Developing Perspective

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

00:00:03 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is a near-daily podcast talking about what is new and interesting

00:00:06 ◼   ► in Apple, iOS, and related technologies.

00:00:09 ◼   ► I'm your host, David Smith.

00:00:10 ◼   ► I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.

00:00:13 ◼   ► This just shows 0.11, and today is Wednesday, July 27th.

00:00:19 ◼   ► The format of Developing Perspective is a... basically, I will cover a handful of links

00:00:23 ◼   ► and articles, things that I found interesting in roughly the last 24 hours.

00:00:28 ◼   ► And then I will move on to a more general discussion towards the end.

00:00:31 ◼   ► The show will never be more than 15 minutes or include third party advertising.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Without further ado, let's get started.

00:00:37 ◼   ► Alright, so first off I have a link to a GitHub repository by Matt Thompson.

00:00:42 ◼   ► This is for something called FormatterKit.

00:00:46 ◼   ► FormatterKit is a very interesting library that he's open sourced, which basically allows

00:00:51 ◼   ► for some fairly sophisticated string-with format-like operations.

00:00:57 ◼   ► So for example, you can combine arrays in interesting ways.

00:01:02 ◼   ► For example, adding commas between the first items and then an ampersand at the end, for

00:01:07 ◼   ► example, or formatting dates and times, formatting locations, formatting ordinal numbers, formatting

00:01:16 ◼   ► time intervals, URLs, those types of things.

00:01:19 ◼   ► It's a great little library that looks to dramatically increase the ease by which you

00:01:25 ◼   ► you can do some standard string formatting operations.

00:01:28 ◼   ► So worth checking out.

00:01:30 ◼   ► Next is a link that I found to the ultimate guide

00:01:34 ◼   ► for installing Rails on OS X Lion.

00:01:38 ◼   ► I recently had to go through this process myself.

00:01:41 ◼   ► I mean, done a clean install of Lion.

00:01:43 ◼   ► And so it was very nice to just kind of walk through this

00:01:46 ◼   ► with somebody who really had tried it and worked it through.

00:01:50 ◼   ► It's basically geared around using

00:01:53 ◼   ► Homebrew, which is an excellent package management tool.

00:01:56 ◼   ► I used to use MacPorts for the most part.

00:01:59 ◼   ► However, now I found Homebrew to be much more reliable,

00:02:02 ◼   ► is probably the better way to say it.

00:02:03 ◼   ► MacPorts works, but if I can get it with Homebrew,

00:02:07 ◼   ► I'd rather use that.

00:02:09 ◼   ► And this walks through installing RVM, PAL, MySQL,

00:02:13 ◼   ► all those kinds of things.

00:02:14 ◼   ► MySQL especially was a bit tricky,

00:02:16 ◼   ► and the guide was helpful to getting that set up

00:02:19 ◼   ► so I could recreate my development environment.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Next, I have a link to Seth Godin's blog.

00:02:27 ◼   ► And the title of the post is called "Defining Quality,"

00:02:31 ◼   ► in which he essentially differentiates

00:02:33 ◼   ► between two different kinds of quality.

00:02:36 ◼   ► There's the quality of design, which

00:02:38 ◼   ► is the thoughtfulness and processes that

00:02:40 ◼   ► lead to user delight and are likely to help someone seek out

00:02:43 ◼   ► a product.

00:02:45 ◼   ► And the other is the quality of manufacturer.

00:02:47 ◼   ► And this is removing any variation and tolerances

00:02:49 ◼   ► that users will notice or care about.

00:02:52 ◼   ► As a developer, it was just an interesting article

00:02:55 ◼   ► to think about and to discuss.

00:02:58 ◼   ► Whereas often you'll think of quality as a singular thing.

00:03:02 ◼   ► It was kind of an interesting thought exercise

00:03:05 ◼   ► to try and differentiate between the various different kinds

00:03:08 ◼   ► of quality that you may have.

00:03:12 ◼   ► And lastly, in the links department today,

00:03:15 ◼   ► there's a link over on TechCrunch.

00:03:17 ◼   ► talking about how ReadItLater, which is a service for saving bookmarks for websites

00:03:22 ◼   ► to read later, had a round of venture capital and raised $2.5 million. ReadItLater, if you're

00:03:30 ◼   ► not familiar, is just a very... It's almost in my mind, it's sort of an Instapaper clone,

00:03:35 ◼   ► though depending on who you talk to, one of them came first, whichever one came first.

00:03:39 ◼   ► The interesting thing here that I thought was, well, in and of itself isn't that important.

00:03:44 ◼   ► I mean TechCrunch isn't exactly a website that I frequent.

00:03:46 ◼   ► But what's interesting is here's a service who's competing with a, whose primary competitor

00:03:53 ◼   ► is almost certainly going to be Instapaper.

00:03:56 ◼   ► And Instapaper is a small one man shop run by Marco Arment who is sort of famous for

00:04:04 ◼   ► skewing this kind of thing and trying to go everywhere, do everything.

00:04:09 ◼   ► it later is cross-platform, does all these kinds of other sort of operations and things.

00:04:15 ◼   ► And what I find interesting here, and this was what I, my first thought when I heard,

00:04:20 ◼   ► okay, they've raised two and a half million dollars. What exactly are they going to be

00:04:24 ◼   ► doing with that? What does that gain them? And also really, how much is that in terms

00:04:30 ◼   ► of money? And what I looked at then was I took that amount of money and worked out roughly

00:04:35 ◼   ► how many, as a percent, of total iOS devices would need to buy a copy of Instapaper for

00:04:42 ◼   ► Marco to raise an equivalent sum of money.

00:04:45 ◼   ► And it turns out that it's 0.3%, which seems like a fairly small number.

00:04:52 ◼   ► It's about 700,000 users, which I'm not saying that's a small number by any means, but it

00:04:57 ◼   ► just seems as though a company like that is giving up a huge amount of flexibility and

00:05:03 ◼   ► control in their own business for something that is not necessarily all that much.

00:05:10 ◼   ► So for me, I'd rather have 700,000 customers than $2.5 million and a group of investors

00:05:19 ◼   ► who now control my destiny.

00:05:21 ◼   ► So just something that I thought was interesting to think about.

00:05:25 ◼   ► All right.

00:05:27 ◼   ► And so now I'm going to move into sort of our discussion for today.

00:05:31 ◼   ► And the basis for this discussion is an analysis that I did over on my blog talking about the

00:05:36 ◼   ► various sort of cost versus performance attributes of the current Mac lineup.

00:05:43 ◼   ► So essentially what I did is I went through every single Mac that the Apple currently

00:05:48 ◼   ► sells and then looked at every single CPU option for those.

00:05:52 ◼   ► I kept every other option as base, so for RAM, hard drive, those types of other things

00:05:58 ◼   ► are all just as they would ship.

00:06:00 ◼   ► And then I went over to Geekbench and found essentially what is a good measure of the

00:06:06 ◼   ► CPU performance for each of those machines.

00:06:09 ◼   ► I took the average of the most recent 5 64-bit Geekbench values.

00:06:16 ◼   ► And I only evaluated a couple of notes.

00:06:17 ◼   ► I evaluated only single processor Mac Pros, a couple of other things like that.

00:06:24 ◼   ► But at the end, let's see.

00:06:27 ◼   ► So then what I did is I took the cost of the various machines and compared it to the Geekbench

00:06:36 ◼   ► score, essentially working on how many US cents it is per Geekbench performance number.

00:06:43 ◼   ► So essentially I take the cost and divide it by the Geekbench score, which is just the

00:06:47 ◼   ► number that ranges, in this case, from about 5,000 to about 17,000, with a larger number

00:06:54 ◼   ► being more performant.

00:06:55 ◼   ► And the interesting thing here, and this is very consistent with the earlier analysis

00:06:59 ◼   ► I had done about the new Mac Minis, is that they absolutely blow the doors off in terms

00:07:05 ◼   ► of cost per performance.

00:07:08 ◼   ► The Mac Minis have a cost per performance by this measure of around 10 cents per benchmark

00:07:16 ◼   ► unit.

00:07:18 ◼   ► Whereas the next best machines, which are the iMacs, have that number is almost up to

00:07:23 ◼   ► 15 cents.

00:07:24 ◼   ► almost 50% better in terms of performance for cost. And you start seeing how various

00:07:31 ◼   ► machines have very different values for something like this. You look at a sort of a tricked-out

00:07:35 ◼   ► MacBook Air, which is a 13-inch MacBook Air, and that value gets almost all the way up

00:07:40 ◼   ► to $0.26, so almost 2.5 times that of what you had for a Mac Mini. This obviously isn't

00:07:47 ◼   ► necessarily representative of total use for a machine, it's just a CPU and memory-oriented

00:07:53 ◼   ► benchmark, but it definitely gives you a sense of where they fall comparatively and helps

00:08:00 ◼   ► you understand what it is that you're giving up when you go from, for example, getting

00:08:05 ◼   ► a Mac Mini, getting a Mac Pro, getting a My Mac, getting a MacBook Air.

00:08:09 ◼   ► You can see those trade-offs in a very clear financial way rather than just looking at

00:08:14 ◼   ► them and having to decide just based on the other attributes.

00:08:19 ◼   ► Something else that's also kind of interesting that I found here is just how strongly the

00:08:28 ◼   ► various iMacs are starting to really catch up with the Mac Pros.

00:08:31 ◼   ► The Mac Pros are starting to really kind of look a little dated in their performance.

00:08:37 ◼   ► They still are certainly the top of the end, but you're really getting to a point now that

00:08:40 ◼   ► unless for the very, very most processor-intensive sort of actions, it's really not going to

00:08:47 ◼   ► matter.

00:08:48 ◼   ► The Mac Mini that if I was to get one right now, I'd get, which is the quad core i7 server

00:08:53 ◼   ► configuration, has a Geekbench score of around 9400, which compares very favorably to almost

00:09:02 ◼   ► all the other machines until you start getting into the Mac Pros with quad Xeon chips or

00:09:08 ◼   ► the absolute top of the line iMac, which has a Geekbench score of around 14,000.

00:09:16 ◼   ► But in order to do that you have to spend $2,200 whereas for the Mac Mini you're spending

00:09:22 ◼   ► $1,000.

00:09:23 ◼   ► So just an interesting thing.

00:09:25 ◼   ► Definitely worth checking out if you're in the market to buy a new machine.

00:09:29 ◼   ► And I think that's it for today.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Hope you have a good day.

00:09:32 ◼   ► Happy coding and I'll talk to you tomorrow.