Soft Arts

I have run into a conundrum that I have honestly despised in other people: I want to do so much in practice that I can’t possibly get everything done in my schedule, so I don’t practice at all. I am going to start journaling a practice routine from here out, and even if I can’t do everything in a single day, I at least want to get through most of the material in the course of the week.

At this point, for me, having a daily practice routine of some kind is much more important than mastering any single part of the art.

Today’s bagua practice

Warm ups
• Finger ripples
• Tea cups
• Lifting up the clouds
• Back palm
• Coiling dragon
• Single palm
• Fountain
• Phoenix circles the clouds
• Tsai Yang Bai Bing

Circle walking
• Inner palms (50 steps each direction)
• Single palms (25 steps, 8, 4, 2, 1)

If you haven’t caught an episode before, check it out. Hysterical.

I could not have said this better myself.

I’ve been working with the iPhone SDK for about a week now, and I have to say that with only a few noticeable exceptions, the experience has been the best handheld software development experience I’ve had in my life.

First and foremost, you get to develop your code on a Mac. After years of having to keep a Windows install around to do BlackBerry development, this is a freaking godsend.

Beyond that, the language you actually develop in is Objective C, which is now officially my programming language of choice. Objective C has all of the best things I love about C, Ruby, and Java.

The Coverflow Project

We have several iPhone/OS X projects going on at Brain Murmurs, including native clients for Mentat. We recently decided that we needed Coverflow functionality as a part of our toolset. This is easily accessible using the toolchain in a private class, but it isn’t available at the present time in the SDK.

David Brown and I decided that the best thing to do was roll our own implementation. I think that the odds are good that Apple will make a canned version of their standard view available in a future SDK release, but in the short term, developing our own implementation would force us to get up to speed on a lot of iPhone related technologies.

Unfortunately, because the contents of the SDK are guarded by a Non-Disclosure Agreement, I am not at liberty to say what APIs I was able to use to make this happen. I can say that it was fun, and cool, and that Apple has a lot of powerful technologies available to developers that are ready to roll up their sleeves and dig into it.

On the other hand, I don’t think that there is a legal problem with showing some screenshots of an iPhone showing pictures of my unlovely countenance.

I needed some photos for the project, so I just popped off several shots with my iSight and Photobooth at my office (hat courtesy of my son, Isaac). The results appear below:

Now, the basic implementation is there, but I’m obviously missing a few features like a reflection layer. I’ll probably add those in sometime tonight if I get the chance, but the main technical goals we had have been achieved.

UPDATE:
I’d initially tried to get the demo to run in landscape, but without success. I was eventually able to get landscape mode working thanks to some much appreciated help from Guy English of Rogue Amoeba (Thank you!).

I’d be happy to discuss the technical details involved to anyone else in the iPhone development program. Just get in touch with me using the contact info on the side bar.

-Daniel

Technorati Tags:
apple, GTD, iphone development, iphone sdk, Mentat, user interface design

So we just set up our new OS X Leopard server for the office. Works great.

Shortly after I set it up, I was showing one of our employees around the user interface. He glanced up at the server itself and said ‘when did we get this one?’

I looked at it for a moment and said “Well, this is the first Mac that I bought…” then froze.

“Holy shit…” I breathed, “I bought this right before Isaac was born, and he’s almost four and a half. Can that be right?”

It was, in fact, right. Our ‘new’ company server is the dual 2.0 GHz G5 machine that I bought for $3,000 in 2003. It’s not surprising that a machine old is still in use, but it is surprising that it is running the latest generation server operating system, fully loaded, as well as it is.

All of our macs have retained their value well. Our Apple machines are the first computers that I have ever gotten extended warranties on, because they *do* eventually breakdown and they still server critical roles within our business.

Hell of a buy.