Raw notes from Thursday May 29. These should not be considered authoritative on any subject! But might be useful especially if you were at the discussion and want to remember a particular point that was made.
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question: how would one get started developing for iPhone? (and for MacOS)
Dave ans:
can do for free using xcode harness at apple
$99 fee to open your iphone
recommended books:
IPHONE Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
cocoadev.com good place to for help
yahoo group
will be developed in cocoa – Objective C : C with add-ons to be object-oriented
methods specify their api in process
xcode has good code completion so the verbosity isn’t that big a deal
(Xcode is the apple IDE)
Cocoa is the framework, ObjectiveC is the language
Appkit used for the GUI development
have to learn memory management – which is a key for iPhone apps
‘you’re having to constantly be concerned with memory management on iphones – developers have come up with a bunch of tricks to do the iphone loveliness with limited memory’
Apple’s free stuff includes a guide to ObjectiveC
coding looks verbose, because everything is an object – ie to append to strings you have to take the first string and call a method on it with the second string
also with cocoa – you try to avoid subclassing where you can
Q: how in demand are iphone developers?
the iphone rush was a couple years ago but ipad may be just going
search on http://telecommutejoblist.com: 3 iphone jobs posted today, 2 drupal jobs, 11 php, 0 python, 1 android
Android vs iPhone – lots of discussion about how Apple is attempting to control app developers, the whole ‘no generated code’ business
android market share 28%
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/android-market-share-passes-iphones-npd-data-2010-05-10
streak tablet
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20005865-260.html?tag=mncol;txt
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CruiseControl – build system for tests
has .NET version so useful for running all tests automated
works with tfs version control
‘continuous integration’ tool – will do a build on every checkin – will also run all the tests
finishes one whole cycle, then starts a new cycle with all new checkins since last
Hudson another continuous integration system, in Java, is an app – can launch VMs
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Talked about ways of speeding up sql queries over large datasets, in particular with large indexes and finding the median in an sql query
valentina
www.1keydata.com/sql/sql-median.html
http://www.valentina-db.com/
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/index-hints.html
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wide-ranging discussion about solar power, battery technology, oil from algae (the sun-driven, not led) and more…
technologyreview.com
silicon-level capacitors – power density close to battery
guessing 5-7 yrs from market?