June 2011
1 post
5 tags
WWDC iOS Predictions
It’s the eve of WWDC and what would it be without a few predictions? Here are the things that I expect to see for iOS at WWDC this year:
Syncing and OS updates with iTunes. This one really seems like a no brainer to me. I figure I’ll at least have one thing right on this list with this one.
OpenCL support. Apple didn’t increase the GPU power as much as they did with the...
November 2010
1 post
7 tags
iOS Audio Queue Tip of the Day™
I just spent a few hours tracking this one down and I figured I would share for anyone who might come across this on Google.
If you are using Audio Queues under iOS to stream audio and you want the queues to continue playing when the screen is locked, your buffer size must be at least 4096 samples. Apple has documented this in QA1606 for Audio Units, but it wasn’t immediately clear that...
October 2010
1 post
Apple, Adobe and Flash →
marco:
“Like the Ministry of Truth, it appears that Apple is deliberately attempting to usurp the meaning of the word Flash in the computing industry and redefine it.” — Jeff Rock makes a great point
Didn’t Macromedia/Adobe usurp the meaning of the word Flash first? Flash the software has been around since 1996. Flash memory has been around since the early 1980s. Why is Apple suddenly...
June 2010
1 post
iPhone 4
I haven’t said much on here lately, but I figured that I would add to the stream of reviews, criticism and praise for the iPhone 4. I picked mine up last Thursday at one of the local Apple stores, and despite a few problems with iTunes (error 13019) and that my new 32GB iPhone 4 can’t hold as much content as my old 32GB iPhone 3GS, it’s been an overall pleasant experience. ...
April 2010
13 posts
MacRumors: Adobe CEO Responds to Steve Jobs'... →
Narayen again returned to his claim that Flash is an open standard, calling Jobs’ claim of it being closed “amusing”. Adobe’s view of the world is multi-platform, allowing it to provide developers with tools to easily deploy their content across many devices and platforms, a concept that may not to Apple’s benefit in trying to lock customers in to its ecosystem.
So...
Screw You, Gizmodo
I wasn’t planning on saying anything here about the recent iPhone leak and Gizmodo’s handling of it. In my opinion, Gizmodo reporting on the iPhone was something that was well within their rights.
But last night, Gizmodo (I’m not linking to it as I don’t want to reward their behavior) posted an article on the Apple engineer who allegedly left the phone at a bar. In...
Adobe
I’m fairly agnostic about the whole Adobe-Apple scuffle. But I can certainly see why Apple wants to keep Adobe from controlling the user experience for their product. Adobe sees their user’s machines as something that belongs to Adobe, not the user. The user is just a way for Adobe to make money and you can just about see the contempt Adobe has for them.
Case in point - I just got...
Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Malicious intent →
Neven Mrgan has an interesting anecdote about the headphone jack on the original iPhone. Dunno if it’s true or not, but given how complex it is to get a consumer product out intto the market and the fact that they fixed it in the next iteration of the design (iPod touch just a few months later) gives it a lot of credibility in my mind.
Marco.org: iPad case woes →
I’ve been using my Apple case for the entire week now, and I have to say I’m rather disappointed with it myself. It’s only redeeming value is having the ability to prop up the iPad quickly for typing.
Besides the dust, I also managed to get a couple of small hairline scratches on my display as well while in the case. These appeared after only a days worth of usage.
At this...
iPhone OS 4.0
Good set of announcements yesterday from Apple. Nothing earth shattering, but overall it’s good progress for the iPhone OS. I was a bit disappointed that the iPad isn’t getting 4.0 at the same time as the iPhone, but given the circumstances, it’s not really surprising.
As for my predictions, I really only got the multitasking right - though some of the implementation details...
Marco.org: iBooks and private APIs →
iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.
I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my…
Marco makes some good points here, but I think the APIs that iBooks is using might only be...
My Own iPhone OS 4.0 Predictions
Since we have a couple of days before the big iPhone OS 4.0 announcement, I’ve decided to follow in the grand tradition of making a fool out of myself on the Internet. Yes, that’s right, I’m going to make a few “predictions” about iPhone OS 4.0 here. For those of you playing at home, come back in a few days to either laugh at me or wonder just how I had this...
iPad Impressions So Far
I picked up my iPad yesterday morning while in line with a few hundred other people or so at the local Apple Store. I was definitely a bit nervous about plunking down $500+ on a device I had never seen in person, let alone used. I had tried out Safari in the iPad Simulator, but of course, that’s not the same as using the real thing.
My first impression was, wow this is heavy. It’s...
March 2010
3 posts
Disabling Caps Lock In Linux
To disable it until the next time you log in:
$ xmodmap -e "clear lock"
To disable it for good:
$ xmodmap -pke > ~/.xmodmap.myown
$ vim ~/.xmodmap.myown
Change the line for keycode 66 (caps lock) to look like this:
keycode 66 =
February 2010
2 posts
Joel Spolsky's Fantastic Mercurial Tutorial →
A great tutorial on Mercurial by Joel Spolsky. And aptly named, too. If you have been tainted by Subversion or (shudder) CVS, make sure you at least read the first section. Even if you don’t read anything else, read the first section. Trust me, it’s that good.
PathPix on the iPhone (and iPad)
I was introduced to a really neat puzzle game on the iPhone yesterday by a friend. The game is called PathPix. There are 3 versions of the app — a lite, regular and pro version. The regular and pro versions offer different sets of puzzles. It’s best to start with the regular version and work your way up to the pro version later.
The game itself is a cross between a Nonogram (aka...
January 2010
16 posts
iPad and Multitasking
I’m seeing a few posts on the web regarding multitasking on the iPad and how the SDK doesn’t say anything about it. Apparently this is surprising to some people.
Without going into too much detail since there is an NDA on the 3.2 SDK, I would like to point out something: the iPad’s OS is called iPhone OS 3.2. It shouldn’t be any surprise that a major functionality change...
Apple and AT&T
There has been a lot of hype leading up to yesterday’s announcement of the iPad. I’m sure that the hype will continue right along until the release of the device and beyond. As interesting as all of the possibilities that the iPad will allow are, I wanted to talk about another subject. One that has also gotten quite a bit of attention over the past few months. And that is...
AppleInsider | Apple updates Boot Camp with... →
Nice to see Apple finally get the Windows 7 support in place with Boot Camp 3.1. I was also hoping for a fix for the issue where one of my CPUs pegs out at 100% when I have a cable plugged into the audio out jack, but I guess that will have to wait for Boot Camp 3.2.
Mac Dev Center: Memory Management Programming... →
Just a friendly little reminder of the memory management rules in Objective-C, since they seem to always cause so much confusion, despite being so simple:
This is the fundamental rule:
You take ownership of an object if you create it using a method whose name begins with “alloc” or “new” or contains “copy” (for example, alloc, newObject, or mutableCopy), or if you send it a retain message. You...
Better Ad-Hoc Builds on the iPhone
Ad-Hoc builds - what a pain. Seriously, Apple has made them much harder than they should be. And that’s after they have been much improved over the past couple of years. But they are very nice to have — especially if you are doing work with clients or if you want to send out builds to your army of testers.
This post is basically what I’ve found that helps in...
How to post photos on the internet
marco:
Take a boring photo with your 50mm f/1.8 prime wide open, with a small sliver of your subject in focus. Leave large portions of the subject outside of the focal plane, regardless of how important or interesting they are.
Rotate the camera 30 degrees before shooting.
Square-crop.
Oversaturate or slightly desaturate. Tint red to look old. Under no circumstances should you apply a...
Windows Driver Issue on Quad (i5 & i7) iMacs
As you may know, I’ve been having fun with Windows lately — first Vista and then after despair, XP. I thought I had everything going pretty good — except that every time I looked at the Task Manager, I had one CPU core running at 100%. Hmm, that’s odd…
I did a lot of digging around on this one. I was able to figure it out, with the help of a few tools: the...
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll continue to say it until it happens: Microsoft...”
– iPhone Development: CES Keynote (via quatermain)
Sparkfun Free Day
And just like that, it’s over. I wasn’t able to get through to place an order, despite having a shopping cart all ready, an account setup and even getting a page to pick my shipping method. The server load was just too much for them.
I hope that they talk about what happened behind the scenes today — was it all server load as suspected or were there issues with bandwidth as...
Nexus One Phone →
Definitely the best Android phone so far. It looks great for an HTC phone, has some great tech specs too, but still leaves some lingering questions:
Why don’t they support AT&Ts 3G network in the unlocked version? Is this because the unlocked phone is the exact same as the T-Mobile version and T-Mobile didn’t want the phone to work with AT&T’s 3G network? How much...
Final Vista (for me) Update
I finally gave up on Vista — the final straw was running out of space on the partition I had created for it. You would think that 60GB would be enough to install an OS onto with all of it’s updates — especially since that’s the size of one of the hard drives in one of my Macs running Snow Leopard.
I have instead switched to XP for Boot Camp. It’s a bit frustrating...
Intel Larrabee story revealed
→
This came via Miguel de Icaza on Twitter. Very interesting read about what’s been happening behind the scenes at Intel with Larrabee. I’ve been very interested in Larrabee, since it represents the continuation of moving more and more onto the general purpose CPUs instead of having specialized chips for things like 3D graphics. The idea of being able to have a very large multicore...
Digital Copy
I’ve noticed that quite a few movies these days are coming out as a Blu-ray+DVD+Digital Copy now — I just picked up a copy of Up at Target for $20, for example. I think this is a really smart way for the studios to get people to upgrade to Blu-ray. Right now, I happen to own two movies on Blu-ray, but no player yet. I hadn’t really thought about buying a Blu-ray player before...
Recursive Descent →
A co-worker of mine from Zeemote just started a new blog. Paul’s a really smart guy, so it should be an interesting read. Go check it out.
December 2009
34 posts
Vista Updates
I’m really starting to wonder if I’ll be able to have a fully updated Vista install by the end of the year now. Since last night at 9:30, the machine has been trying to install 25 updates, and it’s spent over an hour on the 24th update now. I’m pretty certain I could’ve installed Snow Leopard (or even Leopard or Tiger) and had it fully updated by this point. Really...
Windows 7 and Boot Camp →
Looks like Apple is almost certainly not going to meet it’s self-declared deadline of end of 2009 for Windows 7 support in Boot Camp. Of course, there is still almost 2 days to go in 2009, but with all the rumors on the web about a tablet, I don’t think Windows 7 support is their highest priority.
On an aside, it is now going on almost 2 months since Snow Leopard was updated and 3...
Windows Vista
Someone please tell me that was a joke, right? Because even though I don’t care for Microsoft that much, I have a hard time believing that even they could’ve released something as horrible to install as Vista.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if you are attempting to install Vista from the install DVD, you’ve already failed. There is no sane reason why after almost 7...
mxcl's homebrew at master - GitHub →
I shared this on my Google Reader share the other day, but before I had really had a chance to try it out. But now I have had the chance, and I have to say, I am pretty impressed with it so far. For the packages I’ve installed with it so far, it has hands down beaten Fink and MacPorts in simplicity, ease of use, and minimizing the amount of crap on my machine. In fact, it’s...
The Unarchiver →
I just went looking for this again to install on my machine and I wanted to not only remind myself for the future, but also share it with others.
The Unarchiver is a replacement for the BOMArchiveHelper.app that comes with MacOS X. You drag it to your Applications folder, run it once to setup which files it handles, and then pretty much forget about it. From then on, it will handle opening most...
Dear Google
Just because I happen to email someone else who has a Gmail account from my own Gmail account doesn’t mean that I want them to automatically be on my Gtalk friends list. Can you stop doing this please?
Thanks!
“A Geologist and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from...”
– What is your best programmer joke? - Stack Overflow
