Zoetrope

Finally the time has come, the AppStore has launched. I've been running the 2.0 Beta OS ever since my application was accepted during Apple's WWDC. It included the AppStore but the content wasn't there.

After you upgrade to iTunes 7.7 you can browse the store on your Mac, or just do it on your device. Make sure to install Remote so you can navigate and control your iTunes library. Absolutely magnificent IMHO.

The current catalog of apps is really cool, lots of games and contains a lot of free apps. I'm not 100% sure, but it seems you can install (actually: sync) the apps you bought on any number of devices. I'll test that when I get myself the 3G iPhone tomorrow. Oh btw, for once us Belgians have something to envy: unlocked iPhones 3G (although 'expensive')!

The last few weeks I've been ramping up my Cocoa/iPhone development and I have to say that it's really fun. Cocoa has very, very mature API's and excellent design patterns (read: delegates/target-action/datasource) that make GUI programming for Mac OS X/iPhone a lot more fun than spitting thousands of JWhatever components in Swing.

Okay, now back to Xcode!

I'll be leaving for San Francisco tomorrow, and am looking forward to do some hacking at WWDC 08. I'm running solo, so if you're attending the sold-out and landmark event event and want to have a chat drop me an email at nicky AT speakermouth D0_T com. There does not seem to be a lot of Belgian Cocoa developers out there, so I'm eager to see how many I can spot over there.

I've been pining to go to San Francisco and WWDC for quite some years now, but a pricey five-day conference is not something my non-geek friends would attend 'just for the heck of it'. It's also easier for me since this will be a business expense, something I guess almost all attendees will have in common. Going solo is going to be quite the adventure, but with the strong Euro and the arrival of the iPhone SDK I felt this would be the one not to miss.

I've been enamored with my iPod touch and the beta SDK's for some months now and I feel that Apple is going to push the boundaries of mobile development and at the same time jumpstart Mac OS X development. Building iPhone tailored web application is a hoot using Dashcode and the native iPhone API is looking great. Let's hope they won't go all evil on our ass with the iPhone App Store.

If I look back at how NeXT was ahead of its time with its UNIX workstations and the NeXTSTEP operating system and their developer applications such as Interface Builder, I'm hoping the same people and vision are pushing the iPhone and mobile development in a similar direction. If you've ever handled a Apple Newton you know how being ahead of your time doesn't always mean being successful, but looking at the success of the iPhone this won't be a problem for Apple this time.

I'll be posting posts (alliteration, yeah baby!) and photos during my stay, since Apple is providing network-access all across the conference center and I'm not leaving my Macbook in Belgium this time. They really know how to speak to the inner-geek: Apple provides a special conference website with full schedule for iCal, Moscone West floor plans, and even provide reading material and source-code beforehand for each session so I'll be coming prepared.

My inner-geek is getting excited already ;-)

For those who don't want to spend half a day compiling Haskell trying to install Darcs using darwinports, use the darcs client installer from http://www.fivesquaresoftware.com/source/.

Works like a charm, and installs in a second or 7...

###########################################################
# A startup item has been generated that will aid in
# starting postgresql83-server with launchd. It is disabled
# by default. Execute the following command to start it,
# and to cause it to launch at startup:
#
# sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.postgresql83-server.plist
###########################################################
--->  Installing postgresql83-server 8.3.1_0

To create a database instance, after install do
 sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb
 sudo chown postgres:postgres /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb
 sudo su postgres -c '/opt/local/lib/postgresql83/bin/initdb -D /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb'

To tweak your DBMS, consider increasing kern.sysv.shmmax by adding an increased kern.sysv.shmmax .. to /etc/sysctl.conf

Here's how to get rid of the 403 Forbidden: You don't have permission to access /~username/ on this server if you've upgraded your Mac OS X 10.4 installation to Leopard:

>$ sudo cp /etc/httpd/users/your_username.conf /etc/apache2/users/

Just restart Web Sharing in your preferences panel and you're back on track. Apple is finally using Apache 2 in Leopard and forgot to copy the userdir configs.

• A nice post about how there's more to REST that meets the eye called I finally get REST. Wow, coming from an XML-RPC (or worse: SOAP) world.
• A follow-up of the above, debunking comments that REST is just RPC
• And REST, as in Take in Easy, a comment on the two posts above, which pretty much reflects my own experience with REST.

An important thing to add to the 'easy' facet of REST is that pretty much anybody working in IT has experience with it:

• The sysadmin, he uses curl or wget to get things done on his server
• The web developer, because he's evaluating request-response handling while trying to find the ultimate web application framework
• The AJAX developer, he's rendering errors when his AJAX calls return a 400 - Bad Request
• The .Net developer, he's reading up on Common reasons IIS Server returns HTTP 404 - File not found error
• The Java developer, he's typed in an URL to know how to use closures in Java
• The suit, because he's has a weblog on which he's using XML-RPC to add posts

See what I mean ;-)

Dan Webb wrote a nice article comparing the Flash and Flex called Flash vs AJAX it's time to expand your toolbox.

I also like where Flash is headed (or more appropriately, Flex) and agree with Dan (and lots of others - read the comments) that the transformation of ActionScript into a more Java like language (primitive types, static typing etc.) is not necessarily a good thing - sigh. Look into the ActionScript3 overview if you want the details.

I can see Flex/Appollo front-ends in combination with RESTfull backends making a big splash in the future, but I'm not sure I would want to use it for e.g. an online shop. I like to wrap important data like that in nice semantic markup that's more accessible and more important: searchable! The Flexstore example looks nice, but can't quite convince me for such applications. download the sdk, extract it and run the build-samples script in the samples directory and open the index.html in the example to check it out for yourself. Here's a nice whitepaper overview on Flex in PDF

I recently saw a presentation on the new Adobe CS3 suite, and the presenter showed a demo of a rotatable 3D X-Wing running in Flash. The difference in performance between the old and new VM (AS2 vs. AS3) was stellar. I'm not sure if the difference in typing is responsible for this though.

So maybe we need to ban our dynamic languages if we want to rotate our X-Wings at 25fps instead of 10fps...