Random Thoughts

I had a chance to head over to Google’s Google Glass tour this morning.  They are starting their tour of the US with a stop in Durham.  Durham has a great startup community, and being surrounded by multiple colleges, universities, and tech companies, it is the home of great app developers.  So it was a natural for Google to start their tour here.

When I got there, right at 10am, the line was already several hundred people long.  It moved pretty quickly, which was good, and I was in the door and playing with glass in right at an hour.  Overall, it was very easy to use and did a pretty good job of dealing with all the noise in the hall.  Given I have glasses now, having had to give up contacts a while back, I was also pleased that the display was clear and legible.  Looking up into the sky lights, it did a good job of handling strong sunlight too.

The only problem I ran into was the wireless network.  My glass lost connection and we couldn’t get it to reconnect.  So I had fun taking video, pictures, and looking at the interface, but couldn’t get it to answer any voice queries via Google.

I picked up a new iPhone 5s yesterday. I had been using an iPhone 4S, and have consistently been on the “s” upgrade path, so it was time. So what do I think of it.

It is certainly fast. I don’t mean blow your hair back, screaming fast, I just mean noticeably faster than what I used to use. That is to be expected.

The fingerprint reader works. Well sorta, it works for some of the Apple experiences, but in some of my apps that use the Apple ID for activities, I am finding that I am still having to enter my Apple ID password. I expect this to change overtime as apps are updated to iOS7 (i.e. Apple will enable the app, not that the developer will have to do anything). It is great for unlocking the phone, and having had a complex passcode for a long time, this is a much better experience.

LTE is amazing. Not a big surprise, since I have LTE on my iPad, but upload and download speeds are faster than my home network. And since I have been grandfathered in on the unlimited data plan with AT&T, I am loving it.

However, when all is said and done, it’s like an old glove. I’ve been using iOS7 since the first beta, so nothing really new there. And it’s an iPhone. The quality, feel, and experience is just comfortable. I think I’ll keep it.

I’ve been working in the IT business for a very long time. I started as a computer operator on main frames and super computers as an undergrad, and even had a home computer years before that (and long before home computers were normal). With that preface, I started thinking recently about the terminology that is used to describe the people who benefit from the code we right. Over the last week, I’ve heard all of the above terms used again. And I started thinking – what does this mean? Are there really different audiences? To that end, I am going to define the terms above, and see if they resonate.

Users:
Originally, there were two types of people when it came to computers – programmers and users. Programmers wrote code and enjoyed hacking around with the hardware and software. A user ran the programs to benefit from the code which was written. A Super User was someone who understood the ins and outs, perhaps even hacked the program some to use it for unapproved purposes. They even wrote scripts (crossing into the world of programmer). But given the early adoption of computers in homes, a user had to have basic knowledge of tape drives (yes I used to have a cassette interface on my first computer), how to connect it all up, etc. In the very early days, users even typed in the code from magazines so they could use their computer.

Customers:
After a while, you could go to the store and buy software on cartridges, floppy disks, and even CD’s. If someone bought the software there were a customer. You needed customers to make software, because they pay the bills. Customers pay more for things they want and enjoy, and as such you listen to your customers and open a dialog via forums, blogs, etc. So customer are good.

Consumers:
So what is a consumer and how are they different then users? Obviously a consumer is someone who “consumes’ you app. Hopefully they use it. And even more importantly, hopefully they pay you so you can keep making cool stuff. But, let’s face it, many consumers expect apps to be free. They want to consume the service, but don’t want to pay for it. The way you monitize your work, is top sell ads to that consumer. So in all aspects a consumer is actually another part of your product (if they don’t pay for it), and they become an asset to the people who pay for your work (now the advertising service). So your customer becomes the advertiser, and the consumer is your user. While financially this makes sense, you still have to make the application experience even better so that the user wants to consume the application even more. I think this is even more challenging thank just focusing on your customer.

In the last post, I described how to create the template Core Data App, and showed you a few screenshots.  In this one I’ll walk thru the files that are created:

First lest’s look at the structure of the project.  We choose a universal app, so we have two storyboards, one for the iPad and one for the iPhone.  We gave our class prefix of TAS (for TriangleAppShow) so our basic AppDelegate is created (both header and object source) as TASAppDelegate.  Our master and detail views are named TASMasterViewController and TASDetailViewController respectively.  I’ve expanded the other subfolders, but won’t go into those files, other than to note that the CoreData.framework is included in your Frameworks folder.  The file we will focus on first is the Data Model – CoreDataProject.xcdatamodeld.

Once you select that file, you should see the following screen:

If, you don’t see the above screen, click on the following symbol:

 at the bottom right of the main view to switch to this view.

This view allows you to model the database and it’s relationships.  The Entity Relationship model describes the Entities, Events, Attributes, and Relationships that make up your data model.  The way I like to think of this is as follows:

Entities are tables that store the varies events (rows).  Events are made up of Attributes (columns). Events are tied together via Relationships.  Relationships are either one to one or one to many.  The sample project has only one event , with one attribute and no relationships.  You will create a new event every time you select the + button in the app.  That event will store a single attribute – the timestamp itself.

The next screenshot shows you the simple definition of the event:

The name is Event – this is how we will reference it in the code of the app.  It does not yet have a class (more on this later).  Since there are not relationships, we have no Parent Entity.  We also have no indexes – this are used to optimize search via predefined and maintained sorts.

If you select that attribute timeStamp the right panel will show you its definition.

We see that this field is optional, with a name of timeStamp.  It is currently not indexed, so we assume that events are store in order that they are created.  The Attribute type is Date, with no other validations.

So far, pretty simple.  In the next post I will look at how the app actually creates each event.