Jul 28 — 18
I've had T-Mobile for several years. The customer service has always been top quality and I like getting half price on unlimited HotSpot access. The only downside is that the reception is not always acceptable in some key areas, even here in Sunnyvale. It's possible the phone itself is dated enough that it's part of the reception problem, so I'm going to give a new device a spin before
Jul 17 — 8
The newest issue of Flaming Fireball talks about why open sourcing Apple apps isn't some sort of magical solution to adding or changing features. John is dead-on with his suggestion that scripting or plug-ins are a better approach in many situations
Jul 10 — 26
I've read the blog posts about various people switching from one OS to another and what it means for each OS, but I just keep coming back to the simple conclusion: I'm not interested in switching to something that's more complicated and less polished than what I use now. I'm not looking for new ways to spend time staring at a screen in frustration
Jun 26 — 45
There's a post on Digg today that links to a list of MacBook Pro defects. That post and the page it points to gives the impression that the MacBook Pro is some sort of extremely fragile machine that just barely holds together, which is absolute insanity
Jun 18 — 4
So it turns out people are pretty excited about this Cocoa mentoring program. I want to give a few updates and clarifications. First of all, the service is not only national, but international! So far, I've worked with folks in Canada, Germany and Ireland (as well as different places in the U.S.)
Jun 08 — 20
I've been tutoring Cocoa programmers for the past two years, offering mentoring to newbies and question-and-answer services to more experienced folks. Things have gone so well (see testimonials below), that I'm opening this up to the general public. Until the site is up, you can email/IM me at <sstevenson at mac dot com> to get started
May 24 — 12
So I picked up the New Super Mario Bros game, and it's absolute winner. We have in one package something that is legitimately fresh while perfectly capturing the spirit of the original Mario Brothers. Imagine the universe of Mario 1 through 3, but in a new world
May 21 — 16
So I had a chance to play around with a MacBook in an Apple store for a few minutes. As expected, it's a great machine. The keyboard has a really nice feel to it. At first swipe, I think I prefer it to the MacBook Pro keyboard, but I'd need to spend more time with it to make
May 19 — 39
It would be easy enough to look at the MacBook benchmarks for an indication of what a Photoshop monopoly does to the platform, but there's really more to it than simply expecting a design tool that runs at full speed. For better or worse, Photoshop is still rooted in concepts that have been around since
May 18 — 3
Macworld has published the first batch of benchmarks for the new consumer MacBooks. The numbers are pretty much what you'd expect based on the specs. For the most part, the MacBook keeps nearly even pace...
May 17 — 8
Macworld UK has published an op-ed piece on Apple's decision to no longer publish the source to the Intel version of the Mac OS X kernel. I find Tom Yager's response to this somewhat unrealistic
May 16 — 21
Apple's consumer portable line just seems to get better over time. If you go purely by specs and design, the new MacBook (which replaces the iBook) looks like a big leap over previous models. It could even be a game-changing machine, drastically faster with a dual-core processor at an $1100 price point
May 15 — 26
So after trading a couple of emails with John Gruber on the topic, I think we can safely say that the consensus is that Apple is not going to release Cocoa for Windows. In fact, I personally think the rumor about Windows API support in Leopard is more likely. Although the Windows rumor is still outlandish, there's at least a reason to do it
May 15 — 13
One of the more interesting features of Objective-C is the ability to replace entire methods at runtime, and it turns out that it's actually pretty easy. To do this, we need to dig into libobjc, which has headers in /usr/include/objc
May 13 — 7
Even more fun with dynamic messages! Last time, we took a first look at the NSInvocation class, and how it can be used to dynamically construct calls to abitrary objects. This time, we're going to take a look at NSObject's -forwardInvocation: method, which allows us to capture a message and retarget then resend it
May 13 — 14
Although Objective-C may seem very much like Java or C++ to the untrained eye, there's actually a lot of trickery just waiting to be tapped. The dynamic nature of the language allows us to bundle up a method call as an object, and either customize it or reuse it with different targets and arguments
May 12 — 9
In short, it looks to me like Nintendo made the biggest positive splash at E3. I'm not sure what Sony is thinking. A $600 game machine just doesn't seem like a mass market device. Microsoft seems to have kept pretty much even. There were no major Xbox surprises as far as I can see
May 11 — 11
As WWDC draws closer, it's more and more interesting to consider the vantage point that Apple finds itself at. Between the press from Boot Camp (have I mentioned how many people have asked me about Boot Camp and MacBook Pros at Starbucks?), and the new Mac ads that are practically impossible to miss, Apple is possibly
May 10 — 20
Based on the comments on both the original post here on Objective-C garbage collection and on John Siracusa's post, it looks like this is a hot button issue for some people. The biggest single issue is the perception that garbage collection means slow apps
Apple has posted descriptions for a little more than half of the expected 130 sessions for WWDC 2006. Even without any talk of Leopard or other unannounced sesssions, we're getting off to a promising start. Here are my favorites thus far
May 06 — 9
I've always found it interesting to see designs that fell by the wayside on the way to a final revamp of a site. In this case, I have a handful of designs for Cocoa Dev Central that just didn't quite fit for one reason or another
May 05 — 28
There's no confirmation yet, but some encouraging rumors say that Leopard will include fully-supported garbage collection in the Objective-C runtime. The importance of this probably isn't obvious to novice programmers and non-programmers. Like a lot of programming terms, this is a simple concept which has an odd name
May 02 — 14
I took a few weeks off and I feel like I'm returning with a fresh perspective on the idea of writing software for Mac OS X. I'm not promising all of this will make sense right away. I'm sort of figuring it out as I go. Hopefully there's some insight in here somewhere
Apr 26 — 3
I usually try to stay on topic here, but occasionally the need comes up to handle some other stuff. First and foremost, if somebody can help me find at least two tickets for Tool on May 4 at the Paramount, I'd be very appreciative. No promises, but I'll do my best to make it
Apr 26 — 11
After spending some time "working" at Starbucks, I'm seeing a few signs Apple may have already hit a tipping point with Mac OS X, particularly with laptops. This hasn't come in the form of a giant thunderbolt launching down from the sky, but just some subtle hints
Follow your bliss.
