James Andrews

Last night I was browsing twitter when one of my tweeps mentioned an article about iPhone and Flash. The article basically stated that before the release of the iPhone there were discussions of using flash on the iPhone for application development. That talks went south and since then there was no turning back. Now whether there is any truth to that I don’t know. What made the article interesting was the mention of an SDK called Corona by a company called Ansca Mobile. Essentially it’s a scripting language similar to actionscript/javascript that allows you to build iPhone apps as if you were building a Flash application.

I’ve wanted to write Cocoa apps for a while, but with work, and life I haven’t been able to get enough time to wrap my head around Cocoa and bindings and all the fun that goes with it. I know Javascript very well. Since I am a web developer so I thought I would give Corona a shot.

Corona cost $99 but there’s a 30 day trial version. I downloaded the trial version, and started reading through the docs (ok skimming through the docs) and sample applications. I found the APIDocs to be poor. No real explanation on how to capture events, which on the iPhone is important. Touch events are everything when it comes to the phone. Also, the company seems to be indecisive about some of the touch event naming, like “drag”. They thought it didn’t make sense, but I easily knew what they were talking about. Though I probably would have called it “swipe”. The sample code however was full of useful snippets, and from that I was able to build a 45 line application. That’s right in 45 lines I had the application I have been wanting to write for 5 months. Now I haven’t been able to test it on an iPhone or within Apple’s iPhone simulator. I have tested it in Corona’s iPhone simulator, in order to test it elsewhere I need to pay the $99, so for all I know it could totally break. I will give them the benefit of the doubt that it will work fine on the iPhone, and could revolutionize iPhone development for those who want to quickly get something out without the time consumption of learning Cocoa Touch, or paying an iPhone developer up to $150/hr

I am looking forward to them having a version that supports the iPad, I am sure they are working diligently on it.

It’s been one day since Steve Jobs announced the iPad to the world. Since then it seems like a world of haters has vomit their hatred of the iPad upon us. Complaining that it’s nothing more than an oversized iPod touch. What I am trying to figure out is this 1) why is that bad? and 2) Did you really expect something more? 3) Why did it have to be more?

In Steve’s keynote he talked about the computer and the smart phone and something in the middle. The iPad is not meant to replace the computer, and it’s not meant to replace the smart phone. It’s meant to compliment them. There are plenty of instances where you may want something portable like a phone, but not as clunky as a laptop, and that is where the iPad comes in. Something that doesn’t need a full computer operating system. Something that can become the device you need at the time.

Let’s say you are in the medical profession, do you really want to have to boot into a complex operating system like windows, linux or OS X that uses up battery life quickly? Or would you rather just turn on a device that allows you to open your application, view and enter patient data quickly and submit it to the servers in the hospital IT department? What if you are a photographer, or a real estate agent, or a business person in general who wants to track their appointments, calculate costs quickly. Applications designed specifically for you, so you don’t need to multi-task into other applications? That is what iPad is about.

Sure there are instances where multitasking may be nice, such as listening to Pandora Streams while doing something else in another application. It’s not a perfect device, but for people to condemn it for it’s faults and not look past them to the devices potential just seems real sad to me.

The iPad will be a great device once you get it in your hands, and see what it can do.

Halloween this year was pretty “eh”. Rainy and windy, makes for not so many kids out, and a lot of left over candy. My brother being smart sometimes brought it up to the bar with him and got rid of it while drinking with friends. I spent much of the evening doing some fall cleaning. Putting things in truck bed to ready for next weekend’s trip to the transfer station at the old landfill. Moving electronics stuff into a cardboard box so I can bring it to the electronics recycle center. I have a LOT of electronics, and it’s $.25 a pound. Made a lot of headway.

I want to get a machine with a little more power than my itty bitty laptop. Something I can do my photo editing from. I am a Mac user, but I don’t want to shell out $2500 for a power mac. I spent some tie researching on “hackintosh” which is a project for using OS X on non apple hardware. For a fraction of the cost I should be able to get power mac equivalent running OS X. Found a great article the other night that shows you how to prepare an install thumb drive to be an installer of OS X Snow Leopard. I took care of that this morning, and put it in a place I won’t lose it.

Then in talking with a friend he told me about a neat OS X preference pane called Geek Tool. Allows you to display information from a script, image, or a file on your desktop. So you can have your error logs for your web local development web server. With an image you can watch your favorite comic, a security web cam, or even network statistic graphs. The most power comes from scripts. You can have scripts run every so often and the output will get displayed to the screen. You can use any kind of shell script you like, perl, bash, php python, whichever.

There are some great screen caps of what people are doing. A lot of it’s basic like stick the date, time, or calendar on your desktop, or even your to do list.

I’ll be playing a lot with this later this week.