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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Woz Wonderbook

Tuesday, March 31, 2009    0 Comments


This is a test of an apture link.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

iPhone development resources

Wednesday, March 25, 2009    2 Comments

I recently placed an order for two iPhone development books that you might also be interested in picking up.
I found a list of other books as well that you might find interesting.
And here are some potentially useful links (I won't include the Apple Developer site as it goes without saying)
That's about it for now as this post is resembling a spammer's email. You'll be able to get a lot of information from the links above.

If I forgot a resource that you feel is quite valuable, please add a comment with the information.
 

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

OT: Steve Wozniak makes it through

Tuesday, March 24, 2009    0 Comments

I'm watching Woz on Dancing with the Stars because it's incredible to see what a dork and a lousy dancer he really is... yet he's doing his best and he's got the nuggets to even go on the show to begin with. And he is a hero of mine. An autographed photo of him sits on my desk at work.

There must have been TONS of votes for him from the Apple community, because he made it through! Secretly he might be thinking, "oh crap... I have to keep doing this?"

BTW - Apple is advertising during Dancing with the Stars. That's a very smart move since Apple fanboys like me are watching the absolute train wreck that is Woz dancing. And voting for him. Like I do, because I'm a geek in a lot of ways too.

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Monday, March 23, 2009

AS3 after Cocoa for me == happy

Monday, March 23, 2009    0 Comments

I spent the weekend pouring over Objective-C, XCode and InterfaceBuilder for the iPhone.

I created some compelling applications utilizing animation, different views, dynamic images and data, and I'm already a little fried from it all. I broke an application a few times having zero idea what I did (I blame IB).

When I transitioned back to AS3 at the end of today, I was flying. Code was pouring from the renewed sense of freedom and familiarity. I really enjoy learning how to develop for the iPhone - there are 8 billion things to learn for sure. But I love the speed at which one can pump out an AS3 application from scratch.

Perhaps one day I'll be able to do the same in Cocoa, but it was good to come back to AS3 today.

I am going to celebrate with some wicked good™ potato pancake from Joan & Ed's in Natick... it's by far the best I've had yet.
 

Friday, March 20, 2009

Enamored of Objective-C and iPhone Development

Friday, March 20, 2009    1 Comments

The past few days have been an exercise in utter frustration, a flurry of inspiration and obstacles overcome, and a lot of smiles and warm fuzzies. I went from dabbling a little in iPhone development to wanted to just dive into the OS 3.0 stuff and to be able to test stuff on the hardware proper and not in a simulator.

This is the kind of fun I had many, many years ago when I embarked on the Flash expedition. To see really cool stuff run smoothly on a wonderful screen with enough power behind it to make most things possible is really inspiring and enabling.

The whole process of updating my previous SDK in XCode and updating the hardware to the latest firmware was enchanting... when it was complete and provisioned, I'd have access to a whole world of new development.

XCode is a great IDE, although I have a lot of nits about it... dragging rules to link things is silly enough, but there should be a button I can press while InterfaceBuilder is open with my xibs that show all the connections. I haven't figured out if I can open multiple files and once and just tab through them or not, but it would be nice. The autocomplete is awesome, assets in the Project when changed auto-update... not like in the Flash IDE where you need to manually update.

I'll be pouring through some data, the forums, and videos to learn more this weekend. As I get really cool things working, I am slowly learning more, making the ability to look at other's example code a lot easier - I can see what they are doing and understand some of it, not just blindly editing a copy and paste and hope it works in my own project the way I want it to.

Exciting times™.

Update:

I JUST received an email from Apple (it would seem that they were a little late on this, or I beat them to the punch) - although you'd think I was already on the dev list.
With a rich set of over 1,000 new APIs, iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 3.0 beta provides you with an amazing range of technologies to enhance the functionality of your iPhone and iPod touch applications. New APIs also provide support for applications to communicate with hardware accessories attached to iPhone or iPod touch.
Join the iPhone Developer Program and receive access to the new iPhone SDK, iPhone OS 3.0 beta, and the ability to test your applications directly on iPhone.

 

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

iTunes Store sighting: Work Only?

Wednesday, March 18, 2009    3 Comments

I can't be sure if this was an error on the individual who set the tags when they uploaded this album to the iTunes Music Store or not, but I've seen a new tag called "Work Only" and you can see it below.



The album in question is Janine jansen's Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto (Bonus Track Version). iTunes Link.

Notice also that some of the tracks don't have the iTunes Plus designation. Strange.
 

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Point methods... you were there all the time?

Tuesday, March 17, 2009    0 Comments

Today Jason Merrill open my eyes as well as my mind.

In the past, I had done some intersection type math... angle from center intersecting a square, intersecting a circle, etc. and it was all messy code glommed from Google and various sources. The stuff worked, but I never exactly knew why.

Today I had the need to do the "angle from center a certain distance from center of circle = what x,y" thing. And I started to look for my old code and decided to Google and blast a question to Flashcoders.

I got the simple response: In AS3, Point.polar()

Huh? I never would have thought to dig into Point to look for something like that. But there she was, sitting pretty at the end of the AS3 bar, waiting for me to buy her a drink. And I bought her many.

var coord:Point = Point.polar( radiusFromCenter, radians );
trace( coord.x, coord, y );

I'd like to buy Jason a few rounds too, after all it IS Saint Patrick's Day. He also posted a few methods from his extended Math class which are really quite useful too.
public static function polarToCartesian(distance:Number, degrees:Number):Point
{
       var radians:Number = (degrees * Math.PI) / 180;
       return Point.polar(distance, radians);
}

public static function degreesToRadians(degrees:Number):Number
{
       return (degrees * Math.PI)/180;
}

public static function radiansToDegrees(radians:Number):Number
{
       return (radians*180)/Math.PI;
}

public static function cartesianAngle(fromPoint:Point, toPoint:Point):Number
{
       var radians:Number = Math.atan2(toPoint.y-fromPoint.y, toPoint.x-fromPoint.x);
       var backAzimuthDegrees:Number = MathTranslation.radiansToDegrees(radians);
       return MathTranslation.getBackAzimuth(backAzimuthDegrees);
}

public static function getBackAzimuth(angle:Number):Number
{
       var backAzimuth:Number;
       if(angle < 180)
       {
               var tempNeg:Number = angle-180;
               backAzimuth = tempNeg + 360;
       }
       else
       {
               backAzimuth = angle-180;
       }
       return backAzimuth;
}

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Monday, March 16, 2009

TimeCapsule get lost. Hello Carbonite.

Monday, March 16, 2009    1 Comments

I cannot for the life of me get TimeCapsule to work with my wife's Macbook for backup. I've tried everything, including getting new TimeCapsules from Apple.

The initial backup always fails, even when connecting a 1TB USB drive to the TC and trying to use that. Local drives work great, and also TC on desktops works. For whatever reason, this laptop just won't do it.

Hello Carbonite.
 

Friday, March 13, 2009

Safari 4 Top Sites UI for iTunes?

Friday, March 13, 2009    1 Comments

This is just some conjecture on my part, but I think we might seesomething like the Safari 4 Top Sites UI coming to iTunes sometime.

Why?

Coverflow is cool, but it scrolls so freaking fast it's difficult to get to just the thing you're after. Mass moves works well, fine control is lacking. However taking the wall approach might make this a lot easier.

one
Current UI above

one
The wall approach idea

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Custom ActionScript 3 Components

Wednesday, March 11, 2009    3 Comments

While in the throes of creating AS3 code libraries, I felt the desire to encapsulate some of it into proper AS3 components that were easy to install, had documentation for them (thanks VisDoc) and had live preview as well as custom component parameter UIs.

I'd made plenty back in the AS2 days (bollocks to you xch), but since those days are long gone, I really wanted to re-learn the process and get working on AS3 components.

There is documentation and information scattered around the web on how to roll all this up properly. It's still an organizational challenge getting things created and ready for packaging, but after some trial and error and googling, I discovered the magic sauce in creating these things without requiring a FLA or using UIComponent.

The process is much better in my opinion in getting these things created and deployed. One of the quirks though is in the custom icon - I've noticed oddities in white or black being keyed as transparent in their display in the component panel. But that's just a nit.

If any are interested, I can report my findings here so you can get your own component factory churning out deployable developmental goodies to the masses. Or maybe this find of mine is just really basic and you've known all about all of this already. I spend 99.9% of my time with code only so getting into components again caused me to have to learn some things all over again.
 

Monday, March 2, 2009

Dedicated photo printers

Monday, March 2, 2009    0 Comments

Let me preface: this is an off-topic post. Previously our printer was the dual function kind... we used it for printing photographs as well as general printing use. Worked well, poured through expensive ink.

We just picked up a dedicated photo printer - the kind that does nothing but print photos. It's fairly small so it sits on it's own free from any computer connection(s). You can connect your camera or use a card and print whatever you'd like. Quick, easy, pain free, and pretty cheap.

If you've ever considered dropping some coin on a dedicated photo printer, I'd suggest you simply do it. I wish we would have done this a while ago (although you won't be printing anything larger than 5"x6").

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