Category: Uncategorized

…they’re holding the Visual Studio 2012 Virtual Launch from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Eastern/UTC-4 today, Wednesday, September 12th, 2012.

That’s right: they’re holding it at about the same time as the iPhone 5 keynote scheduled to start at 1:00 p.m. Eastern/UTC-4. There’s a fine line between chutzpah and masochism, and the folks at Redmond are downing a 40 of malt liquor and driving a Big Wheel all over it.

Microsoft announced the date for this event before Apple announced the date for theirs. Still, the Visual Studio 2012 Virtual Launch is an online event (not counting the “studio audience”) and could’ve easily been moved. I suppose that Microsoft weighed their options and thought “either we move the event and tacitly admit that Apple is now controlling our schedule or we keep the date and hope that our audience cares more about developer tools than the new iPhone and iOS and prefer a live-streamed video of our launch over liveblogs of the Apple event”.

The silver lining in the double-booking is that the iPhone event is drawing away enough people to guarantee that the video feed of the Visual Studio launch’s streaming video is smooth as silk.

This photo reminds of a time when I was working at Microsoft and rather dismayed that the big Indigo bookstore at the Eaton Centre filed all the Windows 7 books under “Computing for Seniors” and all the iOS books under “New and Hot”.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

If you’re like me and have finally decided to see what all the Node.js fuss is all about, The Node Beginner Book by Manuel Kiessling is a great jumping-off point. In a set of programming exercises that take up barely half an afternoon (and that includes doing some deliberately slow reading and additional noodling with the code), the book provides a quick and easy introduction to building a simple web app with Node. It can’t possibly hope to cover everything with 69 pages of actual text, but if you’re reasonably competent with JavaScript and have at least a little web programming experience, you’ll find this book a pleasant, fun and quick introduction.

The Node Beginner Book is licenced under Creative Commons and is available to read free-as-in-beer online. If you’d like the book in an ereader format, it’s available in a nice bundle with Hands-On Node.js by Pedro Teixeira — an introduction to Node.js and an API reference — for as little as $9.99. You set the price (the minimum is $9.99), and you get both books in PDF, .epub and .mobi formats. Even though my finances have been drained by almost half a year’s funemployment, I decided to support the authors and send ten bucks their way. So far, it’s proven to be money well spent.

Links

• The Node Beginner Book by Manuel Kiessling
• Hands-On Node.js by Pedro Teixeira
• The Node Beginner Book / Hands-On Node.js Bundle
• Reviews of The Node Beginner Book:
  • Amazon
  • The Lancs Coder
  • AKA Web Design

Scott Rose does a wonderful job playing a perfectly face-punchable Apple fanboy stereotype in this video, Shit Apple Fanatics Say, Part 1. Some of my favourite lines are:

• “You get what you pay for!” (Actually quite true, as proven by a few gadgets I have, including a crappy Android tablet I bought at a charity auction.)
• “Nobody needs Flash!”
• “Nobody needs a Blu-Ray drive!”
• “No, they love working eighteen-hour days. It’s part of their culture.“
• “Nobody needs to add RAM!”
• “Nobody needs removable batteries!”
• “Gestures! Gestures! GESTURES!”
• “Just stick with [iTools | .Mac | MobileMe | iCloud]; Apple’s gonna fix it.”

My favourite use of the “Disaster Girl” meme to date.

Click the comic to see the original.

Thanks to William van Bergen for the find!

Nokia’s Head of Design

Over at Wired, there’s an article on Ahtisaari (full name Marko Ahtisaari, but like Pele, Charo or Stifler, he’s better known by a singular name), head of Nokia’s design studio. Nokia currently cranks out the best-looking of the Windows Phones, and the new 920 is continuing that trend. Ahtisaari is big on big-D design, seeing it as more than just how something looks, but how something feels and works. It’s a philosophy most associated with Apple, which explains why the article’s author fixates so much on Apple throughout the article.

Specs for Nokia’s Lumia 820 and 920

The Verge’s live blog covered the big Nokia announcement earlier today, and now Nokia have released their official announcements of their new high-end Lumia 920 and mid-level Lumia 820 phones. Their specs are:

You can find a full Lumia 920 spec sheet here.

The Shoestring Budget “Ugly Little Game” That Became an App Store Hit

The thought process behind Luca Redwood’s game 10000000 (pronounced “Ten Million”) — an App Store hit despite its complete lack of marketing — was built on a budget so small that he had to borrow a friend’s Mac to build it. It’s also a great reminder of the importance of cutting stuff out, the lesson that Antoine de St-Exupéry taught: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

How to Build a Simple Drawing App for iOS

Ray Wenderlich’s site remains my favourite place to learn about iOS development. In the latest post, there’s a great tutorial on using UIKit to build a drawing app.