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Developing Perspective

Show 0.5

 

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,

00:00:08   Apple, and related technologies.

00:00:10   I'm your host, David Smith.

00:00:11   I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.

00:00:15   Today is July 19th, and this is show 0.5.

00:00:20   The format of Developing Perspective is that I'll cover a handful of links and articles

00:00:25   and other things that I found interesting in roughly the last 24 hours, and then I'll

00:00:29   on to a more general discussion. The show will never be more than 15 minutes. Let's

00:00:34   get to it. So to start off today, I'm going to do a great article over on Sean Blanc's

00:00:40   website discussing reading on the iPad. If you own an iPad, which if you listen to this

00:00:45   I'm sure you do, he's probably one of the biggest and most enjoyable uses for it. It's

00:00:51   a great form factor for it, and its size, weight, and general characteristics closely

00:00:59   mirror that of a traditional book or magazine.

00:01:02   However, it's not without its challenges

00:01:07   and Sean walks through a lot of those challenges and specifically focusing

00:01:12   on what are some of the challenges that

00:01:16   we see from the actual magazine and content industry itself.

00:01:20   If you're like me reading in

00:01:24   Something like iBooks, Kindle, Instapaper, those types of applications is great,

00:01:30   but if you ever try and read something in Wired or another traditional large form factor,

00:01:36   or I guess traditional media, there's a whole range of challenges and problems that you have.

00:01:43   A non-selectable text, giant, download size, non-reflowable,

00:01:48   all kinds of things which are just awful.

00:01:49   So, something worth checking out.

00:01:53   Our second link this morning is going to be just an article over on the Flurry site.

00:01:59   Flurry, if you're not familiar with them, is an analytics company

00:02:02   that lets you track user activity inside your application.

00:02:08   They're cross-platform and in this particular article, what's interesting is they have the ability

00:02:14   to see and by proxy identify roughly how many new projects are being started

00:02:23   on the various platforms, iPad, iPhone, and Android.

00:02:26   And they have a little chart where you can see

00:02:29   that with the Verizon iPhone coming out as well as the iPad 2

00:02:33   in Q2 of 2011, and this is through July 30th of this year,

00:02:39   the percentage of new projects starts.

00:02:43   So this is developers coming into their system and saying,

00:02:45   "Hey, we'd like to start a new project."

00:02:48   of those being Android dropped from 36% to 28%

00:02:53   with that difference being made up by both iPhone,

00:02:57   iPod Touch and iPad primarily.

00:03:00   So it's just sort of another indication that iOS

00:03:05   and iPad are doing very, very well.

00:03:10   The next article I have is an article written about designing

00:03:16   and creating the new GitHub for Mac application.

00:03:20   This is an application, if you're not familiar,

00:03:23   that acts as a native client for interacting

00:03:27   with your GitHub repositories, all from your Mac.

00:03:32   It was created by GitHub for that purpose.

00:03:37   And if you're curious at all about how to thoughtfully

00:03:42   design a Mac application and also

00:03:45   to get a bit of a flavor for how this process works.

00:03:49   It's just a really good walkthrough.

00:03:51   I highly recommend it.

00:03:52   He talks-- pulls out some of the challenges

00:03:56   that anyone is coming from, especially an iOS background has

00:03:59   when moving to the Mac where you start seeing all

00:04:03   of these just complications and challenges and where you end

00:04:08   up with most of your application being the set

00:04:13   of spliced Photoshop mockups and things like that.

00:04:18   It's a really good walkthrough and highly recommended.

00:04:21   Next, I have an article from the Atlantic.

00:04:25   And this is just a sort of more of a sidebar article.

00:04:30   But it's about the challenges and nature

00:04:36   of Google's famous cafeterias.

00:04:38   So Google famously provides 24 hours a day food

00:04:42   for free for all of its employees at its main campuses.

00:04:47   And some of the challenges that they're talking about here,

00:04:51   which are relevant for most developers, are some

00:04:54   of the health and related challenges of providing

00:04:58   that amount of good quality food 24 hours a day for free.

00:05:02   And some of the interesting things they do,

00:05:03   they have a color coding system to identify

00:05:06   which foods you can have a lot of,

00:05:09   which ones you should stay away from.

00:05:11   And interestingly, they also have apparently some vending machines

00:05:17   in certain places within the campus.

00:05:20   And these are priced based on roughly their health.

00:05:24   So for example, there's one cent per gram of sugar,

00:05:28   two cents per gram of fat, four cents per gram of saturated fat,

00:05:32   and one dollar per gram of trans fat, which is just kind

00:05:36   of interesting and not a way to do it.

00:05:38   So if you ever thought about working at Google or just think

00:05:41   about health and the developer lifestyle.

00:05:44   It's worth checking out.

00:05:45   Next, I was going to-- there's a fantastic pair of articles.

00:05:50   And you may remember a couple of the episodes ago I talked

00:05:53   about a diagram of the iPhone home button.

00:05:56   Lucas Mathis over on Ignore the Code has a great pair

00:06:03   of articles talking about some of the challenges

00:06:06   of the iPhone's home button.

00:06:08   And then he has a follow up talking about back buttons.

00:06:11   And that is primarily focused on Android and its back button

00:06:18   and the various challenges that you have there.

00:06:20   If you're not familiar with Lucas, he is a--

00:06:23   I guess you could call him a usability expert.

00:06:25   And so he-- his perspective and the way that he talks

00:06:30   about it is just very, very in-depth, very, very useful

00:06:35   and kind of made me think a lot about how this--

00:06:39   so sort of-- something as simple as the home button,

00:06:42   something as simple as the back button.

00:06:43   And from a usability perspective,

00:06:45   how that could actually be very, very challenging.

00:06:48   All right.

00:06:51   The last thing I'm going to talk about today is--

00:06:56   for our main topic, is I'm going to talk a little bit

00:06:58   about rumors.

00:07:00   If you're at all involved in the Apple, Mac, iOS, any of those types of fields,

00:07:07   you know that the last couple of weeks has been shock full of rumors.

00:07:13   At first it was about, oh, are there going to be new Mac Pros coming out?

00:07:19   Are there going to be new iMacs?

00:07:21   Are there going to be-- sorry, not new iMacs, new Mac Minis, new MacBook Airs?

00:07:26   Are they going to have an iPad HD, an iPad Pro, when's the line coming out?

00:07:34   I think that I've just been struck by recently and increasingly it's just a filter that I put

00:07:39   on all of the content I read is all of this rumor mongering is just a huge waste of time.

00:07:45   And mostly I say that not because it in and of itself is problematic

00:07:53   to have people whose job it is to speculate and to try and work that out.

00:07:58   If you're a stock analyst or something like that, a day trader,

00:08:03   that's actually very interesting, useful information.

00:08:05   But for someone who actually consumes that, I've found myself having to catch myself

00:08:10   from getting too wrapped up in that.

00:08:13   And it's just wasting time on something that is by its very nature useless,

00:08:19   Knowing that there's a chance that something may or may not come

00:08:23   out at some time maybe in the future is rarely helpful.

00:08:29   Maybe if you're in the market to buy a MacBook Air, it's helpful insofar

00:08:33   as to say this is not a good time to buy a new one if you can wait

00:08:38   because there's a likelihood that a new one is coming out.

00:08:40   But in general, it's just not worth your time.

00:08:45   It reminds me a lot of Christmas morning, in fact, and I remember this last WWDC,

00:08:53   for about the last day or two before the keynote, I intentionally just sort

00:08:58   of stopped following the news because what I really didn't want is for it to spoil the surprise,

00:09:04   to spoil the fun of learning and discovering what it is that is coming out.

00:09:12   And I would just generally encourage everyone to do the same and try and stay away

00:09:17   from MacRumors, AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, the Boy Genius Report, all of these sites

00:09:24   which make their money just by constantly saying something.

00:09:30   And these claims are typically sensational and blown out or derived from all

00:09:36   from the same material but are made to sound like it's new information

00:09:40   and all those kinds of things.

00:09:42   So just something I've been thinking about

00:09:45   is we have just been so inundated with rumors.

00:09:49   Things will come out when they come out.

00:09:51   Enjoy the carefully crafted marketing, timing, and presentation

00:09:56   that inevitably will be part of that.

00:09:59   And be patient.

00:10:00   All right.

00:10:01   That's today's show.

00:10:03   Again, this is the end of, say, July 19th, Tuesday.

00:10:08   Maybe Matt Lyon will come out.

00:10:10   Who knows?

00:10:11   It doesn't matter.

00:10:12   Anyway, I'll be talking to you tomorrow.

00:10:14   I think some things to look forward to.

00:10:16   I believe Apple's earnings will come out today and a few other things that should be kind

00:10:21   of fun to talk about tomorrow.

00:10:23   Till then, happy coding.

00:10:25   Have a good day.