Last night I participated on a panel with Michael Privat, Satya Komatineni, Dave MacLean, and Henry Lee, moderated by Eugene Chuvyrov. All six of us live in Jacksonville, and we’ve all co-authored books for Apress on mobile technologies: Pro Android 3 — Satya …
Read more →One thing I like about Windows is that Start+E launches an Explorer window. I get frustrated when Cmd+Tabbing to a Finder window on Mac OS X, and for some reason I usually have difficulty noticing the Finder icon in the Cmd+Tab popup. I’ve caught myself …
Read more →Developers love challenges, whether they be programming puzzles, word puzzles, or any other conundrum that flexes their minds and proves how smart they are — whether to others or simply to themselves. The quickest way to con a developer into writing some code …
Read more →How’d you spend your weekend? Did you mow your lawn? Do your laundry? Sleep late, watch TV, or catch a movie? Yeah? Well, I went to LessConf 2011 and got inspired, and now I’m on fire. Hope your lawn looks great. Today’s artists and creative types have turned …
Read more →I just got back from Red Dirt Ruby Conf in Norman, OK. The accommodations were terrific — The Embassy Suites in Norman looks new, and they served us free omelets-to-order every morning. The food was good, the Wi-Fi was blazing, and every table in every …
Read more →Rails developers have the coolest tools, from migrations RVM to Bundler to Pow. One cool Rails tool lets you explain approximately how long ago something happened in words, with phrases such as: Less than 20 seconds ago About 3 minutes ago Over 3 years ago You …
Read more →The power brick for a Mac laptop sprouts two cords: a skinny one that plugs in to the laptop, and a detachable fat one that plugs in to the wall. You can swap a plug for the fat one to lighten your travel load. (Funny story: a coworker didn’t know what the fat …
Read more →I just saw this tweet from @compoundj: I want 2 buy “Pro core data for iOS” by @michaelprivat & @hoop33, but I can’t find the table of contents online…any suggestions? Whoops. I checked both Amazon and Apress, and sure enough — no table of contents. So, I …
Read more →When Gowalla released version 3 of their iPhone client, they completely revamped the user interface. Although they switched from a rich olive green to a stony gray and downgraded the app’s icon: Old Icon New Icon in general they improved the interface. For …
Read more →Last summer, Apple released a developer preview of Xcode 4 under NDA. When Michael Privat and I began writing Pro Core Data for iOS in August, we figured Apple would release the final version of Xcode 4 and lift the NDA by the time we completed the book. After …
Read more →