Monday, July 5th, 2004

Wow, somehow I missed this: Rendezvous for Java, from Apple. It's even open source- Rock on.

-- posted 9:02 pm

If you are running the Safari 1.3 or 2.0 developer preview then check out this little clock I ported over from a CG screensaver I wrote a long time ago. The canvas class is cooooool.

It's all done via javascript, which happens to look alot like the functions in CoreGraphics, or any other PDF programming language out there. And another Safari bonus- I set the attribute contenteditable="true" to the body tag, so you can do whatever you wish to this webpage.

-- posted 5:55 pm

• Daniel Steinberg, editor of ONJava and java.net. (Thanks to Eric for giving me his name).
• James Duncan Davidson, who is the original author of Tomcat, and who also wrote UnitKit, the testing framework I use for VoodooPad. He also wrote Ant, but can give you a thousand reasons why you don't want to use it, where I can only give you about ten.
• Mike Clark, who just finished up a book that I've been dying to get my hands on since I heard it announced- Pragmatic Project Automation. I spent a couple of sessions sitting next to Duncan and Mike, they're great guys.
• And Steve Naroff with his back to the camera, who has been with Mac OS X since NeXT (Thanks to Bill Bumgarner for letting me know.)

And since those guys are all developers, I'm going to make this a developer post.

Holy Crap Xcode 2.0 is awesome. But I guess it's not really just that- it's Xcode and the CHUD tools, and CoreData and all the other great tools that come with it. A while back, I was wishing for Apple to include a relational database in OSX- and they must have read my mind (or my post) because they are using SQLite in Tiger as well. Super cool.

If I was the CTO of a company where all we did was Java programs, I would dictate that starting today everyone must use Xcode and it's tool set- here's why:

Free modeling tools. Look at that screenshot at the top. Do you think that was done by hand? Nope. And as you add and remove properties to classes, it updates it's view. I just looked up the price of Rational Rose for Java- it's $2,495.00. Cripes.

Shark- it's not just for Objective-C anymore. Shark is a kickass profiler from Apple, and the latest (beta) release will profile Java code as well. Borland Optimizeit is $700.00 for the cheap version. Shark is free.

Unix- Nobody ever seriously deploys Java apps on windows, if anything they code on Windows and deploy on either Linux, Solaris, or FreeBSD. Or... Mac OS X. Why would you not develop on the same architecture (unix) that you are going to deploy on? I've seen people screw this up over and over, and it creates a serious impedance mismatch- if you work on OSX, where every developer has their own server (tomcat) to work with, that goes away.

Anyway, there's the short list, and I'm sure I'll get some flack from some folks at work tomorrow for this :)

-- posted 3:30 pm

Looking at various pics across the net from WWDC, it makes me realize that I met tons and tons of people this week- too many to name. And that right there is my excuse for not doing so.

So anyway- Buzz has some pictures here and here.

Fraser Speirs has a good review, and Matt "The Samurai" Gemmell weighs in on various things as well.

Duncan has no pics (I'll take care of that in a sec), but he does have a good wrap up of the week. And Jim Gaynor has some pics from the RSS BoF.

-- posted 2:49 pm

Looking through the info page on OSX Server ala Tiger, you might come across this little tidbit:

"Weblog Server. Host your own Weblog server, featuring calendar-based navigation and customizable themes. User can post using either a web browser or blog clients that support XML-RPC or the ATOM API."

That's right below the bit of text that talks about a new iChat server that's include in it as well.

iChat server is to Weblog server, as iChat is to... iPost?

Wait... Apple doesn't have a weblog tool. Well, they don't have a weblog tool yet. Nothing was said at WWDC, so I'm not privy to any special info or anything... I'm just speculating. Just so you know. And if you work on a weblog tool... well- don't be surprised when Apple comes out with one.

And don't forget, competition is good. Just as long as they don't come out with iWiki or something :)

-- posted 1:33 pm

On Friday of last week, one of the sessions I went to was on Cocoa and performance. When one of the slides came up both Joe and I immediately started laughing, because the title of it was along the lines of "Don't use lots of NSView's for drawing".

Two days before this I showed up at one of the ADC labs with this exact problem. I showed my app to one of the engineers and he knew exactly what the problem was- too many NSViews. I mean hundreds. The solution was to use NSCells instead of views, because the NSViews are more heavyweight.

So back to the slide- as soon as the presenter read off a little bit of what the problem was with using lots and lots of nsviews, he said "And this slide wasn't even here a couple of days ago, but after feedback from an engineer we decided to put this in."

And then I got to laugh some more.

(Apple giving JavaOne the finger)

-- posted 11:40 am