@jnjosh’s internet weblog.
This weekend I spent some time at the Ticketmaster DevJam in Durham. They are working on a public API with events, venues, and more that they’d like to get developers using. For me, it was a day long event with food and building a weird app with some friends.
Interesting, and unsurprising, news today that Xamarin has been acquired by Microsoft. I’ve never used it directly to build apps but I did to some research into using their test cloud system (which is actually calabash-based, something I’ve worked a lot with and have written about before). I hear of a lot of people loving to be able to build iOS apps without learning Objective-C or Swift. This gives Microsoft an interesting position as a vendor of an iOS SDK.
For the last couple of months I’ve been studying German with my wife. We both have always wanted to become polyglots so we decided to stop waiting around an just start learning. We both have some ancestors from Germany and would love to visit, so that was a great place to start. One thing I’ve been struggling with is numbers in German. I can count well, but hearing a number in conversation requires a lot of thought.
Over the last month I’ve been using the Go language more and more. It’s a pretty fun language but I often find myself wishing I was writing Swift. I came across this new static engine system that was written in Go and thought I’d try it out. It’s called Hugo. I don’t have anything bad to say about Octopress, and a new version is coming soon. But wow, Hugo is fast.
During a recent interview with Marcus Zarra on the CocoaConf Podcast, Marcus made a quick little comment that really resonated with me. To paraphrase, Marcus said something like “If you ask for opinions about something to a room of developers, you don’t get much of a response. If you just say something wrong they’ll tell you about it.” It’s an interesting point. People do love to correct you when you say something wrong or even something not 100% correct.
This week I was a speaker and attendee at 360|iDev in Denver. It was my third time at a 360|iDev (fourth if you count last year’s Mini in Greenville, SC) and I think this was probably the best one I’ve been to yet. Now, I’m not saying the previous visits to this conference were bad or anything, I just enjoyed it a lot this year. Here I’ll review the week and my session.
Last week I bought a newly updated 13" MacBook Pro with an amazing new Force Touch trackpad. I love it and it’s hard to go back to the older trackpad on my MacBook Pro at work. I’ve already caught myself trying to press on the top corners of the older version and have tried to press harder a few times. At this week’s NSCoder Night I decided to play around with the new Force Touch API to see how it works.
During the crazy week of WWDC 2014—right after the announcement of Swift—I decided to spend a little time trying to implement a quick weather app using the new language. I managed to wrap it up in a few hours (and spent way too much time trying to figure out how to parse JSON with a generically-typed dictionary) and open sourced it. There it sat for all these months while several versions of Swift were released.
I haven’t been very disciplined in updating CocoaHeads.tv this year. One of my goals for CocoaHeads in 2015 is to improve the quality of videos I record and find ways to improve CocoaHeads.tv. I’ve been really inspired by some of the videos out there in the community. 360|iDev and 360|iDev Min The folks at 360 have been pretty good about providing the videos from sessions at their conference. Currently there are videos from the last two years of 360|iDev and this years 360|iDev Min.
I’ve often wanted to do a yearly roundup of the tools and utilities I use; if only as a log of things I use over time. I did this two years ago in 2012 and when I was thinking about getting back to blogging I wanted to update the list. The funny thing is not much has changed. I’m actually surprised that I don’t use that many tools. Hardware Retina MacBook Pro - Still working with my 2012 Retina MacBook Pro with 2.