Category: Apple

Steve Jobs – 1985

I recently finished reading a long interview with Steve Jobs that was published in Playboy back in 1985. You can find a text version of it here or read it at Playboy.com here. Some of the stuff in the interview is kind of funny, in retrospect. Some other stuff is a little heartbreaking, for obvious reasons. My favorite part of the interview is when they started talking about the future of computing:

PLAYBOY: What will change?

JOBS: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.

PLAYBOY: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?

JOBS: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.

PLAYBOY: Then for now, aren’t you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?

JOBS: In the future, it won’t be an act of faith. The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.

iOS programming

I’m more than half-way through my iOS programming class at NYU. I’ve missed one class due to a flat tire, and I’ve been a bit under the weather during a couple of classes, but I’m definitely getting something out of the class.
I’ve made a Hypotrochoid generator the basis for my previous two homework assignments, so that’s been kind of fun. I didn’t figure out the code for this myself. Rather, I took the C# code found here, and converted it to Objective-C / Cocoa.
All of my homework code is up on my Github page, if anyone wants to look at it for some reason.
And here’s a quick screencast of my app. Not that exciting really, but fun to write.

Dark Horse

I’ve bought a few digital comics via the Comixology iPad app over the last year, but I hadn’t bought any through the Dark Horse app until today. I just bought the new Groo mini-series (which apparently came out in print in 2009), and a Classic Usagi Yojimbo mini-series, which may be a digital-only release. The bundle pricing on these books is pretty reasonable, but you can only buy the bundles through the web site, not the app.
I’ve found myself reading comics on the iPad a lot recently, mostly while I’m on the train. I should really be working my way through the Programming iOS 4 ebook that I started a while ago, but I’ve been finding that my brain isn’t really up for that sometimes.
One interesting comic I’ve been reading via Comixology recently is Vision Machine. The whole three-issue series is completely free. It originally came out just about one year ago, and there was a panel about it at last year’s NYCC, moderated by Andy Ihnatko.

iOS 5

I haven’t updated either my iPhone or iPad to iOS 5 yet, but, as a programmer, I’m happy to see that they’re finally doing automatic reference counting in Objective-C. I’m wondering if the instructor for my NYU iOS class is going to work any iOS 5 stuff into the class or not.  I could see where it would be hard to update class materials on the fly for this stuff, and our classroom iMacs probably still haven’t been updated to the latest version of XCode, but I’m hopeful.

RIP Steve

So sad to hear of Steve Jobs passing tonight. Only 56 years old. I’m starting an iOS dev class at NYU tomorrow night. That first class is going to feel a little weird now. I remember, years ago, being kind of mad at Steve for killing off the Newton, and its OS. It took a while to get from the Newton to where we are now with iOS, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, but we wouldn’t have gotten here without Steve Jobs. And I have to grudgingly admit that killing the Newton was probably the right decision. Sorry Steve.

iMac


iMac
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

When I agreed to develop a Mac app for a client, I’m not sure why I agreed to make it backward-compatible to OS 10.4. Now I’m stuck testing my app on this crazy thing.

The weird thing about Cocoa development is that there are perfectly innocuous things that work fine on 10.6, but don’t work at all on 10.4. And that don’t throw errors either, so it’s pretty hard to nail them down.

Cocoa project

The Cocoa/Mac project that I’ve been working on is pretty much done. It’s not a really big or complicated program, but I just ran a ‘wc’ on it, and it’s a bit over 1400 lines of code, so it’s not trivial either. I’m betting that, if I was more experienced with Cocoa, it could probably be, maybe, 900 lines instead of 1400, but that’s still a reasonable size. Oh, and if I didn’t have to support OS X 10.4, and could have used the garbage collector and other stuff that only works in 10.5+, I could probably have shaved off another 100 lines of code.

My program is replacing an old program written in FutureBASIC. Looking back at the source code for that, it was a bit over 600 lines of code, all in one file. You can definitely write a shorter program if you don’t have to declare variables, or allocate and release memory for them.

Overall, I had some fun learning a new language and a new framework, and figuring out how to solve problems that would have been trivial for me to solve in .Net/C#. I’d like to learn some more Cocoa stuff now, and maybe try writing an iOS app. I don’t really have a specific idea for an app, but I’ll figure something out.

NSTableView

I just spent what seems like an inordinate amount of time getting an NSTableView to work exactly the way I wanted it to. This page was a good reference, even though it’s a few years old. And thank god for Stack Overflow. I have the feeling that I’ve cobbled something together that a serious Mac developer would laugh at, but it does work, so I’m happy.

Mercurial and Git with Xcode 4

I’ve been reading up a bit more on Xcode 4. The prior version, Xcode 3, had SCM integration with Subversion, Perforce, and CVS. The new version has support for Subversion and Git. (I’m not sure if they dropped CVS and Perforce, but I’ve only seen Subversion and Git mentioned.) And, of course, I decided a couple of weeks ago to use Mercurial instead of Git. Oh well. It’s not a big deal to do version control outside of the IDE, but it’s always nice to have it integrated.

I think I’ll be sticking with Mercurial anyway, since Bitbucket allows unlimited private repositories under their free plan, while Github doesn’t.

XCode 4

I was surprised to read that Apple released Xcode 4 today. Usually, I’d know about something like this in advance, but I seem to have missed this entirely.

I’ve been doing a lot of work in Xcode over the last few weeks, trying to learn Cocoa programming, and working on a small contract job, rewriting an old OS 9 FutureBasic app.

I’m a little disappointed to see that they’re charging $5 for it now. That’s not much, compared to, say Visual Studio 2010 Professional, but of course you can get VS 2010 Express for free. I wonder if Apple will make a limited version of Xcode 4 available for free. I think it would be in their best interests.

I think I’m going to stick with Xcode 3 for now, since I need to get this project done, and all my reference material right now is oriented towards Xcode 3. Once I’m done with the current project though, I’ll probably download and install Xcode 4. I’m not sure how I feel about the switch to a single-window interface, but I like the fact that Interface Builder will no longer be a separate program, and it looks like they’ve made a number of other cool little improvements.