Entries Tagged 'Mac Rumors' ↓

It’s a bold new year for Ruby. The recent release of Ruby 1.9 (though it’s still not a production ready release), the inclusion of Ruby as an officially bundled item in OS X 10.5 (though 10.5 still needs a few dot-versions to reach production release itself), Rails 2.0, a whole plethora of new Ruby books…The Ruby year is going to be a good one. It may end up being a bit frustrating when the push to migrate to 1.9 actually does come, but shouldn’t be too bad.On the book side, there is a very interesting Ruby Design Patterns book as well as a few others, such as the Practical Ruby Projects book, and the FXRuby book.Now, we just need a RubyCocoa book, a Ruby Qt, a Ruby Tk, and a WxRuby book.We also need a Ruby game development book. I don’t have any interest in Lua, and Python is the Ruby for people who like the way Python does things.Myself, I’m working on a Cocoa wrapper app for RubyGems called Gem Commander. I’ve already got a proof of concept working app, but it’s slow going dealing with Cocoa and Objective-C after doing Ruby so much. Here is the logo for Gem Commander…  You see, Ruby is just so expressive and feels modern. Objective-C and Cocoa (and AppleScript, while we’re at it) all definitely show their age after coming from Ruby. The method signatures in Objective-C are conceptually very cool, and the whole thing beats the hell out of C++ or Visual Basic, but the naming of methods and the way things work is sometimes just not graceful at all. (especially, as I said, after doing things in Ruby)Even RubyCocoa is just a dog in comparison to straight Ruby. It does present the opportunity to mix good Ruby expressiveness in to things, but at the cost of still needing to navigate through Apple’s ridiculous documentation. Apple really really really could learn a lot about documentation in the modern world from the Rails crowd. (minus the people Zed Shaw bitches about… ).On the subject of Apple, AppleScript itself is really a dog these days and is overlooked or under-attended by developers. Apple really just needs to overhaul the whole damn thing in favor of serious Python, Perl and Ruby scriptability out-of-the-box. Then, you would see a real explosion of cool stuff. 

Scotty is branching out and kind of bringing others on board… Late Night Cocoa is now part of the Mac Developer Network. But there’s more! A new podcast from Scotty, Mac Developer RoundTable is out and is as excellent as Late Night Cocoa, but with the different dynamic of multiple developers on together and interacting, sharing stories and bouncing ideas around! ( tune in for each episode to see what way they’ll geek out in the end when things start to break down at the end…)
Boris has also joined the Mac Developer Network, with his also great podcast, Cocoa Cast. Boris is also soon bringing us something new called Cocoa Cast Express.

And, if anybody is wondering where that very cool artwork for Late Night Cocoa, Mad Developer Roundtable and Cocoa Cast Express came from… me! So all of you developers out there, if you want some cool design work done for your application, you can always contact me and we can certainly work something out. And if you’re still reading at this point, rest assured, that my blog (you’re reading it now) is not the finest example of my artistic skills, but you may find some tidbits in here…

I’m a huge fan of Macs, no doubt about that. But… Cocoa programming leaves a lot to be desired at times. Continue reading →

For all those eager to learn Cocoa programming, yet stuck (blessed?) with 10.5 and Xcode 3, you know who you are… there is no way to run older versions usually. However, you can actually run Xcode 2.5 on Leopard! I know, I know, you want to use garbage collection, right? Well, it’s not the panacea you think it is for everything.

But for those who are still trying to learn using the Hillegass book with Xcode 3, this come from the proverbial horse’s mouth in a post to the Cocoa-Dev list:

From: Aaron Hillegass
Subject: Using “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” with Xcode 3.0

Friends,

I am getting some emails that go something like this:
“Hey! I just bought ‘Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd Edition’ and
none of your directions work on Xcode 3. I hate you, I hate you, I
hate you.”

I understand your frustration, and I am sincerely sorry if you feel
that you have been cheated. The tools have changed a lot, and the
third edition won’t be ready for several more months. Let me point
out, however, that the frameworks themselves have changed very little
and the ideas in the book are still useful.

To use the 2nd edition with Xcode 3, you need to know how the new
tools are used. In particular:
1) You don’t create classes in Interface Builder any more. Create the
class in Xcode, and type in the outlets and actions.
2) You don’t have to explicitly reparse the .h files — Interface
Builder will automatically reparse the file every time it is saved.
3) Instead of control-dragging for every pointer IB, you control-click
on an object to get its connection panel, and drag from there.

To get comfortable with these changes, I suggest that you do Apple’s
tutorial before starting on my book:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjCTutorial/

Skip my Palettes chapter! It is hopelessly out-of-date and unusable.

It will still require some patience to get through the book. If you
don’t have the patience, return the book to wherever you purchased it
– the new edition with Core Data, more Bindings, Web Services, View
Swapping, NSTask, Xcode 3, and Objective-C 2 will be available in the
Spring or early Summer.

Will I destroy my apology/helpful email with something crass and
commercial? I can not resist: I will be using a draft of the 3rd
edition of “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” at the Cocoa Bootcamp, Jan
14 - 18. If you want a seat, call 678-595-6773 to reserve one:
http://www.bignerdranch.com/classes/cocoa.shtml
We can send an instructor to your company, if that is more convenient/
cost-effective for you.

Also, Big Nerd Ranch will be running its first WebObjects course in
Germany, March 10 - 14:
http://www.bignerdranch.com/classes/webobjects.shtml
To register for that, call +49 (931) 9911-485.

Sincerely,
Aaron HIllegass
Big Nerd Ranch, Inc.

Well, I gave Leopard a day; One whole day of mostly lost time trying to get things working for developing again. Granted, Continue reading →

Ok, let’s put 2 and 2 together. Apple has created a truly working touch screen interface with the iPhone and iPod Touch. Pen tablets have been around a long time. Tablet PCs have started to make business inroads lately, meaning we’re probably in the midst of a quiet transition away from paper for many things. (but not completely. Not without nanopaper)

OS X comes with a darn good stylus/tablet capability rolled into it.

Some time over the next year we may well see a Mac that has a touch interface and a stylus for more precision. It will likely be a tablet computer maybe even a sub-notebook size. But it will probably have a screen around Letter size (or the more global standard A4)

But just imagine the sheer possibilities of reasonably priced iMac used as a programmable interface…! Goodbye crappy kiosks… Hello XCode Touch.

Objective-C 2.0 is coming this month and some of the most important features are Properties, Garbage Collection, and Iterators. Continue reading →

Wow. Xcode and Leopard are going to be better! Xcode now apparently does PHP and Ruby and Rails in addition to XHTML and CSS. Let’s just hope they stole a lot of keyboard shortcuts from TextMate… Can’t wait to get my hands on this cat.
And, unlike Microsoft and Windows, it’s all freely included in OS X 10.5 Leopard !
How can anybody say that Macs are more expensive, when all the dev tools are free !?
I know Windows dev tools are anything but free, and no way they’ve ever been this cool.

One thing I’ve always wanted: syntax highlighting that actually shows scope!

Looks like Objective-C 2.0 has borrowed a bit from Ruby! Those Apple engineers, they just kick ass at making good stuff with end-users in mind.

Learn more at:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/developer/

Oh, and let’s hope that the inclusion of PHP and Ruby and Rails means that those tools will be updated regularly (or at least update-able ). After all, web software changes rapidly, and with the impending releases of Ruby 2.0 and Rails 2.0 in the next few months to a year, we can’t just have a one-time installation. We will need the ability to update gems and such.

Now all we can ask for is that Apple gets into making it better for developers who want to make games for the Mac. Investing in some game libraries (cross-platform…?) or even say Nintendo (the two companies would be soooo beautiful together…)…?

OS X is great. The bundled apps all have nice levels of integration and conveniently communicate with each other in intelligent ways. The way they tend to try to guess what you want in Mail.app by accessing information from Address Book.app is wonderful.
But… Continue reading →

Why Safari for Windows? It’s not about competing with IE or Firefox directly. Not at all. It’s already been said that for this iteration of the iPhone, the API is Safari. That means WebKit, that’s why Safari is on Windows. It allows developers on Windows to test apps for iPhone!