Interesting Contrast

Definitely a sign of the times: Two days ago, Apple announced another best non-holiday quarter ever, handily beating analysts' predictions. Today, the once-unstoppable Microsoft reported a 17% drop in revenue, marking the first full-year decline in revenue in Microsoft's history and missing analysts predictions by a wide margin. It's obviously a good time to be a Mac user. It's been a long time since I've heard anyone predict the death of Apple (a favorite pasttime of analysts and pundits for years) and ignorant comments about Macs being "toys" or "not for serious work" are almost non-existent except for a few bitter and lonely commenters on Reddit and Digg. The problems Microsoft is having, no they are not Microsoft's fault. It's the global slowdown and other things that they have no control...

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Posted in: Microsoft

Waving the Red Flag

Craig Hockenberry has just posted a very important piece of information for anyone with applications on the App Store.. Go read ...

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Posted in: App Store,Other blogs

Microsoft's Ads Redux

A while back, I took Microsoft's new Laptop Hunter series of television advertisements to task for being ill-advised. This line pretty much summed up my point:Price is the competitive advantage of generic brands and sweatshop-backed superstores.and this was the crux of my argument:Now, this [approach] will resonate with some people. There are always people who take a certain pride in buying things cheaply under the assumption that anytime you pay less you get a better value and it's a waste of time comparing the actual products. I doubt that people who think like that are a particularly large percentage of the population. Maybe they are, and maybe this is a brilliant ad, and I'm simply overestimating people. Only time will tell, but I suspect that these ads will help Apple as much as they...

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Posted in: Microsoft

August 14 Workshop Update

The August 14 workshop, for which I am one of the two instructors is filling up fast. I'll be teaching the second part of the workshop on iPhone development; Steve Kochan, author of Programming in Objective-C 2.0, will be teaching the first part on Objective-C. You can sign up for either the 3-day iPhone session, the 3-day Objective-C session, or do the combined 6-day worksh...

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Posted in: OpenGL ES,Other blogs,Teaching

To VBO or Not to VBO...

Daniel Pasco of Black Pixel Luminance has an interesting blog post today on the comparative performance between using VBOs and not using VBOs.Surprising results, to say the least, and it really makes you wonder why Apple is recommending VBOs for the iPho...

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Posted in: OpenGL ES,Other blogs

Improved Blender Export

Thanks to some help from some readers, I've got a new and improved version of the Blender Export Script for Objective-C. This new version works correctly regardless of whether there's a texture. If you've used vertex paint, it will export the vertex colors. If you have neither vertex colors or a mapped texture, then it will just export the vertices and normals. It will also update the drawing code as appropriate to the data that's been exported.Also, new with this version, you don't need to triangulate the faces, nor do you need to apply modifiers. Those will happen automatically in the export without affecting your original model. That should make it easier to update and maintain the models you use in your iPhone apps.You can download the new script from the link above. I'm including the...

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Posted in: Blender,iPhone SDK,OpenGL ES

Refactoring Nav from Chapter 9

I received an interesting question (in the form of a tweet) today about Chapter 9. An observant reader asked if there was a way to "DRY" (Don't Repeat Yourself) the code where we add all the controllers to the array that drives the root view controller's table, this code here:- (void)viewDidLoad { self.title = @"First Level"; NSMutableArray *array = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; // Disclosure Button DisclosureButtonController *disclosureButtonController = [[DisclosureButtonController alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewStylePlain]; disclosureButtonController.title = @"Disclosure Buttons"; disclosureButtonController.rowImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"disclosureButtonControllerIcon.png"]; [array addObject:disclosureButtonController]; [disclosureButtonController...

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Posted in: Book project,iPhone SDK,Objective-C,Refactoring,Runtime