The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, has been outed on Newsweek! The most surprising thing is that Satoshi Nakamoto is an actual Japanese person named “Satoshi Nakamoto”. I always assumed that it was a pseudonym and that he looked like this:
Categories
An early look at Apple’s CarPlay
During their Q4 2013 earnings call, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said that they were working on introducing new product categories in the coming year. That year has come, and with it comes the first new product category: car/computing integration. The first product, CarPlay (referred to as “iOS in the Car” in earlier marketing materials), brings better integration between your iOS and the built-in dashboard displays on your car. It lets you access iOS functionality on your iPhone 5-series devices from your dashboard controls or with voice, and giving your dashboard display the iOS look and feel.
Here’s the phone interface:
Here’s the text-messaging interface:
Here’s Maps:
And here’s music:
CarPlay connects to your car’s dashboard system via a Lightning cable, so it’s compatible only with the iPhone 5 series of devices: the original iPhone 5, as well as the iPhone 5C and 5S. It will be available in certain models from these car manufacturers in 2014:
and these “committed partners” will make it available in “future models”:
Volvo posted the first promotional video for their cars featuring CarPlay…
…the Engadget folks managed to get a hands-on demo of CarPlay in a Ferrari at the Geneva Motor Show:
…and here’s what appears to be uncut footage for a Mercedes Benz CarPlay demo video:
Further Reading
- Apple’s CarPlay page
- New York Times: Apple’s CarPlay Captivates the Auto Industry
- BGR: Apple’s new hobby: CarPlay finally brings iOS to the car
- Engadget: Hands-on with Apple’s CarPlay: when Siri met Ferrari
- TechCrunch: How CarPlay Works In A Ferrari FF, And How Apple Will Push New Third-Party Apps To The System
Creative Commons photo by Kris Krüg. Click to see the source.
If you’re…
- Heading down to Austin in the next couple of days to take part in the annual SxSWi (South By Southwest Interactive) conference, and
- In need of a professional photo — a portrait, a headshot, a group photo, whatever,
…then you should drop Kris Krüg a line. He’s going to be there and he takes awesome pictures, including the one of me above from SxSWi 2011. I was wandering about the bar’s back patio when I ran into Kris, who said “I’ve gotta get a picture of you!”, and I was only to happy to oblige. Kris does great work — book him before he’s all booked out!
There are all sorts of ways to get in touch with Kris, and they’re listed on his “Contact Me” page.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Categories
Bitcoin joke of the day
From the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness, by Rob DenBleyker.
Click to see the source.
Thanks to Anne Mackenzie for the find!
Click the photo to see O’Reilly’s deals page.
Today is Steve Jobs’ birthday, and O’Reilly’s commemorating it with a 50% off sale on all Apple ebooks and videos. Just use the discount code DEAL when buying them from O’Reilly store before February 25, 2014 at 5:00 a.m. Pacific (GMT – 8), and you’ll be able to get them for half price.
Recommended
At half price, there are some particularly good deals, including:
iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals, by Matt Neuberg. If you’re an experienced developer, but new to Objective-C (and haven’t touched C in a while) and iOS, this is a good introduction. The book is divided into three parts:
- Language: Starts with a chapter titled “Just enough C” to get you comfortable, then spends the rest of its time getting you up to speed on Objective-C’s way of using classes, objects, and messaging.
- IDE: Once you’re familiar with the language, this next section covers working with Xcode projects, building user interfaces with Xcode, the editor and debugging tools, and what you need to do to deploy apps to devices.
- Cocoa: This section covers those parts of the Cocoa framework that you’re most likely to use, as well as issues of memory management and communication between objects.
At half price, the book is US$15.99, which makes for a pretty sweet deal.
iOS 7 Programming Cookbook, by Vandad Nahavandipoor. Once you’ve dipped your toe into iOS programming, you’ll find this book useful, as it’s a “how do I do this?” reference for iOS developers. Yes, you’ll find a lot of this information scattered all over the place online, but it’s often nice to have it gathering up into a single package, which this book does pretty well.
At half price, this book goes for $21.99.
Not Recommended
If you look at the Head First series of books on Amazon, you’ll find that they generally get great reviews. Not Head First iPhone and iPad Development, which got a low number of stars and is a bit disappointing compared to other Head First programming books I’ve read (especially the various editions of Head First C#). The just-released third edition of Head First iPhone and iPad Development seems to have cut out material that appeared in the second, has some sloppy editing, and reads like as though it were put together by contractual obligation. At half price, it’s US$13.99.
If you’re looking for a beginner-friendly intro to iOS development, I’d much rather you got your paws on The iOS Apprentice from Ray Wenderlich’s site. It may not be as cheap as Head First iPhone and iPad Development, but you’ll get way more bang for your developer tutorial buck.
Chart by Bruno Oliveira.
Click the graph to see it at full size.
File this under “It’s funny because it’s true.”