Experts == Idiots?

It's sad, really, the state of technology journalism. But you knew that, already. I should know to enough ignore link-baiting crappy journalism, especially those that do little more than republish some company's press release. Most days, I do.Not today, though.Computerworld posted an article with this headline today: Devs bet big on Android over Apple's iOS.Wow, really? That seems surprising. What could possibly justify such a claim? Some proof that developers are leaving iOS in droves? Some new data about the Android Marketplace is actually making decent money for a substantial portion of Android developers? No, though it is encouraging to see that the Marketplace opened up to 13 new countries today. Still another 60 or so to go, but it's a step in the right direction. But that fact's not...

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Posted in: Android,iOS,iPHone,mobile,Rant

More on dealloc

I really didn't expect to kick off such a shitstorm yesterday with my dealloc post. A few people accused me of proselytizing the practice of nil'ing ivars, at least for release code. Possibly I did, but my real intention was to share the reasons why you might choose one approach over the other, not to say "you should do it this way." I mostly wrote the blog post to make sure I had my head fully wrapped around the debate because it had come up during the revising of Beginning iPhone Development.Daniel Jalkut responded with a very lucid write-up that represents one of the common points of view on this matter. That view might best be summed up as "crash, baby, crash". If you want to find bugs, the best thing you can do is crash when they happen, that way you know there's a problem and know to...

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Posted in: Memory Management,Objective-C,Rant

Dealloc

Last week there was a bit of a Twitter in-fight in the iOS community over the "right" way to release your instance variables in dealloc. I think Rob actually started it, to be honest, but I probably shouldn't be bringing that up.Basically, several developers were claiming that there's never a reason to set an instance variable to nil in dealloc, while others were arguing that you should always do so.To me, there didn't seem to be a clear and compelling winner between the two approaches. I've used both in my career. However, since we're in the process of trying to decide which approach to use in the next edition of Beginning iPhone Development, I reached out to Apple's Developer Tools Evangelist, Michael Jurewitz, to see if there was an official...

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Posted in: dealloc,iPhoneSDK,Memory Management,Objective-C

Complaining About Success

If you want to see how little sympathy you can get from those around you, try complaining about being successful. It just doesn't tend to be a problem over which people shed tears on your behalf. But I'm actually not here to complain. I'm really thrilled that MartianCraft is growing steadily and, more importantly, that we're getting interesting work.I did think it was worth popping in here to explain my absence of late, however. I've got several partially written posts sitting in MarsEdit, including a couple for my recently-started and just-as-lonely personal blog. But time has become a scarce commodity for me, and will likely remain that way for at least the next month or two, possibly even longer. Even my OpenGL ES book for prags has suffered lately as I've been basically working double-time...

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Posted in: Rant,Update

Global Symbolic Breakpoints in Xcode 4

It wasn't obvious to me how to set a global symbolic breakpoint in Xcode 4. I stumbled across the answer today. Because Xcode 4 is still under NDA, I can't post this here, so instead, I wrote it up on Apple's Dev Forums (Dev Center login with beta access require...

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Posted in: Debugging,Xcode,Xcode 4

Microsof't Funeral

There's really not much fun in bashing Microsoft any more. Although they're still firmly entrenched in the desktop space and profitable as a company, their attempts to make inroads into emerging markets have been less than stellar and in what's arguably the most important emerging market – mobile – they've gone from being a moderately strong player to an almost non-existent fringe player in just a few short years. You may not believe this, but I'm actually rooting for Windows 7 Phone (though I still hate the name). I really want it to be good, and it has the potential to be good, and even the potential to be better than Android out of the gate. Microsoft's problem has never been lack of good engineers; their problems are almost exclusively management making it impossible for the engineers...

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Posted in: Microsoft,Rant,Windows 7 Phone

App Store Review Guidelines

Today, Apple posted guidelines for the App Store review process (requires developer login). This is a huge step in the right direction. The document still contains a lot of wiggle room and vague conditions and doesn't change the fact that Apple still has total discretion and can reject your app for new, currently unstated reasons if they want to, but it is definitely good guidance for App Store developers and should reduce the number of rejections for unknown reasons. If you develop for the App Store, you should read this end-to-end. Now.Apple also issued a press release today that states that Apple is setting up a review process for rejected apps and also says that Apple is loosening the restrictions contained in several clauses of the Developer Program License (3.31, 3.3.2, and 3.3.9). I'm...

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Posted in: App Review,App Store