James Andrews

Today Slashdot.org had an article regarding a blog post from a well known Adobe Evangelist Lee Brimelow. I read Mr Brimelow’s article, and then proceeded back to slashdot to read some of the comments posted within. One of the readers commented.

and hopefully the government will do a bette4r job at slapping apple then they did with microsoft.

The comment obviously in regards to the anti trust/monopoly law suite of the earl century. I have heard this complaint time and time again over the last 6 months. Since the announcement of the iPad and even before. People throwing Apple under the bus saying it is a monopoly. Which it is not.

Apple is and has always been a hardware company. They sold computers with an operating system. Much like buying a DVD player with a BIOS to run and play DVDs. Their OS is $99 unlike M$ who sells windows for $300+ It has never really been about the software. Sure they make a few different specialty applications, but that is not their bread and butter.

As a hardware company Apple has given us some pretty nice devices. The iPod with it’s clean look, and user interface. The iPhone which has revolutionized the smart phone industry in the US, and even abroad. Even the iPad is a nice device. Some people call it an oversized iPod touch (and It essentially is), but after spending some time with the device yesterday, I think it will do pretty well.

The controversy at large is Apple and it controlling what apps are allowed onto it’s devices, and that you have to go through Apple to get your application on their hardware. This in my mind is no different than what many companies already do. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all have rules that you have to abide by to develop for their gaming consoles. They are not as strict necessarily as Apples, but they still have rules. MPAA have rules for getting keys for DVD encryption. Hell, most software you use today on your home computer has a End User License Agreement telling you how you can and can’t use the software. Do you call Adobe a monopoly for not allowing commercial use of Photoshop on an educational EULA? No. The argument that Apple is a monopoly is absurd.

I have a lot of friends who have Droid based phones and love them. Great! I’m happy for them. That is what is most important. If you buy a piece of hardware you should be happy with it. If you aren’t happy with a piece of hardware you don’t need to buy it. You don’t need to develop for it. You obviously are NOT the target market for the device. Stop your whining and go buy a droid based tablet or phone, or mp3 player or what ever.

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.