Archive for the 'Geekology' Category

I’m starting to get antsy for an iPhone, but need to wait for it to be 3G.  It’s kind of weird.  I get cranky when I’m out someplace with my iPod touch and don’t have access to a WiFi connection for Internet access.

I find it quite enjoyable to do mail and the web on it — except for the limitations on when and where I can use it.  I’m pretty confident now that I’ll be one of the losers waiting in line early before the release in order to be among the first to get one.  I’m awfully eager to get one.

It’s gotten to the point where I wholly resent my Treo for being large, cumbersome, and unpleasant to use by comparison.  This is a sad state of affairs given that only a year and a half ago, I called it the coolest gadget I’d ever seen.

The new entertainment center is now all set up, with the exception of ongoing tweaking to the configuration of the Logitech universal remote I bought. It sure is a nice setup.

Eventually I need to come up with a plan to hook up and place the surround speakers. I left them off for now because the wires we have aren’t long enough to position them properly.

I recently went out to eat dinner with my family, and ordered a simple grilled chicken breast.  What I received was something that caught my eye:

This is exactly the way the plate was presented to me upon arrival.  Now, compare to this:

It’s not every day you get a continent served up to you on a plate.  Complete with Tasmania, no less.

You may be asking what this has to do with Mozilla.  Well… nothing, really, but I thought it was the sort of oddball thing that would amuse you.

The new entertainment center is here and mostly set up.  I need to go out and pick up a component video cable today — to get the cable box working without one, I borrowed the Mac mini’s DVI/HDMI converter and cable, so I need to get the component cable to swap things back around.

The center looks beautiful.  So far, we have the TV, cable box, receiver, Blu-Ray player, and even the old 5-disc DVD player hooked up to it.  The Mac will join it later today after I run out and buy that cable and return a spare audio cable I wound up not needing.  I’m also going to look for a good universal remote; we currently have to use three remotes to drive this setup.

Tomorrow, at long last, our new entertainment center into which our HDTV will fit is due to be delivered.  We got a lot of the old stuff torn down and moved out of the way tonight, and will do the rest in the morning.  The afternoon will be spent waiting on them to show up with it, then assembling the new setup in it.  It’ll be interesting.  I’m pretty sure I’ll need to go pick up some cables in order to do it right (now that we have the digital TV, I’d like to use digital audio cables, for example).

I also hope the cable company’s office is open on Saturday, so I can swing by and pick up the cable they insist I use when activating HD service, which I also need to do.

I got the updated SDK installed last night, and to be honest, while it’s obvious what’s new, it’s also pretty clear that the stuff isn’t really all that useful yet.  For example, although Interface Builder is included now, there aren’t any project templates for IB projects.  In addition, although the release notes say to “read the full release notes for instructions on how to create a project using Interface Builder,” those instructions are actually missing.

I played with IB to create an interface, and almost immediately ran into problems.  Although you can create tab bars and toolbars, once you drag items onto them, you can’t edit the items (at least, I was totally unable to select them once they were in place).

The updated Xcode that’s included now has support for hooking to your iPod touch or iPhone to run your builds (if you’ve got the paid membership in the iPhone developer program).  That’s good progress.

There’s apparently an update for the iPhone SDK documentation available (at least, the doc viewer window says there’s one), but trying to download it fails consistently with a “file is not on server” error.

I’m really excited to be able to develop software for iPhone, but the tools just aren’t ready for people that don’t have time to throw their lives into learning the quirks of a system that’s going to get better in time anyway.  Hopefully the next update to the SDK will get it to the point where I can start doing some code in earnest.  I’ve already got two or three projects in mind.

The very first thing that’s important to note about this beta release of the iPhone SDK is that there’s currently no Interface Builder support, despite it being talked up at the demo yesterday.  This is a pretty serious blow to ease of development at this early stage.  Instead of simply dragging and dropping interface elements onto a form, you have to programmatically instantiate UI objects and place them into your view.

That’s not disastrously bad or anything, just frustrating; after using IB for so long, having to go without it sort of sucks.

The API is pretty well thought out.  It makes use of much of the Cocoa API we already know and love, with a new UIKit that provides the UI elements instead of using NSWindow, NSView, and so forth.  Instead, we have UIWindow, UIView, etc.  They work very similarly, except they’ve been tuned for the iPhone.

It didn’t take me too long at all to create my first “Hello world” application, which is good.

On the down side, the documentation is a bit of a mess at the moment; when you go to the “iPhone OS” documentation, you get a lot of links back into the Mac OS X documentation, and much of that material is almost — but not quite — accurate for the iPhone OS.  Obviously the writers have a little work left to do there.

It’s not in bad shape for a beta, though (aside from the missing IB support thing).

There are some nice APIs for things like tracking touches on the screen, monitoring the accelerometer (you simply register to receive notifications of accelerometer events, and a delegate gets called as the user tips the device), and so forth.

Video playback is supported but only in full-screen mode.  That’s not a tragedy, but it’s a mild bummer.

Audio playback has both support for short sounds (five seconds or less) and for streaming audio files off  the flash storage (but only one at a time).  That’s more than adequate for any use cases that I can legitimately think of.  It also supports 3D positioning of audio, audio recording, and streaming audio over CFNetwork connections.  Excellent.

Handling rotation of your view is as simple as using a view controller and having it accept a call that notifies it that the display has rotated.

Generally the API is quite refined from a first glance, and looks like a lot of solid thought went into it.  I look forward to being able to do some real work with it to see what I can do.

The “Aspen Simulator,” which lets you test your code on your Macintosh, is a bare-bones iPhone simulator.  It has Safari, Photos, Contacts, and Settings apps on it, but otherwise doesn’t have the apps an iPhone normally has.  When you create your iPhone project, it defaults to running on the Simulator.  To test, all you do is Command-R to run it, and the Simulator launches and automatically starts up your app.  There are menu options that let you rotate the device left and right, and you can simulate pinching (two-finger) touch events by holding down the Option key while clicking and dragging on the touch screen.

Debugging works great as well.  If you choose to run in debug mode, it works just like you’d expect. Single-stepping, tracing, watching variables, and so forth all work exactly like they do when debugging a Mac application, right within Xcode.

There are a couple of disappointments.  The lack of IB is (have I mentioned this before) a real bummer.  The fact that it’s a beta is a bummer as well, although not exactly a surprise.

The license agreement for the SDK is also fairly disappointing, in that it disallows development of apps that run interpreted code, among other things.  This may prevent Mobile Firefox from being done on the iPhone.  I for one would have liked to see someone do a port of Mobile Firefox to the iPhone, if for no other reason than to have a platform that I personally carry around with which I could show it off to people.

I also had hoped to work on porting an emulator I’ve spent several years helping to develop to the iPhone, but at first glance, I fear that the license terms may not allow emulation.  It’s a question I’ll have to ask.

At any rate, despite the minor disappointments and frustrations, the iPhone SDK is a huge, huge step in the right direction, and I’m very enthusiastic to see where things go from here.

This is one of the more exciting new features — to me — in Firefox 3.  It’s now possible for web sites to register themselves as handlers for protocols.  For example, if you have a web mail service, it can register to handle “mailto” URLs, which is really an enormous convenience.

Although the DOM method registerProtocolHandler() has been documented for a while now, Mark Finkle has finally added to MDC a how-to guide for how to implement a web-based protocol handler.

If you have a web site that might benefit from implementing a web-based protocol handler, be sure to check this out!

I’m back on duty.  I’m not 100% yet, but I’m working again.  I spent today wading through email, which was mostly repeated comments on two or three specific bugs, thankfully.

A few comments on things I’ve been thinking about:

JavaScript Reference

A few people have commented that they’re not thrilled with the reorganization of the JavaScript Reference to split off the non-inherited functions into a separate prototype page.  For example:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Global_Objects:String

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Global_Objects:String:prototype

I find myself agreeing that while this might be technically correct to separate these, it makes the documentation less useful.  This is something we’ll have to revisit pretty soon.

Element IDs

While I was out, the IDs of certain elements in the browser changed in an attempt to fix a certain problem.  After a great deal of discussion, it looks like these will be switched back to their previous values.  The documentation has already been updated for the new names, and will need to be reverted — which I’ll do once it’s a done deal that they will be reverted.

Microsoft: Slayer of Openness and All That Is Good And Right

I think the title of this section of this post pretty much says it all.  Leave your hands off Yahoo!, you thugs.

I thought it might be interesting to just dump my thoughts during today’s Macworld Expo keynote from Steve Jobs on-the-fly, stream of consciousness style, as things go along.  Of course, this is all based off the text dump feeds that are coming out of Moscone today.  I’ll watch the real thing later in the day after Apple posts it.

Time Capsule

OK, an Airport Extreme Base Station with internal hard drive for backups.  Handy but sort of sounds like a snoozer unless the price is awesome.  And the price looks pretty decent.  $299 for 500 GB, $499 for 1 TB.  That’s not bad at all.  Depending on specifics, I may be begging my wife for permission to get one.

We need a new router (our current WiFi router is messed up and only works when wide open — oops), and we also badly need NAS for backups.  The question is: get them all in one, or buy cheaper but separate?  We’ll see…

iPhone

4 million sold in 200 days.  Nice!

New iPhone software?  That sounds exciting… c’mon, make it something really spiffy!  Please?

Maps with location.  Nice.  Web clips; that’s one I’ll have to see in action before I get all that interested.  Home screen customization, multi-person SMS.  Eh.  I have an iPod touch, not an iPhone, so most of that stuff doesn’t interest me much.  Give me Mail on my iPod touch, Steve!

OK, so basically web clips lets you put bookmarks on your home screen, with the zoom/pan settings saved.  I can see use for that, to bookmark the stuff I use the most (like Zimbra for work, for example, and Gmail).

I still want Mail, Steve!

iPod touch

Oh, I’m all a-twitter!

Woot!  Mail!

Mail, Stocks, Notes, and Weather!  Steve, I love you!

$20 upgrade.  Bummer but not by much.

iTunes

Sweet — they passed the 4 billion songs mark.  That’s phenomenal.

iTunes Movie Rentals.  I’m pretty excited about this.  Let’s see who they have on board and how much they’ll cost.

Holy cow.  They got all the major studios on board.  That’s phenomenal!  Wow!

Movies hit iTunes rental store 30 days after the DVD is out.  I can live with that, although it’s a shame and will hurt their rental figures, I think.  Netflix gets them day one.

I’m totally going to have to try this out.  I sure hope the picture looks good on my HDTV.

Hey, nice.  You get 30 days to start watching your rental, but then have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting.  That’s really quite good.

$2.99 for library titles, $3.99 for new releases.  That’s really quite reasonable, especially given the convenience.  30 hours would have been better than 24 for getting your movie watched.

I’d seriously think about quitting Netflix except Netflix will send me Blu-Ray (high definition) movies, and iTunes doesn’t do HD.

Apple TV 2

No computer required.  Rent directly on the TV.  DVD quality and HD + Dolby 5.1.  Does that mean actual HD video?

Still can sync with iTunes, which is also good.  If this thing actually does HD, I’d seriously consider… yep.  HD rentals available, at $4.99 each.

I’ll have to sit down and do the math and see if it makes sense to buy one of these.   Depends on the price of the unit and how my math works out in terms of how much renting I would do.

I’m curious how big the drive is on it.  That’ll need to be good sized to handle all that HD content people will be downloading…

Wow, you can buy music on the Apple TV too.  That’s nifty as well.

Dude.  It’s a free software update to current Apple TV owners.  And the entry price of the unit is dropped to $229.  That seriously means it’s something for me to consider buying.  Wow.

Blah, blah, CEO of Fox.  Blah, blah…

I’m quite excited about iTunes copies of movies being on DVDs going forward, at least from Fox.  That’ll be sweet.

MacBook Air

Woohoo! This is going to be cool, I bet.

Sounds very sexy.  I don’t want one, but it’s very pretty and cool sounding.  I expect it will be quite a hit.  I need performance more than smallness, personally, but I know a lot of people are going to be happy to make the tradeoff.

2 GB standard memory (I guess it’s not upgradeable, so they had to load it up).  I’m curious what it runs with a solid-state drive on it.  $1799 is a good base price for it, especially for people that need the convenience of a small, light machine.  I figure it’ll be a hit with frequent travelers.