Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Posts from November 2008

Retail Education

On Tuesday December 2nd at 5pm, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion about iPhone Application Development at the Glasgow Apple Store.
Whether you already have an application available on the App Store or are just getting started, you won’t want to miss David Master’s demonstration of how to create an application for the iPhone. Following [...]


Retail Therapy

The Great British High Street deserves to die. These days it’s far from Great and not very British, but it is collectively as high as a kite. The entire experience of British retail is like a Lord of the Flies-themed amusement park.
Firstly, the stores are terrible. The architecture of our high streets [...]


MacJury Holiday Picks

I recently joined Jeff Gamet, Joe Kissell, Jean MacDonald and Chuck Joiner for an episode of MacJury. Despite not being culturally aligned with the imminent shopping binge that consumes the United States, I offered a couple of gift ideas from the past year.
My big picks were: Photoshop CS4, Git and the general idea of [...]


Sharp. Tack Sharp.

A new podcast is unleashed upon the earth today. Dan Benjamin and James Duncan Davidson bring us a new photography podcast with the most-perfect name of Tack Sharp.

Canon EOS 30D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 10
1/200 @ f/3.5, ISO 800

I recommend you subscribe post-haste, if you’re interested in hearing smart people talk photography. A new [...]


Free Idea: FullScreenKit

Here’s an idea I want someone to do for me and the rest of the internet: FullScreenKit. What is FullScreenKit? Well, it’s a syncretic mixture of UIKit, Core Animation and Front Row.
Here’s the motivation: I recently wanted to write a Front Row-like application but found the process of bootstrapping too onerous, so I didn’t [...]


Extreme Restraint

The only High Dynamic Range (HDR) images I like are the ones whose tags I have to consult to discover that they were so constructed. Every new tool brings a period of wild experimentation after which we either rewrite the rulebook or reassert the old rules. We’re coming out of that experimental period with [...]


MacDev 2009: Integrating with Apple’s Photography Ecosystem

We’ve finalised the abstract of my session at MacDev 2009:
Learn how to integrate your service or application with Apple’s photography applications iPhoto and Aperture. If your application consumes images, you’ll want to know how to get the most out of the Apple photography ecosystem. In this session, Fraser Speirs will cover the SDKs for iPhoto [...]


Apple Retail Store Field Trip

John Gruber recently condemned Apple’s new Retail Store Field Trip program in brief but strong terms:
I think it’s downright sickening that any school would consider a trip to a retail store as a legitimate field trip. Consumer advertising has no place in education. The fact that the U.S. public education system is in such a [...]