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If you're going to install the 10.7 preview on a separate hard drive or partition, it's definitely worth knowing about Buttered Cat Software's QuickBoot, which allows you to change startup disks and reboot from your menu b...
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Lion in the House
Today, Apple released a preview version of Mac OS X Lion, but only for registered Mac developers. This is a big release, not just in terms of front-end experience, but also under the hood. A lot of the changes are influenced by UIKit and iOS, hence the moniker "Back to the Mac", but there's also a fair amount of completely new goodness, some of which will likely roll down to iOS at some point.If you're an iOS developer, but not a Mac developer, it's probably worth $99 to get access to Tiger Lion. It'll give you a better idea of where Apple is taking things.Plus, there's just a lot of really cool stuff in there.Interestingly, the OS preview is being delivered via the Mac App Store, which might be a hint at how paid OS upgrades will be handled in the future.Members of the Mac developer program...
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Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Voices that Matter Seattle
So far, 2011 has been pretty light for me in terms of speaking. I do, however, have one speaking engagement lined up for this year: I'll be speaking at Voices that Matter in the land of Mordor Seattle on April 9th and 10th. If you're interested in going, early bird pricing ends on February 25.You can use the speaker code SEASPK2 to get $100 off.There's a great speaker lineup for this conference, including Andy Ihnat...
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Blender 2.5 beta 6 Objective-C Export
A kind reader updated my Objective-C export script for Blender to work with the 2.5 beta 6 version of Blender. You can find the new version on GitHub.On a related note, if you make a change to your clone of any of my public repositories on Github, you can send me a pull request. I'm happy to take additions, bug fixes, and other updates back into the master repository.Thanks to John Becker for updating the scri...
Apple Outsider on the Subscription "Hubbub"
I have a very short list of "must-read" blogs. While I have a much bigger list of blogs I read as time permits, the list of ones that I check every morning before I buckle down to work consists of only about a half-dozen blogs by people in our industry who really know their stuff. One of those blogs is Apple Outside, written by former Apple Evangelist, Cocoa Guru, and all-around nice guy Matt Drance (not to be confused with the more intimidating BatDrance who is most definitely not Matt's alter-ego). I've been keeping my head low on the whole subscription kerfuffle that's been happening in the iOS dev world. Partially that's just because I'm busy and don't have time to pen a long blog-rant, but it's also because it's a complex situation on which I don't have a fully-formed opinion yet. Matt's...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
A Couple CGAffineTransform Goodies
Thanks to Core Animation, we iOS programmers tend to use affine transformations (by way of CGAffineTransform) a lot. By being able to combine multiple 2D transformations into a single matrix, we have the ability to do a lot of cool animation effects with only a few lines of code.Take the following example, which is fairly typical: CGAffineTransform transform = CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation(0, -translation); transform = CGAffineTransformScale(transform, scaleFactor, scaleFactor); view.transform = transform;Not bad, right? In just three lines of code, we're able to both scale and translate a view or layer. But in reality, there's actually quite a few operations going on behind these three lines of code. The CGAffineTransformScale()...
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Xcode 4 Icons
Well, now that Xcode 4 is GM, it has the same icon as Xcode 3.25. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be an issue, since a GM release means you can throw out the old one and use it full-time.Only, you may not be able to with all of your projects. Xcode 4 GM has a few issues that make it hard to go full-time with it, including a linker error that can only be worked around by turning some level of code optimization, a change that makes it hard to debug. A few of these problems impact projects I'm working on, so as a result, I have to grudgingly use Xcode 3.25 for some tasks.Despite a small handful of problems, though, Xcode 4 is where I want to be whenever possible. Having multiple identical icons in your Dock can be a bit of a pain.Unfortunately, I didn't...
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
MC3D - Platform Agnostic 3D Foundation
Sorry for the lack of posts recently. Things have been, well… you know. Same old story. Super busy. Which is good, but it's murder on blog post frequency.I've recently had to port some OpenGL ES work I did from iOS to Android. It used to be that doing so would have been insanely painful (as opposed to just painful). I would have had to convert the Objective-C code to Java, and then maintain completely distinct sets of code that do the same exact thing. Fortunately, the Android NDK (Native Development Kit) allows you to write code for Android in C/C++. The version of the NDK supported on 2.2 still requires part of the Activity (Android's counterpart to an iOS view controller) to be written in Java, but does allow you to call C/C++ code using JNI. In 2.3 and 3.0, you can do entire activities...
