Things that might be decidedly odd…

iPhone SDK

The first public beta of the iPhone SDK came out earlier today and of course I had to download it. Unfortunately, it was 2.1GB and took something like 4 hours. In the interim, I watched a movie and spent some time reading about the feature set of the SDK. It’s been a few years since I last did any Cocoa development (when I was in grad school) so it took a slight refresher on the idiosyncrasies of Objective C and Cocoaey goodness. I must say on first glance it looks pretty slick. Support for audio, video, networking, access to a phone’s contact list are all important and expected. The real highlights are certainly access to the accelerometer and the touch interface. I’ve already got a couple ideas of personal projects I want to try out when I get the chance.

Anyhow, after downloading it and installing it (some 5 or 6 hours later), I started to play around with it by compiling the dummy application. Turns out you can’t actually push anything onto a device (not even for debugging) unless you pony up $99 to Apple for a developer’s certificate. Oh and there’s a mysterious waiting list to get one at this time (select few will be selected at some point in the indeterminate future to participate at first / don’t call us we’ll call you type stuff). Still, it is possible to start writing apps right now against the simulator which is something I suppose. Hopefully, more will be announced soon with regard to getting something onto a device.

I haven’t learned a new language or API probably since I needed to do some C#/.NET stuff at work a while back. That wasn’t even really all that exciting and new since I’d done a lot of Java before years ago. So it’ll be neat to tinker around with a new hobby platform.

Eek, it’s late and I should get to bed. This is what happens when I find myself interested and passionate about some new piece of technology though I suppose.

Leopard on My Macbook

So after a fairly lengthy but easy upgrade process, I have Leopard running on my Macbook. It’s pretty shiny and nice I must admit, but I need to explore more of the features.

Upgrading my iMac is next up, but I need to finish up some work work (remotely logged in through VMWare Fusion) on that machine first or reboot this machine into Vista. I suppose I should try out the released version of Bootcamp on this machine, but there’s something tragic about booting into Windows just after loading a new version of Mac OS X.

Fedex Truck #2

Yeah! Another truck just came and delivered the package.

Now, I just have to wait for the backing up of important stuff like my photos onto my laptop!

The driver told me that this was the last Leopard package he was dropping off today. So either I lucked out by still getting it or didn’t luck out by having to wait the longest

Fedex Truck

Why do they torture me so?

The truck sat here in front of my apartment building for a while then drove off. No leopard package still

Fedex is Pissing Me Off

The copy of Leopard (the new Mac OS 10.5) I pre-ordered was supposed to be delivered this morning by 10:30am through Fedex. However, last time I checked the tracking information on my package, it says “8:42am, delivery exception, future delivery requested” and the estimated delivery date has been shifted to Monday.

There’s no door tag, so they’ve not attempted delivery. I called Fedex up, but I think the guy on the phone only confused me more. He said it was loaded onto a truck this morning and that they still have until 10:30am to deliver the package. He then mumbled something about this being “an Apple promotional thing”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Ugh, I’m starting to think I should have just joined the mob trampling at some Apple store instead of having it delivered to my doorstep.

Cult of iPhone, Part II

You got a Jesusphone!!!!

And good on you for waiting. How do you like it so far?

says Lisa.

Addictive. Very addictive.

Favorite things so far:

• The browser really is Safari. Simply *awesome*. WAY better than those cruddy WAP browsers on most phones. I can read my favorite blogs, log into online banking, view Seattle traffic or consume whatever other webby goodness.
• Music, calendar, photos, even bookmarks are all sunc from my iMac via iTunes and are all in one place.

Bummers:

• It doesn’t cooperate with Gmail all that well (pull POP access only). I miss the little Gmail java app on my old phone, but I can always just use the browser to go to m.gmail.com if I really need to search through my mail.
• I still haven’t eaten dinner yet tonight (and it’s after 11) since I’ve been playing with the damn thing. Perhaps it’s time for a break.

I’m not really a noble person for waiting. I just wasn’t going to pay $600. $400 is still not cheap, but it seems more reasonable somehow. Plus, I’m getting my annual bonus on Friday and told myself I could spend a little of it if I save the rest

Cult of iPhone

Yes, I have joined the cult. At least I saved $200 I guess.

Boot Camp

This evening I finally spent several hours getting Boot Camp installed and working on my laptop. Vista actually runs really nicely on the machine. I was also able to get everything configured for working remotely, which means I now effectively have a portable work station!

VMWare technically works when I tell it to run off the boot camp partition. However, it installs drivers which mess everything up when I go back to boot camp. Perhaps I’ll be able to find some nice happy medium state, but Windows just runs so much better under boot camp than under virtualization.

Wow, I’m really tired now though!

Safari 3

One of the big things coming out of Apple’s WWDC today is the announcement of a beta for Safari 3, the next version of the web browser which ships with OS X. There are quite a lot of new features in it, but the big news is that a version has been released for Windows as well. Apple is pushing the performance angle (Safari is snappier than other browsers in general), although personally I think some of the new features are more significant. In particular, the find functionality is pretty cool. You hit Command-F like before, but instead of getting a simple dialog, a pane comes up just above the main web surface. The cool part is that instead of lamely highlighting the pieces of text found, it actually dims the entire surface to better illuminate the found pieces of text. Other features like resizeable web form text boxes are cool and fairly innovative as well. There’s also some features like red squigglies under misspelled words in a form, which Firefox has had for a while now.

For now, I’m running Webkit nightlies on Safari 3 Beta, which I believe takes me to the bleeding edge

In other news, I bought a copy of Vista today for my new Mac Book. I’m hoping to get it set up with Boot Camp and VMWare Fusion soon so that I can work from home on my laptop.

Not What I Expected to See

I didn’t really expect to see this when Safari loaded the default homepage:

Wow, BillG’s mug on apple.com. Will wonders never cease.