After reading that article, and thinking about how easy my iPhone was to use on day one, hell, sitting on the floor in the mall no less, I thought about something I hadn’t thought of in two years:
The iPhone needed no calibration. The touch screen just worked. No touch this cross hair, touch that cross hair.
Those little technological improvements really go a long way in initial user experience. Clearly something Microsoft doesn’t pay much attention to. Yeah, plug this keyboard and mouse in so you can click the EULA on your new $17,000 touch screen computer.
Recently helped John debug why a NSString returned from [UITextView text] was invalid after being returned by a method invoked via NSInvocation on a different thread. (There’s a mouthful)
Anyway, I don’t know gdb very well, so some googling around and I found this cocoadev article on debugging autorelease.
It helped a lot! I wanted to jot this down here so I can remember it later myself
First off, I opened the Target’s Executable and set the environment variables MallocStackLoggingNoCompact and MallocStackLogging to YES.
I then set a breakpoint where my app assigns the value to the variable that was being released behind my back so I could get the address of the variable.
I then set another breakpoint where I was trying to access the now-dead object.
I ran the app under the debugger and noted the address of the object. I then continued and once I stopped, I opened the gdb console and executed:
shell malloc_history <PID> <OBJECT_ADDRESS>
where <PID> is the process id of my running application and <OBJECT_ADDRESS> is the address I had jotted down.
Thus verifying that my object had been released by the AutoReleasePool on the main thread, even before the [NSInvocation invoke] running on the other thread had returned. Fun!
Thus, a proper use of retain on the string from UITexTView view, and making sure I was careful to release any previously retained string, solved the problem
The real problem was trying to understand Cocoa memory management, and never, ever assuming an object will live beyond the current method.
During the Apple financials conference call today, Tim Cook was once again asked about Apple and netbooks and once again he poo pooed the idea.
Of course there are stories showing up on the net about Apple telling netbooks to stuff it, etc.
Of course Apple is naysaying the netbook. Why would Apple want to enter that space? Netbooks are not interesting to Apple; Apple has the MacBook as a small computer, and while nowhere near as cheap as netbooks, they suffice for students and the like.
When Apple entered the cellular market, they didn’t build a phone. They built an iPod. A phone. An internet communication device. iPod. Phone. Internet.
Of course Apple is working on a small handheld computer. It just won’t be a netbook as defined by Asus, something with little power, a tiny screen and crappy keyboard.
I envision a device with the rumored 10″ screen that would serve many purposes. A nice email/surfing device with a gorgeous screen and probably a screen based keyboard. But it doesn’t stop there.
Remember Apple TV? Those of us who bought one of Steve’s hobby boxes do. The product is dead. Really. Antiquated and misplaced.
Replace it with a different box. Running the iPhone OS (known as Cocoa Touch) Maybe even give it a Wii like wand for navigation.
Then marry it to the iBook (has that name returned!??) Much like Apple has done with the remote app. Use it for navigation. Use it as a killer universal remote, to compete in the Logitech Harmony 1000 space.
Make the little box that plugs into the TV powerful enough to not only play 1080P movies (yeah thanks Apple), but also to play games. Real games, like Madden, etc.
Then marry the little iBook to the game. Choose your plays, maneuver, look around, all with the device.
Watching a youtube on your iBook? Touch a button and it is instantly on the big TV for everyone to enjoy. Work on a video on your Mac Pro in the office? Share to the iBook in large format for showing the in-laws.
Bluetooth 3 with high speed connections? You betcha. Turn your iMac, MacBook Pro, Apple TV and iBook into a personal cloud. Data flowing to and fro without any intervention. Working on a document that is stored on the computer upstairs? You’d never know it, as it flowed onto the handheld as you walked out the door.
The winds are changing at Apple. The futuristic ramblings are still aways off, but Apple is clearly dabbling in changing how we compute yet again.
Some suggestions for Apple:
Drop that awful iDisk and buy/license dropbox
Drop Backup from mobile me and license something that works
Include a year of “cloud seeding” with every new mac. All of your data is not only backed up, it is available everywhere you can see a cloud.
Ship a super sexy easel for the iBook, which acts as a sort of dock. USB 3 or dock connector, but make it work with mice and keyboards. Come home, sit on the couch, enter some stuff, go to the office, set it into the easel, and start using the keyboard on the desk.
Make it so data just lives in the user’s cloud, without worrying where it is at any moment. Of course someone should be able to give clues, such as “I’ll be offline for 3 days and really want to work on this project and that other project” Think outside the box about how we reference data.
In conclusion. Oh yes, there is a small device coming from Apple. It just won’t be a netbook. And when we get our hands on it, we’ll ask “Why didn’t we think of this?”
I was discussing the Safari 4’s “Tabs on Top” with friends at MacCamp this weekend.
By 24 hours, my Wife had given up on it. Another friend actually liked it. Most didn’t like it at all.
I did surmise, as I have before, that Apple is preparing “Tabs on Top” for all Cocoa applications. You might be able to collect windows for a given application into one window. Or maybe you can collect windows from different applications into one window. The UI would remain the same because almost every application document window has a title bar.
On the other hand, Apple is taking a big risk at pissing off their users and doing so for (currently) a measly 20 pixels in the Safari window. Meanwhile, the Dock takes up much, much more room to display badge icons, such as new Mail or Urgent To Dos.
So, do any of you know of a utility that will take all badge icon notifications and put them elsewhere, like a growl notification?
I want something that pops up when I have not done anything with the computer for 45 seconds or so, or when I wake the machine from sleep/screen saver lockout.
Then I could hide the dock entirely and not worry so much about the few pixels the Safari tab bar takes up.
At least until Apple makes Tabs on Top more prevalent. Let’s hope they have a better solution up their sleeves.
So we see an ad on TV for DexKnows.com (the phone book) “Dex knows!” the ads say. Alright, I’m up for trying out new things, so I go to dexknows.com and search for “indian” near my zip code.
Until Digg stops forcing people to use their Digg Bar1 and stops redirecting all hits (via 200’s) to their own site, I have stopped reading Digg and have stopped sending them any traffic.
Speaking up against sitejacking is important. Facebook and StumbleUpon wrap sites, but they at least send 301 codes, which redirects properly to the destination URL. Digg doesn’t do this and is merely wrapping a poor attempt to hijack hits wrapped in a trojan horse called the Digg Bar.
I have not verified the site redirects myself, but I trust those who have reported on this. I’ll be happy to re-subscribe once Digg fixes and/or eliminates the Digg bar entirely.
1. the only way to not use it is to have a digg account, to opt-out and then be logged in every time you use a digg shortened url. Yeah, that’s going to happen alot
The Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, a replacement for the one that caught fire, started acting up last month. Apple said they could not do anything until it failed more often, which it started doing this week and is now in the shop for a new display shell, to replace the inverter.
Braun, over at the Washington Square store, was very helpful. They had a part on hand but it was on hold for someone else.
So, hopefully it’ll come in on Monday and Elizabeth will have her laptop back!
As John Gruber so eloquently put it, the new DiggBar is crap. It violates the notion that the url you see in your address bar is the page you are viewing.
Not only that, it also changes the title to read whatever Digg has stored for your URL.
Thus, I have installed the Digg Bar blocking plugin, Diggbarred.
The only downside is that the plugin seems to continually block the URL even once the Digg bar is closed.
Thanks for trying to abuse the internet and waste more of my time, Digg.
There has been a lot of controversy over MacHeist. I’ve purchased a heist in the past, mainly for ChaChing, and I never use the application because it just doesn’t do what I need it to do.
So, Lukas Mathis asks if the heists hurt the developers who are not in the bundle.
I can’t speak for them, but I don’t think the heists hurt developers in the least bit. Yes, people are getting a lot of applications for free. They may be getting an application that does everything they want, and in that case, the heist is a good deal.
The other thing, however, the heist does is expose people to classes of applications they may have never tried before. A new “to do” application, or a recipe tracker, etc.
These applications may pique interest but may not do everything the user likes. The user isn’t too put out, after all, they got 12 applications or so for $40. So they go on the hunt for an application that suits their needs better.
That is how those users end up at Panic, or Bare Bones, or even Geeks R Us.
I have no data to back these claims up, but I do have personal experience and I’ve bought applications, such as Acorn (which is in this year’s heist by the way) because I was trying other applications that came in the heist, but didn’t do everything I needed them to do.
