Bruji’s Pocketpedia does more than sync to your OSX ‘pedia apps, Dilbert from August 5th 2014 discusses so easy your mother could do it. Tom Stewart tells us his new process to keep some of the benefits of Aperture as he moves to Lightroom. Camera RAW updates and why people care. Task Management in a Visual Way with DayMap from whetstoneapps.com. Donald Burr’s Clarify 2 document walking us through exactly how to reset your iTunes activations. In Chit Chat Across the Pond, Allister Jenks from zkarj.me walks us through his journey from a 12 year old with his first computer to becoming an iOS programmer.
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Hi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday August 10, 2014 and this is show number 483.
Remember there for a while when I had to start every show with a correction? Well it looks like we’re back to that. Technically it’s not a correction, but a pretty major omission! In last week’s show, I talked about DVDpedia for the Mac and how I could sync my library database over to iOS using Pocketpedia. For some dumb reason, I never thought for a minute to check and see what else Pocketpedia could do.
Luckily @Herne just happened to mention to me how much he likes Pocketpedia and how he uses it to scan in books to Bookpedia. I couldn’t believe it. Sheesh, what a great reviewer I am. Turns out you can use your iPhone or iPad’s built-in camera to scan in your books, CDs, DVDs and games, and they sync back nearly instantly to your Mac’s ‘pedia software. I tried it and it worked REALLY well! I noticed you can also rate your movies and that info syncs back to your Mac’s database.
I felt like a dope that I didn’t even notice that, and big apologies to Bruji for it.
Dilbert
If you’ve been listening to the show for any length of time, you’re aware of my single biggest pet peeves, and that’s the phrase, “so easy your mother could do it.” I hear this ALL THE TIME on tech shows and it makes me crazy. People never say “so easy your father could do it”, so why single out a huge percentage of the population in this way? Is there something about child birth that makes a person a tech idiot? Oddly this idiocy does not apply to childless women so there’s that to noodle on too.
Evidently Scott Adams, the artist behind the Dilbert comic has noticed this odd phrase as well. Thanks to both TimN_FL and John Malonson for pointing me to his comic from August 5th 2014. I’ll read it out for the audience: the pointy haired boss says, “The interface needs to be so simple that your mother could use it.” Dilbert replies, “my mother taught herself Ruby on Rails over a weekend.” The pointy haired boss responds with, “Then imagine someone else’s mother.” To which Dilbert simply says, “Can I imagine a sexist imbecile?” Thank you Scott Adams – now I can point people to this every time I hear it!!!
Blog Posts
Photo Editing – Moving from Aperture to Lightroom by Tom Stewart
Camera RAW Updates and Why People Care
Task Management in a Visual Way with DayMap
Clarify 2
I’ve really been enjoying all the great feedback from people telling me how much they like the newly released Clarify 2 from clarify-it.com. Some people are sending along “thanks, great update!” and others are sending me their tutorials which is even more fun.
Last week when I talked about why Steve and I are still buying physical DVDs, I mentioned that I ran into the dreaded 5 computer limit in iTunes. I couldn’t even account for why Apple thought I had 5 authorized. Donald Burr wrote on the blog about how once a year Apple will allow you to reauthorize all of your computers (isn’t that big of them?) I knew you could do that (I’ve had to do it before) but Donald also pointed out that any time you do a nuke and pave, you probably forget to deauthorize. I had no idea Apple considered that a 2nd authorization, and you know I’m a fan of the nuke and pave, so I’m sure that Donald has cracked the code on why Apple thinks I have 5 but I can’t count that many.
Donald took it a step further though, he created a Clarify 2 document walking us through exactly how to reset your iTunes activations! Of course there’s a link in the shownotes to his tutorial on Clarify-it.com.
If you haven’t jumped on the special offers for Clarify 2, get started quickly. The 50% off sale on the App Store expires on August 11th so I hope you’re hearing this before then! If you missed it, and you’d like non-app store version anyway or maybe the cross-platform version, you can still get 25% off with the special code just for NosillaCastaways. It’s xxxxxxxxx and it expires on September 1st so you still have a little bit of time. Check to make sure you don’t get a free upgrade first though, there’s lots of ways you might qualify so go check it out at Clarify-it.com. Now I’ve got to run off and follow Donald’s instructions and reauthorize all of my Macs from iTunes!
Chit Chat Across the Pond
Allister Jenks from zkarj.me joins us to talk about his journey to become an iOS developer.
- My background
- Programming from age 12
- Work in “IT” includes programming
- RPG
- SQL
- I like “solving problems” which is what programming is
- Lego
- Programming types
- Pure
- Basic computation, no UI – A simple script to find something
- Problem solving, minimal UI – As above but generic and maybe formatted output
- Full
- Early standalone, custom UI – Take over the screen and lay out
- System
- GUI APIs – early window environments
- GUI & other APIs – modern OS
- Pure
- Getting started
- XCode – free
- You can prove yourself with just this
- Learning
- Tutorials
- Books
- Stack Overflow
- Signing up – $99 per year
- Run on your device
- Distribute
- Sell
- Betas!
- XCode – free
- Going beyond “playing”
- Find a problem to be solved
- See “Learning!”
- The hurdles
- Syntax
- Objective C is picky and complex
- Swift is magical!
- XCode is the teacher with the ruler!
- UI paradigms
- How do you put stuff in a view?
- How do you get user input?
- How do you update views?
- How do you move between views?
- Endless APIs!
- Date & time
- Maths!
- Graphics, colour
- Many abstractions and encapsulations
- Really “grokking” MVC
- When it seems impossible, you’re probably doing it wrong
- Building
- Provisioning profile pandemonium
- ALL the pieces
- iTunes Connect – it’s supposed to be getting better
- Syntax
- Done!
- Price setting
- Expectations
- Marketing
That’s going to wind this up for this week, many thanks to our sponsor for helping to pay the bills, Blue Mango Learning at bluemangolearning.com makers of Clarify. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter and app.net @podfeet. Check out the NosillaCast Google Plus Community too – lots of fun over there! If you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.
A couple of minor points on the photography topics.
Both Aperture and Lightroom can manage your photos or leave you to do that for yourself. It’s a long time since I *started* using either piece of software but I think the default behaviours differ. Aperture manages your photos unless you tell it not to and Lightroom doesn’t manage your photos unless you tell it to. And in either case, backup is easy. I have CrashPlan backing up my managed Aperture library with no problems and I can even extract single (master) photos from the backup if required. It is, after all, just a folder in disguise. I don’t think Lightroom will create a package but it will (at least the last version I used) pull all your photos into a structure it manages.
RAW files may be compressed in camera, but any compression will be lossless. My camera can produce either native PEF (Pentax) files or Adobe DNG files, both of which are losslessly compressed RAW formats. JPEGs are far more heavily compressed but the reason they are so much smaller is the compression is lossy – information is thrown out. On my camera I believe the RAW compression saves around 25% on the file size, whereas JPEG will save 80% or more for a reasonably high quality.
In all fairness, I really doubt that it’s Apple that limits the # of activation resets to 1 a year, it’s probably the media companies that we must “thank” for that. I’m sure if it were up to Apple, they’d let us reauthorize as many times as we darn well please. Actually they’d probably just dispense with this whole activation crap altogether.
Great overview of entering the world of iOS development.
Stack Overflow is awesome… I use it ALL THE TIME. In fact I’ve even set up an Alfred custom search so that all I have to do is hit the Alfred key, type “so ” and boom. The one thing I urge you not to forget is, once you’ve gotten to the point where you feel you have learned enough, go back on SO and answer other peoples’ questions. In other words, give back to the community. But please, ONLY do this if you feel you can respond without being snotty or egotistical or any of that crap. Yes, you will see a LOT of very “n00b” type questions. Just try and remember that you too were once a n00b (remember that we all had to start somewhere.) Also if a person’s question (or their response to your answer) sounds rude or stupid, just remember that English may not be their native language, and so their rude/awkward sounding writing might just be that, a less than perfect grasp of English and its idiosyncrasies. And you will be sorely tempted to just say “RTFM.” This is actually a good thing (you know, the whole “give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime” thing) But try and do so in a kind, non-snarky manner. (Yes this IS possible) Unfortunately a lot of the people in the Open Source community don’t follow these tenets, which is why acrimonious forum posts and scared-away newbies are all too common in the open source world. Don’t get me started on the subject, I could talk to you for hours, that is until the stress and anger (at the lousy Open Source community, not the newbies) it induces causes me to burst a blood vessel and collapse.
Some other tutorials I found EXTREMELY useful are the Stanford CS193p course (iOS app development) on iTunes U – this is a FANTASTIC Course, and the professor, Paul Hegarty, does a great job of explaining how to code in Objective-C (I suspect the next version of the course – it’s revised every year – will deal in Swift instead of ObjC) You do need some to have some computer programming experience as a prerequisite (i.e. you know how to program in some programming language) but he pretty much takes it from there.
Another great site is Ray Wenderlich (raywenderlich dot com) This is a great site full of tutorials, both “deep dives” into particular techniques or APIs, as well as step-by-step tutorials focused on building a certain type of app (“How do I make a game like Flappy Bird?” “How do I make an app like RunKeeper?” etc.) They are all pretty in-depth too, so by the time you finish a particular tutorial series, you are well on the way to having a fully-functional, well-polished app. They also have forums where developers can chat with each other and ask/answer questions, and the forums are quite friendly. (i.e. no snark)
Very nice Article! Thanks for sharing