A Short Story: UPS Blues
Posted by Daniel in Cars, Models & Gadgets on 25. Jun, 2010 | 1 Comment
“Ha! Suckers!” I thought, ambling into work at 9:30, pleased at being almost on time for work for once. I’d queued up at silly-o’clock once before, for the launch of the iPhone 3G two years ago. It hadn’t gone well — my store ran out of iPhones before I got to the front of the queue and I wasn’t that far back at all.
For the iPhone 4, I pre-ordered for delivery instead. I sat at work smugly tweeting about not having to queue. You can set your watch by the UPS van here — if your watch is only accurate to 15-minutes, at least — so I was confident I’d have my iPhone by 4pm.
Refresh refresh refresh. Online tracking assured me my parcel was out for delivery?. Refresh. Out for delivery.
Moonlighting in .NET Part 2: What, no MVC?
Posted by Daniel in Programming/Work on 09. Apr, 2010 | 0 Comments
The biggest day-to-day difference between Cococa and .NET is that, by default, you don’t use MVC. To any Cocoa developer, the thought of not using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern to build an application should be absolutely horrific. In fact, try and build a simple Cocoa app in Xcode without using MVC – it’s really hard. I’ve honestly no idea why .NET/Visual Studio/etc defaults to this approach.
Moonlighting in .NET Part 1: Living in the Bubble
Posted by Daniel in Programming/Work on 09. Mar, 2010 | 0 Comments
I’m a Cocoa developer first and foremost, but for the next few months I’ll be moonlighting as a C#.NET developer, writing version 5.0 of my Music Rescue application from scratch. I actually have version 4.0 in Visual Basic.NET, but, you know — Visual Basic is for chumps.
Writing in C#.NET is an… interesting experience for someone used to Objective-C. This series of posts will discuss .NET from the perspective of a Cocoa developer — what’s good, bad, and just different.
Playing the Game… And Losing
Posted by Daniel in General on 15. Feb, 2010 | 0 Comments
Daniel Jalkut wrote an excellent piece on his blog entitled Only A Game. He talks about how running an indie business is like playing a game — you have to make decisions that you know might make you lose. Unfortunately, that’s what happened to me last year — I made a gamble, and I lost.
Things are getting better. Slowly. Nine months ago, I wrote this post essentially about how I sucked at being a businessman. Since then, things got much much worse. This post is an account of what I’ve been through in these past few months. Everything I talk about was caused directly by the fall in income I suffered due to the my gamble failing.
Why crashing your car on purpose is a smart thing to do… Sometimes.
Posted by Daniel in Cars, Models & Gadgets on 18. Dec, 2009 | 0 Comments
Many people I know will tell me I’m being irresponsible for doing this myself, let alone telling others to do it. However, I saw one of those people nearly trash £55,000 worth of Porsche by simply letting go of the wheel and hitting the brakes when the back end broke loose, so what the hell do they know?
When you’re dealing with a car that’s losing control, you need to know how the car behaves in order to concentrate on getting it back in check. When you start losing control, you have seconds to react and fix it before you go past the point of no return. If you’re already compensating for your car’s tendency to pull right under heavy braking in the snow by the time it happens and putting in exactly the right amount of steering in to stabilise the car and allow stability control to do its job, you have a much better chance of coming out of it without a dented car or skull than someone who’s thinking “Shit, what’s what crunching sound?! Why is my car pulling to the left? Why has my car lost power?”
iPhone Companion Apps: New Project to App Store in Two Months
Posted by Daniel in Programming/Work on 11. Nov, 2009 | 1 Comment
Normally, I write a “Postmortem” blog post after each product I ship. However, recently I got the chance to give a talk at CocoaHeads Swindon, and chose to talk about my trials and tribulations when writing Clarus for iPhone (iTunes Link). The other day it struck me that this actually turned out to be a great postmortem, so instead of writing a blog post I sat at my computer and recorded a video of my slides and commentary.
An Eternal Headache: Core Data, Undo and Files
Posted by Daniel in Programming/Work on 08. Oct, 2009 | 1 Comment
Core Data is awesome. One of the most awesome things about it is that you get free undo/redo. Of course, you wouldn’t actually ship anything but the simplest of applications with the undo Core Data provides, but getting it up to scratch it pretty simple — most of my additions in Clarus are simply putting certain operations into undo groups.
PRS-505 and PRS-600 display comparison
Posted by Daniel in Cars, Models & Gadgets on 11. Sep, 2009 | 0 Comments
I bought my Sony Reader PRS-505 nearly a year ago, and as a direct result the amount of books I read skyrocketed from around 1 per year to 2-3 per month. I adore this thing, and even considered importing a PRS-700 from the USA — but I was put off by the reports of a very glare prone screen. For the first time in a long time, I’d actually prefer to keep my old gadget than replace it with the “better” model. In my opinion, an eBook Reader should be like a car – provide enough technology to get the job done well, and don’t distract me with needless crap, especially if it gets in the way of the primary functionality.
KNKVC – Implementing Key-Value Coding and Key-Value Observing in C#.NET
Posted by Daniel in Programming/Work on 07. Aug, 2009 | 1 Comment
My favourite kind of programming is framework programming. Designing a component outside of the complexities of a whole application allows you to design beautiful, clean APIs and components. In fact, every single application I write or am a part of writing ends up shipping in components. Music Rescue for Windows, for instance, has a library for talking to iPods which I wrote, a library containing user interface controls which I wrote and the application (which my colleague wrote) imports them both and assembles it all together into an application.
Day-To-Day with a Sony Reader on a Mac in the UK
Posted by Daniel in Cars, Models & Gadgets on 06. May, 2009 | 0 Comments
Look around the web, and you’ll find many a review of the Sony Reader. If you’re looking for another one, you’re in the wrong place – this is an account of managing the device on a Mac.
As a Mac user living in the UK, I’m pretty much S.O.L when it comes to using the Reader’s built-in software. The Sony Store, which is an online book store not unlike iTunes’ Music/Video/etc store. However, it only works in the USA due to “licensing restrictions”. Even if I was in the USA, the software that lets you access the store and manage your Reader’s content is Windows only. Super.
