PodSearch

Developing Perspective

Show 0.4

 

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.

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

00:00:13   The format of the show is pretty straightforward.

00:00:15   I'm going to talk about the things that I found interesting, worth looking at over the

00:00:19   last 24 hours or so, talk about that for the first half of the show, and kind of have a

00:00:25   a more general discussion and the show will never be longer than 15 minutes.

00:00:30   So it should just hopefully be an ill adjunct to your day rather than being a major time

00:00:36   sink.

00:00:37   The show is currently, I guess you could call it, beta.

00:00:40   I'm kind of trying it out, shaking a few things out.

00:00:44   So if, as they say, pardon the dust.

00:00:47   All right, let's get started.

00:00:49   The first thing I'm going to talk about is a pretty interesting article over on Macworld

00:00:53   talking about why Apple dares to change your apps.

00:00:56   And I think this is a discussion about the Final Cut Pro 10 sort

00:01:03   of debacle and the interesting thing

00:01:05   about it is it's just a pretty honest description

00:01:07   of I think why Apple's doing what they're doing there.

00:01:10   And you just kind of understand that Apple's purpose

00:01:16   in that is to go their business and fit their strategy.

00:01:20   It's not that they don't care about creatives anymore

00:01:23   But what they really care about is the millions of other people who buy their products.

00:01:27   And so definitely worth checking that out.

00:01:29   Next, there's an interesting article about on --

00:01:34   over on Ars Technica about getting a -- making a clean start with Lion.

00:01:39   I think, let's see, today is July 18th.

00:01:41   And it's expected, I think, that Lion will be coming out at some point this week.

00:01:47   And as part of that, you have sort of the usual dilemma

00:01:52   of how do you actually set that up?

00:01:54   Do you want to do just the native migration

00:01:58   where you run the installer and it'll set it up for you?

00:02:01   Do you want to set it up on a totally clean install?

00:02:04   Set it up on a clean install and use migration assistant.

00:02:07   And this article is a walkthrough of how

00:02:10   to do a totally clean install on migration,

00:02:14   which is what I'm expecting to do myself when I get live.

00:02:17   I think OS updates come out infrequently enough that it's definitely worthwhile to sit down

00:02:24   and really go through the effort of making a clean start.

00:02:27   I think your performance for your machine, as well as unused disk space and those types of things

00:02:32   will just be so much better starting from scratch,

00:02:34   making sure you're pulling over only the things that you really use,

00:02:37   and you're just kind of removing the cruft, all the stuff and junk that builds up over time.

00:02:43   Next, I was going to talk about a delightful little script over on the iPhone development

00:02:50   blog by Jeff LaMarche. And it's just a really nice little script that he's been working

00:02:56   on that auto-updates build numbers from within Xcode. And this is especially helpful if you're

00:03:03   using something like TestFlight or a related technology where the build number is used

00:03:09   not just for marketing and related

00:03:13   uses actually used for

00:03:17   fit for the system to be able to keep track of what the build is

00:03:19   where it uh... where it fits within your job and scheme etcetera so it's a really

00:03:23   nice way

00:03:25   uh... do that stuff it's going to be worthwhile looking at it if we would

00:03:28   check that out

00:03:31   i said that's uh...

00:03:33   jeff lemarch

00:03:34   repair development block

00:03:36   Next, there's a really interesting video series.

00:03:39   I think this is probably going to be an ongoing thing,

00:03:42   but at this point it was just the first episode was posted.

00:03:44   And it's an interview done by David Hanemeyer-Hanson

00:03:48   of 37signals of different founders.

00:03:51   And his first candidate was the Slicehost guys,

00:03:55   which for a little bit of background is a company

00:03:58   that was founded a couple years ago doing virtual private

00:04:01   server hosting.

00:04:03   And they've recently, maybe a year ago or two years ago,

00:04:08   got bought by Rackspace.

00:04:09   And there's been a little bit of drama about that.

00:04:14   They recently denounced that they're shutting

00:04:16   down their VPS system and moving everybody who was on that

00:04:20   to the Rackspace cloud and a whole bunch

00:04:23   of interesting things.

00:04:24   But what's really interesting here,

00:04:26   certainly David Hanmer Hansen's interviewing them

00:04:29   from the perspective of his sort of standard online persona

00:04:32   of someone who doesn't really like VC, who doesn't think you should ever sell out, those

00:04:39   types of things, which I don't argue with.

00:04:42   But it's a very interesting story nonetheless.

00:04:44   And it's especially interesting when you see the section where they're talking about what

00:04:48   it was like after they sold out, after their golden handcuffs came off and they finally

00:04:54   just found themselves, probably, I don't know exactly how old they are, but in their late

00:04:58   early 30s with a lot of money and a lot of time.

00:05:02   And kind of it's just sort of a good sobering thing to see

00:05:06   that, you know, that's really not that fun.

00:05:10   It's fun for a little while but especially if you go

00:05:13   from running a successful business that sort of the let

00:05:16   down that you'll get at the end

00:05:17   of that is probably not worthwhile.

00:05:19   And then our last link that I was going to point

00:05:25   to is something I haven't had a chance to play around with yet

00:05:27   but that looked really interesting and fascinating.

00:05:29   And this is over on the corner, the development blog

00:05:32   for the Square guys.

00:05:33   And basically they just released a new framework

00:05:36   for iOS integration testing.

00:05:38   It's called KIF, I guess Kif.

00:05:41   And basically this is a framework

00:05:44   by which you can script interaction

00:05:47   and integration tests.

00:05:49   So for a little bit of background there,

00:05:51   an integration test is something whose purpose is

00:05:54   you simulate the system in use rather than something like a unit test which is focused

00:06:01   on testing in the individual section of code or a functional test which is testing a particular

00:06:07   module of code.

00:06:09   Integration testing is about seeing if the system at large works together.

00:06:13   And so this is, if you can imagine, in many ways it works with, it's a way of setting

00:06:18   it up that you can simulate users actually working with your application.

00:06:22   So it's, the user opens this page, clicks this button, enters this text, hits this button,

00:06:27   does this, and it's an interesting way of doing that.

00:06:29   Some advantages of this, A is of course it's you get to a nice baseline.

00:06:34   You can do, also incorporate this into your own continuous integration system.

00:06:39   So if you have a base set of tests that need to always work, you can verify that nothing

00:06:45   breaks there.

00:06:46   So definitely something to check out if you're at all interested in integration testing.

00:06:50   Alright, for today's sort of finishing discussion, I'm going to take a slight break from what

00:06:57   I've done for the last couple of episodes and talk about something that's near and dear

00:07:03   to me, and that is coffee. And this is not atypical for a developing perspective that

00:07:09   I'm going to be talking about things that are not strictly developer-oriented but are

00:07:16   to developers, things that are interesting and fun for us.

00:07:19   If there's one thing I think you could say fairly categorically is

00:07:23   the average developer enjoys their caffeine, and many of those people enjoy it in coffee form.

00:07:29   And I've recently been reading a book called "God in a Cup," which is just an interesting discussion

00:07:34   of specialty coffee from sort of the ground up.

00:07:39   And there's a really interesting paragraph that I'm just going to read.

00:07:42   to read, it shouldn't take too long, but it was a very interesting overview of where

00:07:46   coffee comes from and what it starts as, which is something that, while I've drunk a lot

00:07:51   of coffee, I don't have as much familiarity with. So like I said, this is in God and the

00:07:57   Cup and starting in a section called Coffee 101. Coffee beans are dried from the red fruit,

00:08:06   the cherry that coffee trees produce. Coffee trees grow in farms and in forests. The higher

00:08:10   the altitude, in general, the better the coffee. Coffee trees require fertilizer,

00:08:15   organic or industrial, and pruning. They need a moderate amount of sun and rain

00:08:19   at certain times of their growing cycle. Coffee cherries do not ripen in a

00:08:23   uniform rate. In order to pick ripe cherries, pickers must make repeated

00:08:27   passes through coffee orchards. Once picked, coffee cherries in Latin America

00:08:32   are generally depulped mechanically to remove the skins and most of the fruit,

00:08:36   and then they are subjected to a process called washing,

00:08:40   which may or may not actually involve water,

00:08:42   during which they ferment.

00:08:44   Fermenting or washing, the terms used interchangeably,

00:08:47   dissolves the sticky coating called mucilage

00:08:50   that covers the hinged pair of coffee beans

00:08:53   and it alters the flavor of the coffee.

00:08:55   Washing techniques vary from farmer to farmer,

00:08:57   region to region, and can take one to three days or more.

00:09:01   Washing stations are not terribly expensive to build

00:09:03   build in villages, co-ops, and other small groups often have their own washing facilities.

00:09:08   After washing, coffee must be dried. Farmers around the world use a number of different

00:09:12   drying technologies. Beans can be dried on racks, on cement patios, or mechanical dryers

00:09:18   that may be wood burning, gas burning, or fired with coffee parchment. Some of these

00:09:24   machines use coffee tree prunings as fuel. Again, this process may take days, and if

00:09:29   rains, mold and mildew can ruin or degrade the coffee.

00:09:32   After drying, coffee must be milled.

00:09:34   During this process, a papery parchment skin covering the

00:09:38   coffee is stripped from the bean.

00:09:40   Next, the coffee beans are sorted by size and quality.

00:09:42   This can be done by hand or by machine.

00:09:45   Once the beans are sorted, they are packed into clean bags

00:09:47   and stored in a dry place.

00:09:49   After resting for a month or two, the beans are ready for

00:09:51   sampling.

00:09:52   At every step along this production process, the coffee

00:09:55   loses weight, and that the final milled product is

00:09:58   approximately 20% of the original. During the roasting process, coffee shrinks another

00:10:03   15% or so. And I said, it's a bit of a diversion, but I thought that was a very, very interesting

00:10:10   discussion to kind of give some background on where coffee coffee comes from. And so

00:10:16   obviously from that stage on, you just get, you roast it and then consume it. I'm a bit

00:10:22   of a coffee guy myself. In case you're curious, I use an AeroPress for making almost all of

00:10:28   my coffee. This is the hat tip to Marco Orment who recommended that and I think he has probably

00:10:34   sold more AeroPresses than anybody in the history of the world. Everyone I know who

00:10:40   uses one uses it because of him or because someone who heard about it from him second

00:10:46   hand. It's an excellent way to make good, well-tasting coffee without needing to make

00:10:52   large quantities of it and without quite having the usual expense of high-end coffee machines

00:10:58   and AeroPress is 20 bucks or so. And I think that's going to be about it for today's show.

00:11:06   It'll be a little bit shorter than normal, but that's probably going to be common over

00:11:09   the weekend because less has happened. Some things to be looking for this week is hopefully

00:11:15   line will come out. Definitely be checking your Mac App Store for that or Twitter or

00:11:21   whatever you want to keep up with that. Like I said, I'd recommend doing a clean install.

00:11:25   I think you'll thank yourself later even though it may be a little rough at the time. Hopefully

00:11:29   there might be some new hardware coming out, some new MacBook Airs maybe, new Mac Mini

00:11:34   maybe, who knows. Rumors like that are always just kind of silly. But beyond that, I hope

00:11:40   you guys have a good week. Happy coding and I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye.