Photo found via Paul Tichonczuk.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
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A snapshot of Techmeme today at 2:30 p.m. EDT. Click to see the snapshot on Techmeme.
As I write this (Monday, June 11th, 2012, 2:30 p.m. EDT), the WWDC 2012 keynote’s still going and it’s eating up the first two or three screenfuls of Techmeme. Wait until the keynote’s over and the pundits have had time to digest, editorialize and post full-length review articles!
With all the fuss about Apple’s WWDC, which starts today, and Google I/O at the end of the month, Microsoft’s big TechEd North America conference, which is aimed at both developers and sysadmin (or IT Pros, in Microsoft parlance), seems to have faded into the background. TechEd, being based in the Eastern time zone (it’s in Orlando this year), has been in full swing for a few hours already, and not a single report has found its way to Techmeme as of this writing; it’s a safe bet that this will not be the case for WWDC after it’s been in full swing for a few minutes.
People actually lining up to try the Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone.
Against the hubbub of rumoured announcements iOS 6, an Apple TV SDK, new Macs, and Apple’s answer to Google Maps, as well as rumours of a new version of Android, TechEd, with no ground-shaking announcements to make and a straight-up tutorial approach feels more like an excuse for people who work at places using Microsoft technologies to take a break from work on the company dime without sacrificing precious vacation days. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who are excited to be there or that they’re not doing useful stuff (we probably owe the fact that we can pick up detergent and TV sets at Walmart to people running and maintaining MS Tech); it’s just that from an outside perspective, they seem like Twilight fans: a force to be reckoned with, but when you look at what they’re into, you’re tempted to ask “Really? That’s what you spend all that time and effort on?”
I think the most telling thing about TechEd was a Channel 9 live broadcast I just saw, during which my friend and former co-worker Joey Snow was interviewing the guy who created PowerShell, the shell-scripting system for Windows. He talked about a guy who was considering learning Scala and wondered aloud why anyone would want to do that. He said that five years down the line, PowerShell would be the more valuable line item on your resume than something like Scala (he said that resume scanning software would put you in the delete bin). This “Not Invented Here”, short-term community-college-style, old-school FUD, resume-padding-uber-alles, death-of-intellectual-curiosity, lack-of-imagination-and-learning-different-things mode of thinking that has worked its way through many parts of The Empire like a brain cancer and is only speeding up the IBMification of Microsoft.
What you’ll see if you visit Apple’s online store right now.
As I write this, Apple has placed the traditional “We’ll be back” message on their online store, signalling the announcement of new products at WWDC 2012. At 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific), Apple CEO Tim Cook (and presumably marketing chief Phil Schiller and iOS kahuna Scott Forstall) will take the stage and deliver the WWDC keynote. You can follow all the action on the following liveblogs:
- Ars Technica’s liveblog
- CNET’s liveblog
- Engadget’s liveblog
- Gizmodo’s liveblog
- The Globe and Mail’s liveblog
- iMore’s liveblog
- MacRumors’ liveblog
- Ubergizmo’s liveblog
- The Verge’s liveblog
The banners seen at Moscone Center, WWDC’s venue, confirm that they’ll be announcing iOS 6. You’ve probably heard that one of the biggest changes will be Apple’s own 3D maps, which will replace Google Maps, as well as Siri being made available on more devices than just the iPhone 4S. There are also rumours that AppleTV will get an SDK, enabling iOS developers to truly take over the living room.
According to digital marketing and research firm eMarketer, there will be 53 million iPad users in the US by the end of the year. They say that by 2015 — although we should remember to be suspicious of such predictions — that there will be 91 million of them. That’s just under one in three people in the US right now or three times Canada’s current population.
iOS 5 captured approximately 75% of all iOS users in the same amount of time it took Gingerbread to get 4% of all Android users. Even more astounding is that 15 weeks after launch iOS 4 was at 70% and iOS 5 was at 60% while Ice Cream Sandwich got to just 1% share at the same age.
The post may be old, but it’s making the rounds now thanks to Scoble, and it’s relevant right now.
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Just Puttin’ It Out There…
Screen capture taken on Saturday, June 9, 2012.
Click to see my current Klout score.
…I hear that having a high Klout score is a handy thing when looking about for your next work opportunity.
(For the curious, here’s my LinkedIn profile and my resume.)
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
All you need is a little HTML5 magic, the Twitter logo and callous disregard for Twitter’s brand guidelines to have a little fun. Try it out!
Kudos to Bertrand Fan (@bertrandom) for this creation.
Some Personal Notes
As I wrote earlier, I’ve declared a bit of a summer vacation for myself, but that doesn’t mean it’s been all fun and games and loafing about. I mean there’s been some fun and games and loafing about, but there’s also been a little work as well, what with lining up some conversations about work opportunities, updating the LinkedIn profile and old-school resume and of course, learning iOS development, which is what the Vaya con iOS series of articles is all about.
So, with my trusty MacBook Pro, iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, I got to work…
Just kidding — that’s not me.
As I said, with my trusty Mac and iTools, I got to work…
Okay, enough fooling around.
This is really me. I’m at the girlfriend’s place in Tampa. She goes off to work, while I start the day with an energizing swim at the central pool that almost no one in this townhouse complex seems to use:
Sixty to eighty lengths of the pool later, I emerge, shower, get dressed and then it’s time to get cracking:
She has a desk set up in her living room, which I’ve commandeered for my studies and other work. The laptop, mouse, iPad and phone are mine; Tux, the SUSE gecko, IBM bee and Sun dolphin (alas, it’s not in the shot) are hers.
A few people asked about the Nyan Cat sticker. I bought it at — I almost hate to admit this — Hot Topic (they have good pop culture stickers), cut it into two sections and laid it carefully around the trackpad.
iTunes U’s iPad and iPhone Application Development Course
There’s a pretty interesting iPad and iPhone programming course on iTunes U taught by Stanford’s Paul Hegarty. I enjoy his lectured and have watched the first three without zoning out or dozing off, which I must say is a damned sight better than some moments in my colourful academic career. I suppose not being hung over helps.
Over the course, which was recorded as it took place in the fall term of 2011, students were expected to build two complete iOS applications, with each lecture providing more material. There are 19 lectures in the series, which also includes some supplementary sessions as well as the slides for each lecture. It’s a Stanford computer science course without the Stanford tuition — it’s free! All you need is iTunes. If you decide to subscribe, be sure to get the 2011 course, as it covers iOS 5.
Ray Wenderlich and the iOS Apprentice
While researching blogs and other sites with useful information for developers with programming experience but little or no iOS development practice, I stumbled across Ray Wenderlich’s site. It’s updated regularly with new articles about various aspects of iOS development, and there’s also a regular email newsletter. One of the enticements for subscribing is that subscribers get a free tutorial — the first part of a tutorial series called The iOS Apprentice, written by Matthijs Hollemans.
I used to do Windows Phone tutorials back when I was a developer evangelist at Microsoft, and I was curious to see how someone else did it. So I signed up and soon afterwards, I got an email with the download link for the tutorial, a zip file with the tutorial in HTML form, plus XCode project files for the completed application and all the graphics and other resources needed.
I was impressed, especially because this was free. It’s on par with the NerdDinner tutorial for ASP.NET MVC, which I called the best “chapter one” I’ve ever read.
The tutorial is huge and it’s beautiful; it looks as if it was made by Apple. If you turn it into a PDF, it becomes a 117-page book, and it covers the development of a “Bull’s Eye” game, in which you try to position a slider as close as possible to a specified target value. In the process, you learn a lot: you get an intro to programming in general and XCode in particular, setting up UI controls and responding to events, dealing with different device orientations, adding a modal screen, customizing controls with your own graphics, giving your app an icon, dealing with regular and Retina displays, deploying your app to a device and more.
The tutorial was written for people who’ve never programmed before, but it does move pretty quickly. I wonder if complete novices get stuck in the process. However, I found it easy and skipped the parts in which programming concepts were explained, focusing more on the iOS-specific parts. I didn’t find the fact that it was written for beginners a bother, and I had a lot of fun in the process of following along. I even opened another project to noodle with the concepts I was learning from the tutorial.
In fact, I had so much fun with the Bull’s Eye tutorial that I decided to spend the $54 and purchase the rest. I’m currently on part 1 of the second tutorial, in which you build a reminder list app, which covers TableView-based applications. I found The iOS Apprentice more appealing and more packed with useful information than a number of iOS development books that I’d had the chance to read over and that it’s money well-spent.
If you’ve been putting off learning iOS development for whatever reason, go sign up for the newsletter at Ray Wenderlich’s site, get the first tutorial for free and give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.