Hi, I'm Martin and I write software. I also have a hell of a lot of stuff going through my head with thoughts and opinions on many things. Unfortunately, in this whole jumble I often fail to articulate my point of view very well. This blog is an attempt to rectify that by trying to put all my thoughts on various subjects down in one place. If you want to get in touch, email me at pilky@mcubedsw.com.
Autolayout has had a lot of bad press. A lot of people find it complex, confusing and more hassle than it's worth. They find the APIs a bit awkward to work with and the tools provided seem to work against them and break what they've done. I'm wanting to change that, so I'm working on various projects to help people learn and use Autolayout.
Yesterday the first clusterfuck elections were held for Police & Crime Commissioners. These are meant to be elected officials that oversee policing and crime prevention in 41 areas (excluding London). The turnout for these elections has been laughably low, ranging from 10% to just below 19%. These are the lowest peacetime election turnouts in history. Evidently many chose not to vote, me included. But why was that? I can't vouch for everyone but I can at least give my reasons.
8:30am: Hello and welcome to this coverage of Apple's October 12th Maps press conference. Apple called this conference in response to the uproar over their new Maps applications.
8:40am: We're noticing a lot of people filing in, dressed like tourists. I overheard one of them asking whether this was Buckingham Palace, and pointing to their iPhone claiming Siri sent them here.
Emacs or Vim? Tabs or Spaces? Mac or PC? There are many arguments between developers. One of the biggest ones in the Objective-C community is over dot-syntax. It's the argument that just keeps going. I'm on the side that doesn't particularly like dot syntax, but people often misunderstand the reasoning behind this position. So I'm going to outline it here.
A new year and a new version of Xcode 4. This of course means that it's time for me to drop everything and try to find out everything that's changed. Thankfully (for me at least), this is a relatively small update feature wise. I've been seeing two different responses to 4.3. Half of people seem to be experiencing a lot of crashes, but the other half seem to be seeing major performance improvements. I will be honest in admitting that I haven't really noticed either, but then again I'm still sure I have a special "more stable" build of Xcode that few others have. But besides that, what else has changed?
I'll start off by saying that I'm not suggesting you should not file bugs with Apple, you should. I'm also not going to suggest that Radar isn't a valuable tool to Apple, it is. But it's time to get something off my chest, something I've been wanting to rant about for ages.
I've spent a lot of time and words this year talking about what Xcode does have. At the same time I've spent quite a few tweets pining for certain features or wishing pain on those who are responsible for annoying bugs. I thought it would be an interesting idea to put together my personal wish list for the future of Xcode. These aren't in any particular order, though I have marked which are bugs I'd love to see fixed and which are features I'd like to see added. And finally I've included radar numbers where appropriate to allow you to file duplicates if you so desire.
The great Apple software release of 2011 happened a few weeks ago, bringing the likes of iOS 5 and iCloud. But we don't really care about those in this post, what we care about is Xcode 4.2. If Xcode 4.1 was the Lion release, Xcode 4.2 is the iOS 5 release (although many of the improvements apply to the Mac as well). So lets get cracking and see what's new and improved:
Lots of people have been writing posts describing what Steve Jobs's passing and life meant to them and how he influenced them. I've been struggling to figure out how to put my thoughts together and whether I really wanted to, as others have said most of what I wanted far more brilliantly than I could. However, someone who generally pisses me off, pissed me off to an even greater degree than usual. Said someone is Richard Stallman, or as I shall refer to him henceforth, Dick (as suggested by Justin Williams). The reason for this will soon become apparent.
Apple is no stranger to throwing out the old and changing things around. You can build something incredible, that makes lots of money and makes many people happy, but if you let that stagnate then people start to get restless. It's how the new kid on the block comes along and steals your thunder. So you have to change. People will get annoyed and even angry, as human beings are generally averse to big changes, at least to begin with.
Prior to Xcode 4 there existed the Build folder. I hated this folder, especially as I often wanted to zip up a project and send it to someone, and I'd end up having a huge file because I'd forgotten to delete the Build folder. So imagine my delight when Apple created the Derived Data directory in Xcode 4. This directory contains all the build products, intermediate files, indexes, logs etc. It is usually located in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData. The problem is, it is rather hard to find the particular Derived Data directory for a particular project…
Lion is a great OS. It has brought many great user features (Versions, autosave etc) and many fantastic developer features (Autolayout, popovers etc). It has brought one new feature though that is annoying a lot of users: Mission Control. I've mentioned some complaints I've got about it on twitter, but it's got to the point where I really need a blog post to convey my full opinion on it. I can't quite remember another change in an OS X update that was so big, yet so awful.
Another Xcode release, another review of what's new. Xcode 4.1 coincides with the release of Lion and includes many improvements, some to help adopt new technologies in Lion and some just to make Xcode a better IDE. So lets get started with what's new.
So, I find myself here again, talking about the powder keg topic that is equality. My last post caused lots of argument on twitter. Things seemed to have calmed down and everyone had gone away to reflect on things. Today Faruk, who's initial post prompted my last post on the subject, posted a sort of rebuttal to my post and another person's post. It is a much more reasonable and well articulated post, but I still disagree with several points. Now what I ultimately found through the arguments on Twitter is that Faruk and I both want the same goal, but we disagree somewhat on the means by which to achieve it.
Over the past couple of years there has been a large influx of Objective-C developers. Some are coming from dynamic languages like Ruby or Python, some from strongly typed languages like Java or C#, and of course there are those who are new to programming altogether. But this means that a large number of Objective-C developers haven't been using it for all that long. When you're new to a language, any language, you focus more on fundamentals like the syntax and core features. But it is often the more advanced, and sometimes less well used parts of a language that really makes it shine.
So if you're in the tech world you may have heard that several small iOS developers have been sent legal papers by what is commonly known as patent troll, asking for money for a patent that apparently covers In App Purchasing. There are lots of questions, people are angry and as usual patents are being berated.
I often like reading "translation" posts, where someone takes what someone said and puts it into the terms everyone was thinking. I also like reading posts regarding the problem of equality and representation of people at conference and the lack of people who aren't straight, white men in the community, and how we can possibly solve it. I also have a lot of respect for Faruk Ates (@KuraFire on Twitter). So it was a dissapointment this morning to read a "translation" style post by Faruk this morning on the topic of how to increase the participation of minorities at tech and design conferences, which I almost entirely disagreed with and considered crass and unhelpful.
We all hear about how we need to make our applications more concurrent. There is no longer a free lunch for software developers, where processor cores will get faster, giving us a performance boosts for free. Instead we need to try and run more code in parallel.
Schemes are one of the most interesting new things in Xcode 4, but also one of the hardest to get your head around at first. This guide will help you understand what schemes are and why they are useful.
It can be hard to find your way around Xcode 4 at first, especially coming from Xcode 3. This is a quick start guide for how to find various Xcode 3 items in Xcode 4.
So it is finally here. Xcode 4 has been released into the world and we are now allowed to talk about it. As my review of Xcode 3.2 went down really well I thought I would have a go at reviewing Xcode 4 in depth. I'll also be publishing other posts over the next few days going in to some of the bigger changes since 3.2 in more detail and hopefully helping you migrate. I've also put in radar numbers for all bugs and feature requests, so you can file duplicates or so any of the Xcode dev team reading this can find them. So without further ado, what is new in Xcode 4?
This is a blog post I've had on my "to write" list for a while. At the end of December Buzz Andersen posted a link on twitter that outlined why he doesn't feel comfortable with Pair Programming or the Agile ideal. A conversation followed between several developers, including myself, which was nicely archived by Manton Reece using his Tweet Library app. I recommend reading through the archive to get an idea of what was said.
I've just finished watching David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote talk at RubyConf. It's a great talk about what makes Ruby great in his eyes and why he hasn't bothered learning other languages since discovering Ruby. There are some things that I disagree with or that contradict each other (at one point he says Ruby protects you from pointer arithmetic, but later that he likes Ruby because it doesn't stop you from doing things even though they can be dangerous if used incorrectly) but on the whole it's well worth watching.
So I read through the slides of a talk recently, by the incredibly talented Anna Debenham. The talk is about the state of web education in schools. It is an incredibly good talk and thankfully there is a video of another talk by Anna that covers pretty much the same things here, which I highly recommend you watch. The thing is, what Anna says about web education equally applies to any form of software design and development. The education system teaches it badly, all the way from primary school through to university. They are either too theoretical or too outdated.
There has been a lot of anger over the Government's decision to increase the cap on university tuition fees to £6000, with £9000 allowed in some circumstances. There is also anger over the increase in interest rates. However, there has been little proper analysis into how this works out financially. After all, these aren't real loans.
So… that Mac App Store thing. I've been wanting to write up my thoughts on it for a while but just haven't found the time or drive to. Then I read this post by Marco Arment. It's an interesting read, but is from the perspective of an iOS developer and I can't say I agree with much of it.
It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of Ruby's syntax. I've grown to love Ruby's functionality and I would like to see language support for some of it in Objective-C (symbols, non-alphanumeric method names and modules/mixins come to mind). I'm also not too opposed to the syntax of Ruby per say. It is concise and fairly readable.
The title of this post is a little misleading. I'm not aiming to define discrimination, that has been done already. What I'm wanting to do is put down my definitions of what should and should not be illegal to discriminate against. This isn't to say what is right or what is wrong, there are some forms of discrimination I disagree with but think shouldn't be illegal.
I put my old iMac for sale on eBay yesterday. A few hours after it going on sale, I saw that someone had bought it at the "Buy Now" price. I got a bit suspicious as they had only signed up that day and had no feedback. My suspicious were confirmed this morning when I received emails from eBay saying that the buyer had left the site. All credit to eBay, I was able to get through to someone on the phone within a 90 seconds of calling (despite them saying there was a large number of calls) and get my fees refunded so I could re-list it.
There is a misconception that in order to get the effect of the retina display on the iPhone you need a display that is 326 dpi (dots per inch), regardless of the device. Now retina display is a marketing term of Apple's, but for the purposes of this blog post I'm going to define a "retina display" as so:
A display where a person with 20/20 vision is unable to tell apart individual pixels at a normal viewing distance
My health hasn't been all that good the past 3 years. Up until 4-5 months ago I was suffering from a mental illness. And now I have a physical illness which is technically even worse than what I had before. Oddly enough though I've been quite open about the physical illness and fairly quiet about the mental illness. This blog post will change all that and give details about them both, what they are, how they affect me and how you can get help if you need it
OK, let's be frank. 32 bit is dead on the Mac. Apple cut out most of their 32 bit users when they dropped PPC support in Snow Leopard. Those that remain are 3-4 year old machines, so are likely to be replaced in the next 12 months given the 3-5 year upgrade cycle most people have. 32 bit is a legacy platform and should be treated as such.
So yet again I saw a tweet about the impending death of the Mac in favour of the iPad and yet again I feel the need to blog my answer rather than have 10 conversations about it on Twitter. Here is the tweet:
RT @joehewitt: You'll know the Mac is officially dead when Apple releases Xcode and Final Cut Pro for iPhone OS. <- +1, we're on that path
@stroughtonsmith
There was a short twitter conversation between @rentzsch and @joehewitt last night about the decline of the Mac market due to the iPad. It was started by this tweet:
If the Mac market is going to shrink to the size of the current market for Mac Pros, perhaps that will be the only model they keep alive?
@joehewitt
Welcome to my new personal blog. I've decided that I need a place to write my thoughts down, rather than spewing them over twitter or IM or other more realtime forms of communication where my hands type faster than my brain works.