Tonight the first CocoaHeads Reston meeting was held at Near Infinity Corporation. Jason Harwig gave an excellent presentation on WebKit, starting with a simple browser created completely in Interface Builder (it consisted of a text field linked to a web view). I’ve recreated it and included a snapshot below.
As Chad Fowler says, “The best reason to learn a new programming language is to learn to think differently.” Here in Northern VA, we have a new opportunity to think differently with the introduction of the NoVA Languages group. Chris Williams from Iterative Designs posted to the NoVA RUG mailing list this morning and received quite a bit of interest. Here’s what he has to say about the new group:
Thoughts on the makeup of the group include obtaining (however you want) a book, working through the book 1 chapter per week on one night of that week with a group of like minded individuals.
To start, the group will work through Joe Armstrong’s Programming Erlang book starting on Monday, June 16th (hopefully I’ll be able to work out a schedule with my wife so I can attend). This is an excellent choice on several levels: every developer should know a functional programming language; single core processors are increasingly rare and the number of cores in commodity hardware should only increase in the coming years; and I already own the book.
If Erlang doesn’t pique your interest, the NSCoderNight DC group is going to work through the 3rd Edition of Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book on Tuesday nights. For several months now, I’ve been playing around with Cocoa and while I’m getting used to the syntax of Objective-C, the XCode IDE and Interface Builder still seem foreign to me (I never liked IDEs having been weened on Emacs).
It’s a great time to be a programmer in Northern Virginia!
Update: It turns out that there’s another Cocoa group right around the corner from me in Reston: CocoaHeads. They meet the second Thursday of each month.
MacSanta is back again this year with some nice savings on great software for Mac OS X! Each day they have 20% off deals on a subset of the software in their extended list (which is all 10% off until December 24th). Just use the coupon code, MACSANTA07, at participating vendors.
Hurry over and scoop up those apps which you’ve always wanted! So far, I’ve purchased MarsEdit and Webnote Happy.
The folks over at Aquafadas are running a promotion entitled, “Give Good Food to Your Mac.” It’s a very sweet deal as you get to choose from 28 different Mac OS X apps and the more you purchase the bigger the discount. If you purchase three apps, you get a 30% discount, 40% for five, 50% for seven and 70% for ten.
Here’s a little hint, pick the five apps you really want (even if they are the most expensive apps available). This will start you off with a 40% discount for the apps you want. Then pick the two cheapest apps — once this brings your discount up to 50%, the total will probably be less than it was without those two apps (unless you’ve only been choosing the cheapest apps). Finally, pick the next three cheapest apps — you should end up with ten apps for a total cost which was less than price of your original five! You’re getting the five apps you want, plus another five free and then they’ll throw in another app at check out (for me it was Postino, a feed reader — I’m not sure if they give the same bonus app away to everyone or not).
This great deal is time limited and ends on December 9th, so get on over there and scoop up some great Mac apps.
The full list of apps can be found after the jump.
Below are my notes from the first day of sessions here at OSCON. The talks I attended were:
NoVA JUG held a special session on Thursday night where Tom Copeland presented on PMD and Dave Thomas provided an introduction to Ruby on Rails. Held concurrently was the initial meeting of the NoVA Ruby Users Group — of which I hope there will be more meetings.
Tom’s overview of PMD focused primarily on CPD, the copy-paste detector. He showed how to run PMD/CPD and what the results look like (there are a number of plugins for IDEs to run PMD as well as an ant task).
Dave gave a high-level overview of Rails and showed how quickly you can get webapps up and running using Rails. He focused on the benefits of Rails from a Java developer’s perspective (since that was the primary audience). He also discussed the Ruby programming language since many of the attendees were not familiar with it. Overall, I think he did an excellent job and many folks went away eager to try out Rails.
