Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Posts from October 2008

Could Snow Leopard be free?

I was wondering aloud on Twitter today if, given Apple’s cash on hand, the company might choose to make Snow Leopard either free or very low-cost.
Over the history of Mac OS X, the installed base has adopted new OS releases at a very impressive rate. From the data available from Omni Group, this appears [...]


Two Macs: Fail.

An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it.
In 2006 I acquired a Mac Pro which was my first desktop Mac since the beige G3/266 desktop I owned in 1997. [...]


London

I’m heading down to London next week for Apple’s iPhone Tech Talk. I thought it would be fun to repost a set from London from last year.
Flickr now supports embedding their slideshows in external sites, so here goes:

Matt Biddulph is hosting a little soirée afterwards. See you there?


Yet Again: Thanks, Apple!

More great news on the Apple front today: devforums.apple.com is live. Apple has created a forum where developers can talk about information under NDA and interact with each other, Apple technology evangelists and engineers.
The service is currently in beta and only covers iPhone development for now. It would not surprise me to see [...]


MacDev 2009

I would love to say I left this a while to expand the window of news coverage for the event. That is partially true but there are, shall we say, greater truths that could be told.
Anyway, I wanted to bring to your attention that I’m speaking at the (first) MacDev 2009 conference next year.
My talk [...]


A technique for using UITableView and retaining your sanity

I love programming UIKit. It’s really slick and, although it’s lacking a few things that I would really like to have, it’s already very powerful. In UIKit programming, the table is fundamental. Almost anything you see that appears in rows on the iPhone is data within a UITableView object.
The iPhone does not support [...]


Exposure 1.1 post-mortem

[Preamble: if you don't have Exposure, here are App Store links to Exposure (free) and Exposure Premium ($9.99)]
Exposure 1.1 is now available on the App Store. This is the first serious feature update for Exposure, and it includes a ton of work under the hood which is succinctly summarised in the release notes as:
Thumbnails now [...]


Git: Rebase

Another quick Git video, this time talking about the rebase command and how you can use it to keep a branch current with changes in the parent branch.

By the way, I’m really liking Viddler for hosting these videos, although I need to be a bit more careful about the aspect ratios of the videos I [...]


Dual Systems and Cameras as Computers

James Duncan Davidson writes:
Not having a single answer isn’t all that surprising. In fact, having an easy answer for a period of time when it comes to digital SLRs may have been a fluke of history. … The design decisions made by the camera makers are producing really good results in some areas with compromises [...]


FNDA is now “Former” NDA

Feels great to have a second thing to thank Apple for in the same week. Yesterday, Apple lifted the Non-Disclosure Agreement on publicly-available iPhone software.
Pre-release Mac OS X Development has always been under NDA, but once an OS was on sale, we were free to talk about it. I can’t blog about Snow [...]