Random Thoughts

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Well today started with a blast! Fred Armisen from SNL and Portlandio!

He was interviewed by Chris Breen, who was probably geeking out as much as I was. I had the perfect question ready for Q&A, but they ran out of time. Here it goes, for those of you who know a bit about Fred, Question – How do you think punk music would be if it just came about today, given all the technology available to make music? Fred was a drummer in a punk band, so it was the prefect question. Of course Chris asked him about the famous iPhone 5 skit that was done on Saturday Night Live. If you’ve not seen it, immediately click on the previous link, or watch the embed here.

I was surprised to hear that he didn’t write it, especially after you watch this videos from Portlandia.
I was looking for the other video they showed, which was even funnier, as Fred went nuts over dosing on email, web videos, Facebook and twitter. It was amazing.

After Fred, I actually went and started walking the show floor. I got to meet up with my buddy John Martin from Reallusion and the rest of the gang.

They actually won best of show for their new CrazyTalk for Mac! I had to pick it up and I quickly pulled together something freaky here: CTdemo. I had done one with my own head, but it was even freakier. So you get the cool kitty.

I also stopped by a bunch of app developers for things that I use every day: Smile and ECamm Network. I also picked up a new microphone from Blue Microphones, they have incredible technology and this is my third microphone from them.

I also sat in on part of the future of Apple talk, but to be honest, there was nothing new in the discussions, and I was much more interested in the session on networking trouble shooting by Dave Hamilton from the Mac Observer. The most informative aspects of his talk was around using DD-WRT to setup your own VPN. I’ve been putting that off for some time, but it certainly seems doable now.

The next section I went to was Tom Negrino’s trouble shooting iCloud. The session prior to him ran long, and the one after him was not as forgiving as he was, so he was a bit rushed. He did a great job of explaining all the feature / functions of iCloud, but was rushed to cover most of the good content on actually trouble shooting. I am hoping that the presentations will be posted soon. The one thing that I shared with him was that you can also get to the raw iCloud files on your Mac by going to ~user/Library/Mobile Documents ( I can’t find the article where I learned this, and you can really screw things up here… but if you need to access a file directly this is where they are kept).

The final section was Don McAllister from Screencasts Online going thru AirPlay. A great tip was AirServer and Reflector, I have been using Reflector for some videos on this site. I think I now need to check out AriServer. The rest of the section was a live demo, explaining the ins and outs. He was fantastic! I really need to check out his Screencasts.

Finally I grabbed a quick beer with some of the podcasters I’ve been listening to over the years.

Wow! Today was pretty cool … and I am pretty exhausted. It started off with an interview of the stars of the upcoming Jobs movie – Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad. They did a great job of addressing the recent controversy based on Woz’s comments. The next section was a quick review of Mountain Lion tips from one of the writers at MacWorld. While I learned a few new tricks, to be honest it seemed a bit disjointed, and like an un-prepared presentation. It wasn’t bad, but it shouldn’t have been on the main stage.

Next we were treated to Future Hunting with Brian -the futurist at Intel, and will.i.am. I really enjoyed this session. Will.i.am was very entertaining, and it reminded me of the discussions I have with my friends around how to change the world using cool upcoming technology.

They are both supports and creators of the Transform conference. The great thing about this conference is they try to help change the world using new and future technology. The first one was designed to the transform a specific gehetto neighborhood that will.i.am grew up in. The new one, next week, is about transforming America. Lofty goals from a pop star.

Speaking of pop stars, I spent the afternoon learning about cool software to change drum loops, but the real existing part was going to the indie innovation finals. This was the finals of a year long battle of about 400 indie bands, and we got to hear the final two. The judges were in the room and had to judge them based on the use of apple products in their music. To me this was a bit unfair. Both bands were good, but Mister Loveless were real rockers, with a love of punk (a love of mine) and a pure rock and roll sound. They used a MacBook Pro to play an audio file of a BART train. The band Exists Elsewhere were a well polished band from LA. They had the look and sound of a well produced band. They used iPads for their amps and mixers, but in my opinion there music wasn’t as good. Don’t get me wrong, I love sythnesiser music, etc. but a good rock and roll band is much more fun live. The band Exists Elsewhere won the competition and got to open up for Little Feat tonight, however, the band Mister Loveless got to do a full set of music at MacWorld right after the compeition. I recorded it on my iPhone and picked up their CD and a few Ep’s on iTunes. Go check them out:

This year’s class was taught by the students and teachers from Canberra Grammar School’s Code Cadets. This is based on their 10 year class at the school where the actually teach their students how to develop a class. The structure of the class teaches not only the basics of iOS, but also a structure of how you program. I find that many classes tell us about how to write for a platform a do a poor job of explaining how to think like a programmer.

The structure of the class was setup into two sections:
1) Introduction to Objective-C
2) Introduction to iOS Development

During the Objective-C section, our instructor went the basics. Comments,code structure, variables, if’s and loops. Expression evaluation was also covered. I’ve seen many classes skip this, which causes a lot of basic programming mistakes early on. The approach they use was to have very simple assignments (both on paper and inside of xCode) to reinforce the learning projects. Nicely done.

I also learned that a habit I’ve been following for twenty years is called Camel Case. I must have learned that years ago, when I was learning Pascal. Cool! The other major AHA! moment from the class was the “fizz-buzz” test. Evidently this will easily weed out people who don’t understand programming, and so many people who apply for programming jobs, can’t program! Amazing!!!

We then got into Object-Oriented Programming. There were four major classes that were explained to the class: NSNumber, NSString, NSArray, and NSDictionary. Another learning point for me, NS prefix is from NextStep! You now know that you can figure out where Apple got various class libraries. (Well sorta).

The overall class was great, but as a one day class, and with as many people as there were in the room, we barely scratched the surface of iOS programming. The good part was that each attendee got a book with all the exercises, and there will shortly be a dropbox location for all the sample code. I had a great time, and meet some cool people throughout the day.

A shout out to my lunch and dinner friends!

Let us know about you and we will include links to your site.

• Jamawkinaw Enterprise
• IconFactory, Inc.
• Gale Force Logic

Well it’s almost here… My yearly sojourn to San Francisco to geek out with Mac and iOS users. This year, I decided to focus on iOS development while I am there, and am taking a full day intro class on iOS programming. You may ask, why take an intro class? I like to understand what people are learning, as they get started in programming. I’ve been coding iOS for three years now, and always learn something new when I see how others are learning. People starting by learning iOS6 get a completely different perspective than those of use who have been coding since iOS3.x.

While I am out there, I am also looking forward to catching up with friends and acquaintance from over the years. If you are planning on heading out, drop me a comment or tweet and let’s meet up for a beer or a coffee.