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Developing Perspective

Show 0.6

 

00:00:00   Hello, and welcome to Developing Perspective.

00:00:03   Developing Perspective is a near-daily podcast discussing what's new and interesting in iOS,

00:00:07   Apple, and related technologies.

00:00:09   I'm your host, David Smith, and I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.

00:00:14   This is episode 0.6.

00:00:17   Format of the show is pretty straightforward.

00:00:18   I'll walk through a couple of interesting links, have a general discussion.

00:00:22   The show will never be longer than 15 minutes.

00:00:24   Without further ado, let's get started.

00:00:26   I said today is July 20th, the day "Lion" came out.

00:00:30   We'll be getting to that a little bit later after I walk through the links.

00:00:34   First, a couple of links to get you started with today.

00:00:37   Yesterday, VBEdit 10 came out.

00:00:40   As you may remember from a couple of episodes ago, this is increasingly becoming the de-facto

00:00:46   text editor for programmers on Mac OS, as TextMate seems to have largely been abandoned

00:00:53   or at least is falling into disrepair.

00:00:55   BvEdit 10 comes with a variety of new stuff, though I would say the most important thing

00:01:00   that I saw is that it is finally compliant with Lion.

00:01:06   And so you can do things like full screen and a couple of related things, and so that's

00:01:11   great.

00:01:12   I recently finished installing Lion onto my machine from a clean install, and at this

00:01:17   point I have not installed TextMate.

00:01:19   I'm going to give it a try with BvEdit as my go-to text editor for a little while and

00:01:24   see what happens.

00:01:25   So definitely check that out.

00:01:28   Next article I have is a fascinating little piece from the Wall Street Journal about Google

00:01:33   and its early days.

00:01:35   It's basically a piece written by the employee number 59, Douglas Edwards.

00:01:41   It recently published a book about the early days at Google.

00:01:45   And this article is sort of some of the highlights of that.

00:01:49   Just a really interesting thing if you kind of get a sense of the culture back then and

00:01:53   And you can kind of see and understand some of where the company has become now.

00:01:58   So it's also interesting to check out.

00:02:01   Next is an interesting discussion that's been happening over on Stack Exchange.

00:02:05   And specifically this is talking about why companies don't buy developers the best hardware

00:02:11   they can.

00:02:13   And if you're a developer who works in a large company, I'm sure you've run into this.

00:02:16   There's this inevitable challenge within most IT shops that, "Well, we have a standard machine

00:02:23   this is how we do it and they give the same machine that they have to their sales guys,

00:02:27   to their developers. And I imagine if you're listening to this you're probably a developer

00:02:33   and if you are you're probably of the same mindset that I am that that's just foolish.

00:02:38   Developers should have as fast of a machine as is physically reasonable for their their job.

00:02:45   You'll almost certainly make the money back in terms of increases in productivity, retention,

00:02:51   those types of things, especially when you're considering that a brand new computer, for

00:02:56   example, every two years, maybe every three years, but say brand new top end computer

00:03:01   every two years, you're talking about probably something like $1,500 to $2,000 a year, which

00:03:07   given the cost of a high level employee is probably well over $100,000, if not $150,000

00:03:13   a year, that's a bargain to keep them happy, to keep them engaged and ready to go.

00:03:20   So that's just an interesting article to look through there.

00:03:22   There's just a lot of back and forth, which might be fun.

00:03:26   And our last link that we're going to talk about today is there's an interesting article

00:03:30   in Ars Technica that came out before the big Syracuse article today, seven under the radar

00:03:37   line features you may have missed.

00:03:39   If you're going to read the whole article over by John Siracusa, you probably don't

00:03:44   need to read this, but if you want some of the highlights, it's an interesting place

00:03:47   to look.

00:03:48   Alright, today's going to be a little bit different than normal because we had two absolutely

00:03:53   major stories today that I need to spend a lot of time talking about.

00:03:58   The first is yesterday Apple renounced its third quarter results.

00:04:03   So this is Q3 2011 results.

00:04:07   And as you would imagine or as you may have guessed, they were again record – blowing

00:04:15   records and doing amazing things.

00:04:17   So they posted a record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion and a net profit of $7.31

00:04:25   billion, which is an absurd amount of money considering that every quarter, I think for

00:04:30   a while now, they've set records for the revenue and income.

00:04:33   And especially when you consider this is not a holiday quarter.

00:04:37   This is essentially June, May and April.

00:04:42   So not exactly the usual time when consumers are buying lots of things.

00:04:48   The company sold about 20 million iPhones during that quarter, 9.25 million iPads.

00:04:57   And the only thing that went down was iPods, which is hardly expected considering the number

00:05:04   of iPhones that they sold.

00:05:07   I think I remember the COO talking about how they sold roughly 33 million iOS devices in

00:05:17   the quarter, which if you work it out is about 4.2 sales per second of iOS devices.

00:05:25   That's a user who's either upgrading or purchasing for the first time their iOS device, which

00:05:30   is as an iOS developer, that is an absurd number.

00:05:34   The number of new customers and perhaps even better, the customers who are upgrading and

00:05:37   allowing me to do more and more with new higher performance devices is just astonishing.

00:05:44   Just for a little bit of context on that, the global birth rate, so the number of children

00:05:48   born every second, is about 4.28.

00:05:53   So it's only slightly more people are born every second than are buying an iOS device,

00:05:57   which is quite remarkable.

00:05:58   I'll have a link in the show notes about if you want to get all the details and the nitty-gritty

00:06:03   of it, but those are some of the highlights.

00:06:05   Essentially as an iOS developer, as an Apple developer, the Apple ecosystem is doing well.

00:06:11   Apple has lots of money and is doing good things with it.

00:06:14   My last little sort of footnote that I thought was a fascinating thing that Simco pulled

00:06:20   out is that Apple's R&D as a percent of sales is now at a record low of 2.2%.

00:06:29   So if you imagine that that's all they're spending to accomplish all the amazing technologies

00:06:34   and hardware and all kinds of things that they're developing, using only 2.2% of their

00:06:40   sales in order to drive that innovation.

00:06:43   And that is quite impressive.

00:06:45   All right.

00:06:47   And the second part of today's discussion is, of course, I'm going to talk about Lion.

00:06:51   Lion came out at about 8.45 Eastern Time today.

00:06:55   And there's the usual stampede to go get it, to download it, to make sure everything,

00:07:02   make sure you can get the latest build.

00:07:04   It appears that the build is the exact same as the gold master that was published to the

00:07:09   Mac developer's portal a couple weeks ago.

00:07:12   So in fact it was a true gold master.

00:07:15   So in case you're wondering if Apple was still having those challenges with, like we did

00:07:20   with Xcode 4 where we had three gold masters, this was in fact the gold master.

00:07:25   So good news there.

00:07:28   I think I'd mentioned a couple episodes ago,

00:07:31   I was going to do a clean install for myself

00:07:34   for this build.

00:07:35   And so I blanked my main boot drive, installed Lion,

00:07:40   and have been merrily installing applications so far.

00:07:43   So far, I'd say it's fantastic.

00:07:44   It has a series of small changes that I

00:07:48   think make a lot of difference.

00:07:49   I really like full screen editing.

00:07:51   I really like the new mission control.

00:07:54   I'm looking forward to hopefully using FileVault 2,

00:07:57   assuming that the performance for it is up to snuff.

00:08:01   If it is, I think that would be a fantastic thing.

00:08:04   I've often wondered and worried about some of the data

00:08:08   that I store on my machine, especially considering

00:08:10   that data is my lifeblood.

00:08:12   That's how I make my money for my apps.

00:08:14   And so its security is vital to me.

00:08:17   So I'm looking forward to that.

00:08:19   If you're looking for probably the best walkthrough of that,

00:08:23   There's no better place than to read John Surakusa's Mac OS 10.7 Lion review.

00:08:30   This is over on Arshteknica.

00:08:32   If you at all follow his show on 5x5, Hypercritical, you've probably been looking forward to this

00:08:37   for quite some time.

00:08:39   And I've read probably the first third of it at this point, and it doesn't disappoint.

00:08:43   If you want really good, detailed, in-depth discussion of what's happening in Lion, what's

00:08:48   new, things you may not have noticed or picked up on, that's definitely the place to go.

00:08:53   And one other thing that I would mention about Lion that I thought was kind of interesting

00:08:59   is they have now started, it seems, distributing the release builds of Xcode via the Mac App Store

00:09:06   rather than necessarily through the dev portal.

00:09:09   As of right now, so as of about 12/38 on July 20th, at this point the Xcode 4.1,

00:09:16   which is the current shipping version of Xcode that you would use to submit apps to the App Store,

00:09:21   as opposed to Xcode 4.2, which is what you would use if you were going to play with iOS 5,

00:09:27   is only available through the Mac App Store for free. Xcode used to be available as a $5

00:09:34   purchase. It is now free for anybody to go and download and use. And if that is in fact the case

00:09:41   for how they're going to be distributing it in the future, that's just an interesting thing to see how

00:09:45   they're gradually moving more and more towards the Mac App Store as the primary

00:09:49   and main way in which apps are distributed to users, including developers.

00:09:55   Alright, well that's about it. I'm going to get back to merrily installing

00:10:00   applications on Lion, getting set up with that, and like I said, enjoy Lion Day, have

00:10:06   fun, and I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye.