http://www.matthew-long.com Matt Long's Blog About Programming and Stuff Fri, 16 May 2008 12:27:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There is nothing fun about Java. Every possible good facet's goodness is completely predicated on the requirement that you know how to set up and or get around some soul sucking gotcha. Where it's been said that even a language such as Perl can make "easy things easy and hard ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/05/15/that-sucking-sound-is-java-killing-your-soul/ 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 ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/04/03/becomeanxcoder-and-give-please/ 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 ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/04/02/bring-on-the-comments/ 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 ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/03/26/scott-stevenson-on-writing-copy-for-product-pages/ 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 ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/03/20/microsoft-product-launch-less-than-inspiring/ 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 ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/03/16/core-animation-tutorial-dashboard-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... ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/03/11/guitar-hero-on-the-commodore-64/ 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 ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/03/05/zarra-studios-releases-iweb-buddy-the-post-processor-for-iweb/ 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 ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/03/04/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 ... http://www.matthew-long.com/2008/02/29/windows-programmers-shifting-to-the-mac/