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.
As expected, Apple has released a new version of iTunes which supports Podcasting. The integration into iTunes is great and, unfortunately for ODEO, I prefer it to the alternatives since I don’t have duplicate Podcasts sitting around on my disk now (well, atleast I don’t have to manually remove them). I will say that, currently, ODEO seems to have a better selection of what Apple is calling ‘Indie’ Podcasts — but I’m sure that will change as more folks register with Apple to have their PodCasts added to iTunes.
Tangentially, this morning while working out I was listening to the DSC and heard that the CastBlaster beta is available for download. So I rushed to the website and found out it’s only available for Windows. Ugh! Fortunately, it looks like Apple is pushing GarageBand as a Podcast recording studio. I haven’t tried it yet, but perhaps over the weekend I’ll experiment with recording a Podcast. I haven’t the faintest idea as to what I’ll speak about though.
Now that I think of it, more folks with Mac OS X installed will be much better for all of us — though with Apple presenting a bigger target to the virus writers and haxors, they’ll need to continue to focus on security.
Obviously, Apple doesn’t want to see their HW revenues dry-up, so I suspect that Mac OS X86 will only run on Apple HW (it’s just that the Apple HW will have an Intel CPU inside instead of a PowerPC one). Thanks to NextStep’s support for fat binaries (the executables for multiple platforms stored in a single bundle), Mac OS X applications will have a single instance which runs on both PPC and x86, making it easier on Apple’s current customers (not sure yet how troublesome this will be for developers — Steve says that XCode will take care of it).
Overall, this could be a monumental mistake or an amazing (and risky) gamble for Apple. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Interestingly enough, Apple’s stock is only slightly down after the announcement; atleast the investors aren’t spooked by the switch.
