen and this is what I came up with. Take a look and let me know what you think. Core Animation Tutorial: Dashbaord Effect.

Wow, some people have some serious hacking skills. That, and a lot of time. This guy built his own interface that allows him to connect the Guitar Hero controller for the Playstation up to his Commodore 64 on which he plays a Guitar Hero clone he calls Shredz64.

That’s very geeky… and cool!

Get more information at Toni Westbrook’s website and here is more about his Shredz64.

Colorado Springs, Colorado - Zarra Studios LLC announced today the release of iWeb Buddy. iWeb Buddy is a post processor application for iWeb that is designed to bring additional functionality to iWeb that professionals and “pro-sumers” have come to need on their web sites.

iWeb Buddy allows you to have multiple domain files with iWeb so that you can keep your sites separated into their own files. iWeb Buddy also post processes web pages created in iWeb; allowing the user to add Google Analytics, Social Bookmarking, Haloscan comments and custom HTML code to your website automatically.

In addition, iWeb Buddy remembers your settings, account numbers, etc. making it easy to update your website whenever you make a change in iWeb.

With iWeb Buddy, a user can “monetize” their websites that they have created in iWeb by being able to track the traffic on their sites, add custom html code for shopping carts and more.

Explains Marcus Zarra, owner of Zarra Studios, “iWeb is a great website design application. It is geared for the consumer but it is so close to being truly viable for professionals to use but it is missing a few key features - iWeb Buddy brings those features to iWeb.”

Features:
* Use multiple “domain” files with iWeb
* Add Google Analytics to your website
* Redirect your RSS feeds to sites like Feedburner
* Fix the RSS links on your iWeb blog pages
* Add Social Bookmarking to your blog posts
* Add Haloscan comments to your pages/blog posts
* Add Custom code to your web pages (WITHOUT IFRAMES)
* Add Mint site tracking to your webpages

Pricing and Availability
iWeb Buddy is available today for $25.00 USD for a single user license. A family license is also available for $35.00 USD. A demonstration copy is fully functional for the first 30 days and can downloaded from Zarra Studios website.

Congratulations on this release, Marcus and Zarra Studios!

Marcus can really crank these articles out. His latest demonstrates how to create a Wizard interface with next and previous buttons, however, this is not your average every day Wizard interface. This one employs Core Animation. When you click the next or previous buttons, you’ll see that the next view slides in from the right or left depending on which you clicked. Take a look at his latest tutorial post: Core Animation Tutorial: Wizard Dialog with Transitions.

The tide is turning or so it seems. Well, maybe it’s not quite so monumentous as a tide shift, but there is certainly a buzz in the air that I think is indicative of at least a gradual shift. I can’t speak for all Windows developers of course, but I’ve talked to enough of my friends to know that the Macintosh is no longer in their eyes some obscure computer made by some obscure computer company that makes computers for artists. It’s got some amazing tech that would appeal to any geek especially programmers who have the initiative to take advantage of it.

I made the switch to the Mac along with a job change back in June of 2007 and I have to say that I am glad I did. It’s not to say that there aren’t good tools for programmers on Windows, but there is most definitely a different approach to everything from the kinds of applications that you build to the way you build them on the Macintosh. These differences in some areas are subtle, but in others they are monumentous.

Core Animation, for instance, a technology that enables programmers to use animation to provide users with visual feedback of many different sorts (e.g. change window frame dimensions and watch the window change in steps rather than having the frame update instantly), is really groundbreaking. It’s not something that you see in Windows programming. There are many other technologies that have a similar appeal. Some frameworks that I’ve used such as WebKit–a framework for building web applications, or QTKit–a framework for building multimedia applications based around QuickTime, are exciting and interesting to work with.

I have made predictions in the past that haven’t come true, so when I make a prediction, you ought to take it lightly. However, on this one I feel pretty confident. Apple just gets doing technology elegantly and they’ve made their tools and libraries available to everyone so that anyone who takes the initiative can build elegant software themselves. This fact, I think, will soon have a snowball effect that will start brining programmers from the Windows world in droves. Considering the disappointment that Vista is and the fact that Microsoft doesn’t even seem to like it, Windows programmers are going to start looking for ways to deepen and broaden their toolsets and even consider new platforms such as the Mac.

So what are the hurdles to entry? I think the following list pretty well summarizes it:

• The cost of a Mac. I’ll put this one out there even though I don’t agree with it. To get a decent professional laptop, you’ll pay at least as much if not more to get similarly equipped systems to the MacBook Pro line. The MBPs were just recently upgraded and the price is actually excellent for the specs you’re getting
• The cost of the development environment. Oh wait… XCode is free and comes with every new Macintosh. Scratch that!
• Objective-C uses square braces. Well, you will need to learn a new language. Just take it by the horns and go for it. It’s not that hard and once you become proficient with it, you’ll prefer it. It’s very powerful and often intuitive.
• No real hurdles. There really aren’t any major hurdles to entry. Just get a Mac and start coding. It’s that easy. And if you need some pointers, take a look at my XCode 3.0 article to get your started. When you’re done with that, head on over to Cocoa Dev Central for some great tutorials or your can check out Cocoa is My Girlfriend a new site that Marcus and I put together.

If you are planning to switch or have just recently switched to the Mac, you should know that you are far more likely to find work building applications for consumers. Most of the work I’ve done over the years on Windows has been business software. This is one of the main differences. I think this will also shift over time, however, for right now, expect to build applications your mother might use rather than software your company might use. And if you have any questions as to what other benefits there are, talk to any successful independent Macintosh software vendor out there. There are lots of them and they do very well.

Marcus and I have started to have NSCoder Nights on Monday’s at Panera Bread on Powers near S. Carefree. We’ve been working to try to learn how to do certain OS X Leopard animation effects using Core Animation. The first challenge we took on was figuring out how to shake a window back and forth to indicate that the user has entered the wrong password in the login window. OS X does this when you try to login and enter your password incorrectly. If you’ve never seen it before, you either don’t have manual login enabled, or you’ve never entered your password incorrectly.

Anyhow, the article is short, but it has an XCode project that you can download and use. Take a look at the post, Core Animation Tutorial: Window Shake Effect and let me know what you think.