I finally got around to putting my pictures from the Big Nerd Ranch together, better late than never. Enjoy.

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Well, I downloaded the beta 3.2 SDK for the iPad. It’s interesting to see how large the screen is in comparison to the iPhone. Yeah, that’s a no-duh statement, but you really don’t get as good a sense of it until you try and build something in Interface Builder. You suddenly have this enormous amount of real estate. I’ll admit that even though it doesn’t have some of the things I would have liked to have in a tablet, there is no doubt in my mind that it’ll be a fun device to develop for. Just the potential of a screen this large that’s as reactive as an iPhone screen is exciting. I can see gaming will heavily utilize this. With a screen this large, I can easily see RTS games being a huge (no pun intended) genre here, being able to touch your troops and have them go. Yes, they have RTS games like that on the iPhone, but having it on a 10″ screen will make it a whole new experience.

Well, it’s called the iPad, and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s less than stellar. It appears to be nothing more than a big iPhone; which to me, is a disappointment and a missed opportunity by Apple to do something even greater. Now, I may be a bit harsh in my initial judgement, but to me it doesn’t seem to fill the niche that the netbooks try to with portable computing. From a development point of view, this could be interesting, since you can probably do more with a larger iPhone, which will address the limited screen size of the iPhone. I can see some interesting apps pop up, and I’ll probably still plunk money down to buy one; if only to attempt to develop for. I paid alot to learn Objective-C and iPhone development, so I figure I might as well get in early on this. I hope I’m wrong and this thing revolutionizes slate computing.

Well, tomorrow is the day Apple let’s us all know what the big deal is with the Tablet. Let’s see if they prove my misgivings wrong and make something I’ll be really excited about.

Today, I ran across something at work with my co-worker Sean that just hit us as a “duh” moment. I’ve been a web developer for a LONG time, and this little gem was never in my arsenal of web knowledge.

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My co-worker Sean found my blog today and picked on me for not updating this thing since the end of November.
It’s not like I don’t have anything to say, but I suffered from the same excuse… Too busy with other things.
Well, now that the old decade is behind me, and the end of the year madness is mostly ended, I’m getting back into this.
I got a couple of things I’m working on right now, first, my wife was sweet enough to buy me a new Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet, which I’m experimenting with right now for an upcoming review. In addition, to commemorate the upcoming Apple Tablet I dug up my old Newton 120 Messagepad to share some of my insights on.

Today’s development blog entry is some coldfusion code that’s helped me make a little app that is basically a proxy.

It takes a URL as input and does a pre-flight check to ensure that the endpoint is available before launching the user to the destination.

Most web developers probably never need to take this extra step, since it’s another layer in the link chain, but this becomes important if you are dealing with a large multi-environment site or external links that are a critical portion of your web site. The trend (at least in the company I work for) seems to be a move move toward outsourced web services, where whole portions of your website functionality is literally outsourced to a vendor. The outsource component is more complex than it seems, because this isn’t just sending the user blindly over to the vendor; we must perform authentication in some fashion, a single sign on, if you will, to allow for a more seamless experience. In the case of a large internal multi-environment web site, you have multiple pieces, which are expected to behave as a single entity, so any failure in one part ruins the cohesive single experience.

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I’m not dead! Honest! Life has been busy, and I’ve not been able to get my thoughts together to write anything comprehensive. But let me recap some of things going on so I don’t forget.

I got back from Voices That Matter, and I was so inspired by Erica Sudan’s Dell Mini 9 Hacintosh project I had to try it. I’m happy to say that I’m a proud owner of a HP Mini 110 Mac! I’m going to write about my experiences doing it, and using it soon! I’ve also made my Dell 17″ E1705 laptop into a nice 17″ Macbook – Bwahahaha!

I’ve also been checking out Windows 7, now that I have it. I’ve installed it a couple of times now, and the short of it is… I like it! It is so much better than Vista… If Microsoft brought this out as Vista, Apple wouldn’t have so much trash to talk about. I’ve not delved too deep into it, but from what I’ve experienced so far from installation to initial usage it’s been awesome. Kudos to Microsoft!

In gaming, my buddy James got me Borderlands… Damn him! I’ve been playing that more than I should, and in reality, not as much as I want to… Damn real life job!

So, between those three big things, and the impending launch of Motorola’s Droid on Verizon tomorrow, I’ve got no shortage of things to type about… I just need more hours in the day…

At the Voices That Matter 2009 iPhone developer conference there was a heavy emphasis on good design and August Trometer suggested using paper templates or whatever we could do to plot out or applications before diving into development. We even got an iPhone Sketchbook as a goodie from the conference, which is a neat notepad of grid paper with a 1:1 blank iPhone in the middle of the page. I googled around the web and found a nice photoshop template for this at http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=1628. I’ve not tried it yet, but it looks like a promising way to get a more real representation of your final design.

Sunday in Boston was a dreary and raining day. When the last session of the Voices That Matter conference ended, I decided to head to the airport. I still had about 3 hours before my flight, but the weather didn’t make it pleasant to drag my luggage around town. I decided to take public transportation to the airport. I  took the outbound Red Line train to the Silver line bus to the airport, which was pretty easy, and only cost me $2. Once at the terminal, I got my boarding pass, went through security, and settled in. I was pleased to find out that there was a Legal Seafood restaurant at the terminal, and I had a nice dinner there… A bit overpriced, but being at the airport, I didn’t have alot of options, and I didn’t want fast food.

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