Programming

Finding relevant WWDC videos

As I’ve said before, I find the WWDC videos to be invaluable and I try watch all of them eventually. But there are a lot of them, and it can be hard to find what’s relevant. And a lot of them I go back and watch again when I start working with a different part of a project. So I’ve developed a trick, and I thought I’d share it with you all.

 2 min read

How can you edit, build and install iPhone and iPad Apps without being near a Mac?

I’m going to walk you through the process that XCAB uses (These steps are taken from this SlideShow). I have a refurb mini in my Living Room that I bought to be an Home Sharing server, and it’s more than up to the task. I’ve run it on my laptop, too, from time to time. As far as the iOS device, an iPad is obviously better to use for editing, because of the screen real estate, but the process is the same for both.

 2 min read

Video Demo: How to program an iPad by using an iPad, no jailbreak required

Here’s a video I put together to demonstrate how to use the code that I wrote that I blogged about last week to program an iPad with an iPad, without having to lug your laptop around with you (or jailbreak your device): Please excuse the fuzziness, I recorded it from my iPad 2 using a setup that converted it to a Standard Definition Analog TV signal along the way. Hopefully, it is close enough that you can get the idea of how it works.

 1 min read

AutoJournaling with VoodooPad - moving toward Interruptible Programmer Nirvana

Since I read the Interruptible Programmer, I’ve been trying to do a better job of handling interruptions. Well, specifically to reduce the effort it takes me to get back to where I was before the interruption happened. I and switch to a new task very easily, but my brain isn’t wired to get back to where I was, leading to much frustration (and lots of misplaced coffee cups that happened to be in my hand when I started answering a question when I was away from my desk).

 3 min read

The Value of Slow: Lessons Learned via the Golf Course

Once upon a time, I was working on a project at a high tech company in an LA suburb, and I was working for a manager that I’ll call Mike (because that was his name).Mike had once worked managing a group that put satellites in orbit, and from that experience he gathered some great wisdom, some of which he attempted to impart to me, and some smaller amount of which actually sunk into my young (at the time) head.

 2 min read

The Hard Stuff - iPhone App Design Edition

I was talking to my latest iPhone App customer today, and now that we’re both able to look at the prototype, we were talking about the features that we could add before the shipping version, or not. We talked about trade-offs, and I heard myself saying the same thing I’ve said many times before, so I thought I’d write it down. There are three really hard things about iPhone Apps (at least to me - I have a background Enterprise and Web Apps).

 2 min read

The decade of the developer?

This article claims that we’re entering the decade of the developer. I don’t know if that’s going to be true, but I’ve said before that changes to our industry, especially cloud computing, is making systems knowledge and Enterprise I.T. skills irrelevant. During the boom in the early 2001, I knew people here in Austin, Texas that were making $100K/year and up without a college education and with no formal training - because they had manage to acquire IT skills, experience, and had negotiated well for salaries in the past.

 2 min read

Horror Movie Productivity

A few years ago, I had a job that involved writing software while I worked at home. I, like many people in that situation, struggled with how to keep myself motivated.I found my thoughts wandered too much if the house was silent. I tried music, which had worked for me in an office setting, but I had trouble getting into “the Zone” like I felt I needed to.Eventually, I found something that worked quite well for me - horror movies.

 1 min read

On Becoming an Interruptable Programmer

Just read a great blog post on becoming an interruptible programmer. Since the older my daughter gets the more interruptions I get from her, I think I’m going to try this and see how it goes.(Via @GeorgeSealy)

 1 min read

Blog On

So I read this great article on why I should be blogging. So I decided I should start blogging.So here I am blogging :).Now, to be (at least partially) a programming blog, I need to be able to post code. I was playing with the High-Light plug-in for Rapid Weaver last year when I was playing with this blog the first time, but it doesn’t do Objective-C (at least not well - and Objective-C is what I’ll probably blog about the most), so I went hunting, and found highlight and used the installer from here to get it running on my Mac.

 1 min read

Rebasing Simplified

It occurred to me while I was working on a presentation about git for work, that rebasing happens every day, we just don’t think about it that way.Every time we get the latest version from (almost) any source control server, those changes get merged into our current working directory. That makes the changes we’ve been editing appear as if they were written after the latest server changes, even though we wrote them before.

 1 min read