Mar 11 — 23
I picked up a PlayStation 3. I wasn't really even considering it a few months ago, but things have happened since then. Prices came down, and the future seems brighter now. I think the PS3 is starting to find its voice
Mar 09 — 34
The iPhone SDK has finally arrived. Although the community has figured out how to put together apps in some very awkward ways, there's a real environment now. Not just real frameworks, but profiling tools, drag-and-drop UI creation, remote debugging, and a simulator. And normal people can run the apps
Feb 26 — 6
My friend's two kids got to live a ten-year-old's dream last night — a drive over to Emeryville to take a look inside Pixar. Josh Anon actually made this happen, walking us around the main building, showing us storyboards, concept art, and full-size recreations of Pixar characters
Feb 24 — 5
I'm thrilled to share three variations of NanoLife that other developers have put together based on the original project. Each one does something a bit different
Feb 21 — 36
NanoLife is a simple Core Animation project with a single layer-backed view and a collection of sublayers. Each sublayer has a glowing sphere and moves along a random path, giving the impression of a microscopic lifeforms (or maybe fireflies?)
Feb 16 — 28
I've seen a number of comments here which ask about the upcoming third edition of Aaron Hillegass's Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. Without doing an exhaustive review, I can tell you that this book continues the tradition of being the best introductory Cocoa book available
Feb 15 — 10
Super Mario Galaxy is probably my favorite video game ever. Not that it's better than every game in every way, but taking everything into account — gameplay, graphics, musical score, depth and variety — it wins for sheer overall wonderfulness. It's what I want a game to be
Feb 14 — 6
The Google Video page for the Core Animation talk allows viewers to leave comments. Someone called "twobyte" corrected my note in the talk about needing to build 64-bit in order to use NS and CG geometry types interchangeably. It turns out you just need to define NS_BUILD_32_LIKE_64
Feb 13 — 28
The video from the First Look at Core Animation CocoaHeads talk for Feb 7 is now available as part 1 and part 2 on Google Video. Slides and projects are available for download as well
Feb 05 — 10
The next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting will be this Thursday, Feb 7 at 7:30pm. I'm going to give a high-level introduction to Core Animation. Lucas Newman will be there to give some demos and answer questions. This meeting is earlier in the month than usual — two days from today
Feb 01 — 9
Bill Dudney is nearing completion on a book on Core Animation, published by The Pragmatic Programmers. A beta version of the book is now available for purchase, which entitles you to a paper copy when it ships
Jan 31 — 17
John Gruber went out of his way to mention that Transmission is a cross-platform app which is actually very good on the Mac. In other words, it feels like it was designed for the platform. I was curious about this, so I looked at the source. I found a pleasant surprise
Jan 29 — 8
A long-overdue episode of Odds and Ends. Fractal flames, hippos and crocodiles, octopus stealth techniques, Starcraft around the world, easter eggs in Amazon Kindle, and more
Jan 27 — 10
As a complement to the MacFUSE CocoaHeads talk, Joar Wingfors posted video for the Q&A and demos which followed the main talk. Two of the three projects demoed are now available for download
Jan 18 — 35
John Gruber says the MacBook Air is "clearly designed as a secondary machine, not a main machine" — mainly because of the chip used and the storage capacity. I think this is true for his purposes, but there's an entire category of users that could use this not just as their primary, but their only computer
Jan 15 — 1
You can get a taste of Macworld and San Francisco in general by browsing the macworld08 and mwsf08 Flickr tags. I've gone up the staircase at Moscone North who knows how many times, but this photo by Robert Donovan made me see it in a whole new light
Jan 11 — 9
Ted Bonkenburg's talk last night on MacFUSE went fantastically well. This was the largest CocoaHeads Silicon Valley audience yet, and Joar Wingfors was gracious enough to take the time to record and encode video from the event
Jan 10 — 0
CocoaHeads Silicon Valley is tonight at 7:30pm, with a presentation from Ted Bonkenburg of Google on making user-space filesystems with MacFUSE. The meeting is still in Apple Building 4, but we will be in "Garage 1," which is directly upstairs from the usual Town Hall room
Jan 08 — 22
It's easy to get lost along the way. You get swept up in parents, siblings, teachers, co-workers, guidance counselors, even friends. A lot of them will tell you who they think you're supposed to be. You have to ignore them
Jan 03 — 0
Ted Bonkenburg of Google will give a talk on MacFUSE at the next CocoaHeads Silicon Valley meeting on Thursday, January 10. MacFUSE is an open-source project which allows developers to write user-space filesystems (Update: Thursday, January 10, Update 2: Slight relocation)
Jan 03 — 1
A new Wall-E trailer went up, like, two weeks ago and no one (ahem, Josh) told me. This one is two and a half minutes long, shows Wall-E doing his thing and reveals some basic (vague) plot points. But wait, there's more
Jan 01 — 10
I don't think anyone could have scripted this year. It was more like tumbling along in a hurricane than walking a slow and steady path. There were two big — really big — landmarks for Mac developers this year, so it's hard to pin one as the definitive event
Dec 24 — 30
The Learn Cocoa tutorial at Cocoa Dev Central is updated for Leopard. It turns out this actually isn't as easy as just swapping a few screenshots in. Interface Builder was completely rewritten, so everything is in a new place
Dec 20 — 2
The Silicon Valley chapter of NSCoder Night will take the next two weeks off, because both dates happen to fall on major holidays. We'll start again on January 8. CocoaHeads Silicon Valley is currently scheduled for January 10 at Apple. More details to follow on venue and topic
Dec 20 — 39
I've used Photoshop for eleven years. I use it mostly for design, but also for touching up photos, editing screenshots, and so on. Any image editor I might use either has to replace Photoshop entirely, or carve out its own space. Acorn does the latter
Follow your bliss.
