November 2nd, 2007
Up until a week ago I couldn’t say much about OS X (specifically the new 10.5 Leopard release) or the iPhone (which I broke down and bought two months ago). The reason I couldn’t talk about Leopard was that I’m an ADC (Apple Developer Connection) member and I’ve been play-testing 10.5 for months, and I was bound by a non-disclosure agreement.
Well, Leopard has been released so the NDA doesn’t apply (much). I mention the iPhone because my iPhone thoughts are related to OS X Leopard. Let me explain…
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July 17th, 2006
Most everyone can pass over this blog posting. I was writing a lengthy e-mail to a friend who is considering “seeing the light” and moving to Mac. Her big concern is that she has a lot of old WordPerfect files. So this guide talks about (a) the different Word Processing options for your new Mac and (b) the two Windows “emulators” that will allow you to install a copy of Windows on your new (Intel) Mac.
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July 1st, 2006
If you’ve never heard of OpenOffice (and I’m not just talking Apple here) you should educate yourself. It is a full “office suite” that can compete fully with the likes of Microsoft Office, Corel Office, Lotus SmartSuite and Apple’s “iWork” suite. It actually has a rich and fascinating history, dating back to its origin as “Star Office”, a German product that was proudly touting advanced Object Oriented design and cross compatibility between Windows and IBM’s OS/2. We’re talking circa 1995 here.
I don’t remember the particulars, but Sun bought Star Office and did the split-personality part-open-source, part-commercial development thing, like Netscape had with Mozilla. Essentially they made it an open source application “OpenOffice” to attract a wide developer base while keeping a closed-license version they could charge money for. OpenOffice is really a viable product on two platforms: Linux/Unix and Windows. For a long time it has been a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and some government agencies in the US and abroad have attempted to standardize on it in order to escape Microsoft’s expensive licensing. (To mixed results.)
“So where’s the Apple OS X version?” you may ask. Well, the answer to that is far from simple.
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May 2nd, 2006
Although it’s jumping the gun a bit, I’m trying to figure out a name for my upcoming Task/Project Management application for the Mac. I’ve internally called it iProject, but a quick Google search comes up with a product that I think is made in Germany. I’ve tried the combination of adding “i” + any common related term: Task, Todo, GTD… everything there has been taken. Granted, my product doesn’t have to start with the letter “i” but I wanted to emphasize my own design goals which are (a) to have something that is as simple and easy-to-use as it is powerful and (b) an incredible level of integration and “plays well with others” with the existing iCal and other Apple applications.
For a brief moment I thought of i + Do It = iDoIt. I even like how it sounds when you pronounce it: I Do It. I typed ‘idoit’ into Google for a search and suddenly realized my folly, as Google politely asked me “Did you mean: idiot?” That could have been a disaster in the making. Kinda like the old Chevy Nova that didn’t sell well at all in Latin American communities because in Spanish “no va” means “doesn’t run”!
I’m happy to entertain any application name recommendations. Until then, I’m going to keep calling this thing iProject.
April 22nd, 2006
I wrote a few days ago about how I had this killer (simple but useful) Mac application idea bouncing around in my head for a year now. I have to confess I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last three days in refreshing my Cocoa programming skills, and I’ve written my first decent test-app: a Mandelbrot generator.
Back when I was a teenager I was fascinated with the Mandelbrot set. It was kind of the “hallmark image” of the then-newly-emerging field of fractal geometry. This was the same field of Mathematics that was allowing computer-generated landscapes like moon in the Genesis Planet Demonstration video from Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn. I remember staring at the strangely beguiling image in a Scientific American article, fascinated with its strange features. Also incredible was the fact that no matter how closely you “zoomed-in” to a point of the Mandelbrot set, you got a uniquely different-yet-similar picture.
I remember being about 16 years old and reading and re-reading the article, trying to understand the relatively simple mathematics behind it. It was just the equation z=z2+c but in the complex number plane. I understood complex numbers and had a year or two of algebra under my belt, but couldn’t get it. Then one day I had that “eureka” moment and it all made sense. I jotted down the simple quadratic, translated it into a computer algorithm and set to writing a program to test it.
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