I have been thinking about some New Year’s resolutions for 2010 so I have composed the following list.
1. Learn to use my Canon 450D properly
2. Finish my iPhone apps and get them in the app store
3. Attend SXSW in March (flights and platinum badge already purchased)
4. Attend WWDC in June
5. Experiment with more software development design patterns
6. Get digitalrobotsoftware.com up and running
7. Produce better quality blog posts
8. Develop a desktop application for OS X
9. Run more often
10. In 2009 I have met a lot of great people so I aim to meet lots more in 2010
As New Year’s resolutions are notorious for not being maintained, I have made this list realistic and by the time we reach 2011 hopefully these goals will have been achieved.
If you are planning on developing applications for the iPhone chances are you will be familiar with object oriented programming. Design patterns promote code and design reuse along with making an entire application easier to understand and why a certain structure was adopted.
It is important to note that a design pattern is not a blueprint for an application that just has to be written in your development language of choice, but rather a blueprint for how to implement your code in order to enable stronger code maintainability, testing and to avoid a wide range of issues that could otherwise occur with unstructured (spaghetti) code.
The iPhone platform makes use of the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern.
Model – Manages the data for the application and how the state of the data should be updated.
View – Will handle how the data is displayed on the screen.
Controller – Deals with the inputs from the user such as utilising all the available on screen elements such as buttons and keyboard functions.
With the MVC design pattern it means that when developing for the iPhone you will have a better way of maintaining and testing your applications. Overall this should mean that better quality applications are created.
On a side note I used Balsamiq Mockups to create the above diagram, I would highly recommend giving it a try. This has quickly become one of my favourite applications.
Updated: Diagram updated to show two way relationship between model and view (well spotted by David Rice)
On the OS X operating system you can read NTFS external drives but you will not be able to write to them by default. There is a simple solution for this that comes in the form of a couple of applications MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.
Utlising these tools makes writing to NTFS drives seamless and you won’t have to worry about performing any complex configurations, the NTFS drives will just work as with any other HDD.
Best of all both of these applications can now be installed from a singe source over at SourceForge as part of the Catacombae project.
Enjoy!
I have had an incredibly lucky streak this year where I managed to win an iPhone 3GS at Refresh Belfast which was provided by Ecliptic Labs and then a CS4 Web Premium applications package at the Build Conference from Ian Sayers at Giant Training.
Jase Bell has now created an iPhone app proposal that I feel if developed should be implemented in competitions across the land!
Although in all seriousness I have been extremely lucky at these two events and I am putting both the iPhone and CS4 suite to very good use. Hopefully there will be a post here in the not to distant future referring to the launch of an iPhone application.
I picked up a passport size 320GB Iomega HDD from Tesco’s a few months ago. It really is an extremely useful piece of kit to keep in my laptop bag.
On Thursday November 5th the first Build conference was held in Belfast’s Waterfront Studio.
The atmosphere during Build was fantastic, a really positive vibe was emanating from the audience all day. The speakers did interesting and informative presentations, we even learned how to open a banana thanks to Tim Van Damme, I can’t believe we were doing it wrong all this time.
In case anyone missed the lineup of speakers, they are all top class:
Eric Meyer
Tim Van Damme
Mark Boulton
Wilson Miner
Andy Budd
Ryan Sims
I was also very lucky during the Build conference as I won a copy of Adobe CS4 Web premium (for Mac OS X) from Giant Training, thanks to a prize draw where Eric Meyer picked my out of a box.
The Build after party was also made of the stuff of legends, many beers were had and I met so many great people who I hope to see again next time!
A great job by Andy Good/McMillan on organising Build, it has been the most informative and fun conference I have had the pleasure to attend. Already I am looking forward to the next Build!
Conference pass.
Tim Van Damme getting things started with the first presentation.
The Build conference got off to a great start last night with a screening of the documentary Objectified by Gary Hustwit in the Black Box. Free pizza and beer were served throughout the screening and the evening was rounded off in style at the Malmaison.
In OS X if you ever need to burn a variety of disks and don’t have a large budget, a nifty and free tool that can be added to your software arsenal is Burn.
Burn is a simple and yet full featured disk burning package that offers burning data, music, video and disk images.
The Burn menu makes utilising these options as easy as a single click.
Sub menus can also be used in order to narrow down exactly what format of disk you require.
For the more advanced users there are also an array of features including being able to use custom ffmpeg files, allowing overburining, selecting audio codecs along with the video and audio bitrates.
Burn has many the features of high end alternatives, so if you are looking for a free lightweight and easy to use disk burning utility I would highly recommend checking it out.
Windows users utilise the famous ctrl + alt + del command to allow them to quickly lock their screen and leave background applications running. On the Mac using OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, I will show you how this can be as easy as a single mouse click.
First enter the system preferences:
Next click on the security options icon:
Then under the general tab select ‘Require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins’:
Once you have done this go back into the system preferences menu and click on the option for ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’:
From here select the button on the bottom left side of the screen called ‘Hot Corners…’:
Hot corners enables you to set the screen saver to activate by clicking on a corner of the screen, you can select any or multiple corners by picking the option ‘Start Screen Saver’ from the relevant drop down menu:
Now when you click on your selected corner(s) your screen saver will start, you will then be prompted for your password when you next use the machine and all your background applications will still be running.