If you are a Mac developer or iPhone developer using Cocoa for your apps you have to check out Cappuccino and Objective-J, which allows you to bring that Cocoa knowledge to web apps.
For someone like myself who has never really gotten into advanced web development this is a very useful toolset.
The guys at 280 North have done a great job of making JavaScript behave very similar to Objective-C and Cappuccino mimic Cocoa.
Check out this cool demo
Last Friday Randy Pausch a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon died, that same day I bought his book unknowing that he had passed. I read his book The Last Lecture
If you want a great story of a man living life to the fullest give it a read, the book makes you reflect on your own life a bit. I wish I could have had Randy as an instructor during my years at university.
If you listen to talk radio, stop! That is all. Up until a week ago I listened to talk radio to and from work (I even have a short 5 minute drive), all the doom and gloom talk about the economy really gets you down. Plug in the iPod or tune in to your favorite FM/Satellite music station. My stress level has gone down a bit, hope yours does too.
In my previous post I mentioned that I was expecting to miss a few of my old BlackBerry’s features with the switch to the iPhone.
First I thought I would miss the ability to just start typing at the home screen and having the address book show any matching entries. With the iPhone I found that the favorites list covers 95% of the numbers I would normally just start typing on the BlackBerry. The BlackBerry is a bit easier but who is to say Apple will not add a similar feature with a firmware update.
Secondly I worried about the speed (or lack of) of AT&T’s Edge network, I have found that the speed is not that big of an issue. When I am out and about I mostly am checking text based items; email, news feeds and the occasional google search. When I am not moving about I often have access to a WiFi network which is much faster than EVDO on the BlackBerry.
Third I was worried about the call quality, back in 2003 when I last had AT&T (before the merger with Cingular) the service was horrid. I have found the call quality and coverage to be very good, call quality is on par with Verizon and coverage is probably 98% of Verizon’s. I have noticed that the iPhone coverage indicator is a bit conservative, many times it will indicate zero bars of service and calls will work just fine.
Lastly, voice dialing. I truly miss this while driving, here in California it is going to be illegal to talk on the phone without a headpiece starting in July. I am not sure what the law states about dialing a phone while driving but I think that is the riskiest part. Below are the required steps to make a call on each phone:
The company that provides voice dialing functionality to most phones is VoiceSignal, on their homepage they have two demo videos of voice activated apps running on the iPhone. One video shows the iPod functionality of the phone being controlled by voice commands and the other demonstrates voice activated search. I am hopeful that VoiceSignal is working with Apple on adding this via the upcoming iPhone SDK, I am willing to pay up to $20 for this feature.
All in all I am still very happy with the iPhone and wouldn’t want to go back to the BlackBerry.
