Apple’s new legalize in their latest SDK seems to not only kill Flash, but hint at the possible removal of many frameworks like Unity3d. I can’t say for sure how true that is, but that would be a huge blow to developers. It seems Apple wants you to do it all the hard way. Using only XCode and Objective-C. I guess some folks think that this will result in better quality programs, because it’s written in their native language. Being a programmer myself that is the most stupidest excuse I’ve ever heard. There’s plenty of CRAP apps in their App Store written entirely without frameworks in Objective-C. So, the excuse of better because it’s in their native tongue holds little weight in my opinion. It’s disappointing to think that I could have jumped onto Flash Actionscript and built an app or game for the iPhone, doing so would have been so much faster for me. Especially considering that I’m not very well versed in OpenGL-ES, nor do I really want to be. I don’t dream about writing 3d game engines, and having seen the amount of Objective-C code that’s required to put a 2D box on the screen at the Big Nerd Ranch was enough to make me run for the door. I want to be able to make what I envision into a reality without having to outsource my development or hire highly skilled specialized programmers. The other point raised by folks is that Apple doesn’t want you to cross-platform develop, which I can see too, but it’s not very fair to force developers to choose like that. Yes, there are lots of iPhones and iPads, but to say you can only choose one isn’t right. It’s like asking a child you can only choose your mom or your dad.

In the end, so far Apple has managed to make enemies of Google and Adobe, and alienated some developers. It saddens me to see this happen, because I see so much potential in the platform, when you consider what things people have done with jail broken iPhones, it’s a missed opportunity. I’ve been witnessing for some time a change in how Apple’s attitude. They’ve become quite the opposite of it’s roots, when they were gunning for the corporate giants like Microsoft and IBM. Now that they themselves have become this bloated beast of a corporation, much like their old enemies, they don’t need to embrace customers or developers. “Just suck it up or go elsewhere”, seems to be their stance, and I guess there’s enough people out there keeping Apple afloat that they can maintain that stance. It’s times like this that reinforces why I would like to love Apple, but I can’t because they keep pulling stupid shit like this.

There are better articles written on Ars Technica, TheFlashBlog, and TUAW.

A few days ago, I ordered a Pogo Stylus which arrived in the mail today. I know there are plenty of no-name brand styluses out there, but I figured I’d go with the name brand first before jumping onto a generic. The question you must be asking is why buy a stylus? The iPad doesn’t need one! But I miss my stylus! I’ve been using tablet pc’s for such a long time, and not having a stylus for some tasks just doesn’t feel right. For example, if I boot up Sketchbook, or Adobe Ideas, I have a hard time using my finger to draw… It just feels like I’m in kindergarten finger painting with my stubby index finger. It’s times like this I miss the pressure sensitive pens on my Wacom penable tablets (even though they are not without fault). So to quell my desire for a stylus, I bought a Pogo. So, how is it?

It came in an unassuming box, and it was see-through and the pen was red… Not sure if  I ordered that color, but I don’t mind, I guess it stands out amongst all the Apple minimalistic toned stuff I own.

Look it's squishy!

The first thing that you’ll notice about this stylus is it’s skinny when compared to a regular pen, but it’s thicker than a Nintendo DS stylus. The tip is a nub with a soft foamy like material, which squishes…

Something I’m not too fond of so far. This is quite different than a plastic nib that I’m used to in my Wacom’s. But I can’t expect that, since the iPad/iPhone precision is a finger, which is about 20 pixels round…

My first attempt using it was with Adobe Ideas. The response was ok, but as I drew around on my Zagg surface, I noticed the tip pull and bend away more than it probably should… I think it has something to do with the Zagg surface, because it is smooth, but has a bit of tack to it, unlike the plain unprotected glass of the iPad. It did respond better on my iPhone though, but the screen protector I have on the iPhone is a cheaper smooth type, and not a Zagg… I’m not planning on pulling the Zagg off to try it out, considering how much effort it was to put the thing on, so we’ll see how it survives long term use. It does make the use of the iPad and iPhone a little different, I found myself more accurate on the iPhone when typing, since the stylus point is a bit more accurate than my stubby index finger.

All in all, it looks nice and it works, and it’s probably the closest thing I’ll ever get to a real stylus on the iPhone/iPad. Is it worth the $20 price tag? Hmm, I would say no… But luckily you can buy it for almost half that at other retail locations. I’m going to see about ordering some of those generic ones and see how they stack up. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can get used to drawing with this stylus.

Once dinner was done, I headed to my gate. To my dismay, the airport had barely any outlets to plug anything in, and my laptop was down to 30% and my iPhone wasn’t far behind, what outlets I did find were far from the gate, or otherwise occupied. I noticed alot of people sitting around, and my phone kept getting notifications from Orbitz about my flight being delayed. It didn’t take long for the cancellation to come. I really wanted to head home… But the weather had turned bad; ice formed on the planes, and the earlier Rochester flight was still at the gate awaiting departure. The next direct flight would be tomorrow morning at 1:30pm – Ouch!

This is the first time I’ve been stranded (it always happens to those other people on TV!). But I remained calm, since I’m of the philosophy that getting angry will probably not solve anything, and just aggravate the situation. I asked at the counter nicely about what my overnight options were, and the woman behind the counter indicated that no-one is allowed to remain at the terminals when the airport closes, I would need to wait in the area outside security (which is REALLY sparse). But she said that the lady at the info booth near baggage claim could help me out with discounted lodging at hotels near the airport (see it pays to be nice). I went down to see this woman who pointed me to the hotel phones where I could enter in a special code which got me to someone right away. The gentleman on the phone gave me rates for 2 hotels close by. The hotel at the airport was still expensive, even with the discount, but the Wyndham Chelsea, about 2 miles from the airport, had a reasonable rate of $109, and had a free shuttle.

So, I’m here now at my room in the Wyndham Chelsea (which is quite nice), finishing off my weekend blog and taking advantage of the extra quiet time.

Time for bed, and hopefully my flight won’t be further delayed tomorrow.

After the keynote, Mike Daley gave a talk on beginning iPhone development, which I enjoyed. He began his journey on the iPhone in many of the same ways as I, although he’s much further along. He does iPhone game development on the side, since his day job is at Oracle, and he sees the platform as a great place for the solitary independent developer, much like the old days of the C64. He showed the game he’s working on for his upcoming book, which I look forward to reading early next year. I hope to keep in touch with him.

Moving on, Kevin Avila gave an indepth look at Core Audio, and OpenAL which was a bit over my head, but had some good information that I’m sure will come in handy when I get that far along in my development path.

I had the pleasure of meeting Erica Sadun at the conference. During lunch, she did a presentation on in-app purchases, which was very interesting. It truely does open up a new distribution path for your application, such as making it possible to do premium content and conversion from demo to full version software within your app. I was very pleased to spend a little time chatting with her. She showed me her Dell Mini 9 Netbook, converted to a Hackintosh, running Leopard! I now have a new mission!

Dan Glover showing us some shortcuts and tips for making the most of XCode, I learned that XCode has a testing module called OCTest, which is handy for automated testing! Erica also showed us how to get a split view of both our .m and .h files! Very handy!

The last session of the day was about Network Gaming by Peter Bakhirev, which was a good overview of strategies we can use for tackling an online or local network game. It was very interesting and he had a nice chart highlighting approaches to the various types of networked games, turn-based or real-time, either online, or local.

With the closing of the last session, the conference ended. It felt sort of anti-climatic, since pretty much everyone just disembarked, but I think that’s probably for the best, since people wanted to head home after a long weekend. Overall, I’m happy with how the conference went, and I hope to make this an annual event.

The first session I attended was Custom User Interfaces with Core Animation by Marcus Zarra. He showed some pretty interesting things you can do with CAShapeLayers to create a slick interface that didn’t need to change views to bring in other views. His presentation was good for me to see, since it was more pertinent to something I was trying to do after the Big Nerd Ranch. Hopefully the source code will be available on the conference site soon so I can dissect his app.

August Trometer’s session was titled Designing a Killer iPhone User Interfaces, where he highlighted the importance of taking the time to create a well designed application, and not just design in the graphical sense. It reinforced the things that Aaron had said in his keynote. August did a nice job showing some examples of similar applications and how a good design really set them apart.

After lunch, I attended Bill Dudney’s session on Peer to Peer Networking for Games, where he gave an overview of using GameKit to easily create local networked games using Bluetooth networking between 2 iphones. It was quite amazing to see how GameKit really made things simple. Sadly, I was suffering from food coma, but once again, I hope to get the session source code to play with.

Jonathan Rentzsch presented next about Core Data, but sadly, this session I didn’t get much from. At the Ranch, we didn’t go over this too much, so I didn’t have much of a background on Core Data. I was hoping Jonathan would have given a more interesting overview of what I can use it for, but he rambled on about the benefits in regard to other data modeling methods, but I didn’t have much context to understand what he was talking about. It wasn’t until the last 10 minutes of the session where he started using Xcode that I started to see something interesting, but sadly, all I got to see was 2 errors that I could encounter when trying to use Core Data.

The last session of the day was titled “Rapid Application Delivery: Going Hybrid” presented by Lee Barney, the creator of the QuickConnect iPhone framework. Prior to the session I’ve never heard of the framework, but I was interested in seeing how I could leverage html, css and javascript in an iPhone app. I was very impressed with what the QuickConnect framework offered; with it, I could actually build an application only using html, css and javascript. Very impressive indeed, probably one of the best things I’ve seen at the show.

Dinner was provided for us, and soon after dinner we were treated to a presentation by Andy Ihnatko titled “Know Your Oppressor”. It was a very insightful look at Apple, and had warnings about how Apple could crumble from the empire they are today, if they aren’t careful, in particular, their missing the boat on ebook readers, their handling of their loyal development community, and the looming threat that Android could evolve into.

The final event of the evening was the networking get together at the Elephant and Castle pub, where we got a chance to talk with the other conference attendee’s; a nice way to end a long, interesting and enlightening day.

The three of us wandered down to Quincy Market, but didn’t settle on anything in the facility, since finding a place to sit was nearly impossible (being a Friday night). We wandered out not too far from the market into a nice bar/restaurant and had a nice catch up dinner conversation. I was speaking to James and Jennifer about how my real life job had kept me from doing much iPhone development, and how I’ve grown rusty. James had similar feelings, and mentioned that he had been wanting to write a simple 2 minute timer application. A challenge was then posed, what can we write this evening? So, after dinner we headed back to our hotel rooms, and we began coding. Admittedly, for something that sounded so simple, it was rather tricky, and it served as a nice refresher for me. I managed to make a weak 120 second count down timer, it worked. but looks rather awful. I’m just proud of being able to have gotten that much done, and feel more encouraged to continue

I’m hoping to hook up with Jennifer and James, two of my fellow Big Nerds in Boston tomorrow. I’ll be sure to write up how things go.