Even though I’ve been using Xcode for something like 5 years, I learn something new about it and its related tools all the time. This week I started playing with Instruments and the Leaks tool in particular. I was horrified at the number of memory leaks I found in ReceiptWallet. While they weren’t large, I’m ashamed that I had any (there were maybe a dozen or so). It also showed me that some of the system libraries I’m using (in particular TWAIN and Image Capture) also seem to have memory leaks. I feel much better that I squashed the leaks. They probably won’t affect users, but having memory leaks is just bad.
Barenaked Ladies Live!
I like listening to music as silence is sometimes unnerving; I listen to music in the car and most of the time when I work. However, I’m not a music connoisseur and haven’t been to many concerts in my life. The few concerts I have been to, I really haven’t enjoyed because the music is usually too loud and distorted and the artists are just not as polished as when in the studio. Last night, Apple surprised us by having the Barenaked Ladies at the WWDC bash. I have one of their CDs and we recently bought their kid’s CD. I must say that the concert was excellent; I was able to understand the words, the music was good, and they were pretty funny when telling some jokes. It was a very welcome surprise. All I had with my was an iPhone, so my pictures aren’t very good, but here is one anyway.
Unified ToDo List
I’ve struggled with managing my todo lists and have bounced back and forth among many different applications and even paper notebooks! Recently I decided to give 37signals‘s Backpack as there are a few Mac clients and the web interface is excellent. I’m quite impressed with it and their free account seems to meet my needs at the moment. Browsing it on the iPhone works quite well and now I have my todo lists wherever I go (as long as I have data coverage). Others probably have the same issue organizing todo lists; I hope that this current solution will work for awhile.
Annoying people at conferences
I sat down in a session today and the person next to me was eating raw carrots. She (yes there are a handful of women here) kept crunching and crunching. I moved seats, but it was still annoying. Do people lack common courtesy or do they not realize the are disturbing my peace?
In another session, the guy next to me started cracking his knuckles. If I smacked him, would he have stopped? Why should I have to tell people to be kind? I can handle typing at the conference because there is enough other noise to mask it; however, the knuckle cracking and the carrots are just plain annoying. I guess many of these people don’t get out much and don’t need to be courteous to others.
In my last session of the day, the lady next to me took off her shoe and started cracking her toes. To top it off, she banged on her keyboard at 100 miles per hour; the keyboards on the MacBooks are really annoying when people type fast. I could live with that (sort of), but cracking her toes almost put me over the edge.
Babar is staying above me
Babar is staying above me; I hear him stomping around. I was going to ask the front desk if they allowed animals in the rooms, but I’m not sure they’d get the joke. In most cases, heavy stompers don’t realize that they’re stomping, but what can I do about it? Going upstairs and confronting Babar would not be a good idea as I could get trampled.
WWDC – Day 2
Well, there isn’t a whole lot I can say. I respect the NDA I signed and therefore can’t reveal the contents of any sessions. However, I can say that I almost fell asleep in a number of sessions; some of the presenters assume zero knowledge from the attendees. While that may be the case for a number of the developers, I’ve been doing this for awhile.
I did run into someone that I knew from college; Dean Dauger has been a Mac developer for ages. I remember in college he had a prototype Quadra 840 AV. I thought it was so cool that he had prototype Mac hardware.
I’m still quite excited about iPhone; I just need some good ideas for some apps. Some of my posts in about a month may reveal more information and some of my concerns about the iPhone, but for now, I have to keep quiet.
Oh, I’ve been reading more and more about the pricing and it looks like the minimum AT&T plan for the iPhone 3G is $70 per month. That is a bit steep compared to the awesome plan I have; however, I got my plan at the start of the smartphone era before carriers really knew what was going on. This, of course, keeps me with Sprint as no one can match it.
WWDC Keynote – My take
Lots of web sites have their opinions on the WWDC keynote (pretty much all I can talk about all week), so my comments will be brief.
I really, really wanted a new MacBook Pro; my machine is now 2 years old running a Core Duo processor and not the newer Core 2 Duo. My machine is quite sluggish and as soon as Apple announces new MacBook Pros, I’m ordering one. Likely by then, I’ll be able to get a 320 GB 7200 RPM drive which will be great, but the machine won’t be available soon enough.
The 3G iPhone was a given, so that wasn’t a surprise. The GPS wasn’t a surprise either, nor the enterprise features. What was a pleasant surprise was the $199 price. This pretty much means that the number of iPhones is going to sky rocket and the market will be huge. I’m hoping that this will translate into more work for me with companies wanting me to build iPhone applications.
The rest of the keynote really wasn’t all that catchy. I was hoping for the “one more thing”, but we didn’t get that.
One thing that the person next to me commented on is that Steve looked a little thin and that Phil Schiller may have gained the weight that Steve lost. Could that have affected the pizzaz of the keynote? Was Steve not feeling well? Or did Steve not want to upstage the 3G iPhone? It’s quite probably that this conference will be basically an iPhone conference. Another thing that surprised me is that Apple will basically have a 2 month lack of iPhone inventory. I guess this will cause people that bought not to be pissed off by getting an older model, but 2 months of sales is a lot to sacrifice.
I’ve noticed that there are a ton of people that haven’t done Mac or iPhone development judging by the list of sessions. With my 6 years of Cocoa experience, I hope that this gives me a leg up on doing iPhone development. We shall see; I’m sure that there are a number of talented developers that will create excellent applications (I’ve been amazed at some of the demos I’ve seen).
Today has been a long day and I’m quite excited about the iPhone; I keep running into people I’ve known for years and have enjoyed talking to them about what the iPhone means and where it is going. I’m not sure what the rest of the conference will hold, but it better slow down or I’m going to collapse before the end of the week!
Oakland Airport vs SFO
When I was booking my flight to attend WWDC, I could fly into either SFO or Oakland. I’m been flying into Oakland for a long time anytime I’ve come into San Francisco. Back in 1995, the first time I came to Macworld San Francisco, I flew into SFO because I didn’t know better; I then took a bus into town. Pretty much after that when I came into San Francisco myself (I came a number of times for work and we always took cabs in), I flew into Oakland because BART went to Oakland Airport via the AirBART shuttle and Southwest stopped flying into Oakland. My last trip to San Francisco, I got annoyed with Oakland because I didn’t have the exact fare for AirBART (now $3) and had to scramble to get change and the 15-20 bus trip to transfer to BART was a pain.
So, for this trip, I decided to try SFO because Southwest started flying there again and a BART station was built at the airport a number of years ago, connected via a tram. I must say that it was much smoother flying into SFO as I got off the plane, walked to the tram, took it to the BART station and made it right into San Francisco. In addition, it is slightly cheaper. I’m now a convert to SFO!
Misinformed Runner
In today’s local paper, a reader wrote that he was disappointed that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon was 26.5 miles and not the standard 26.2 miles according to his Forerunner 305. The letter annoyed me as the author is a bit clueless about marathons. I’ve thought about writing letters to the editor all the time, but finally pulled the trigger.
I read the letter from Joe Chavez about the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon and was very annoyed that the author thought he knew more about the marathon than the organizers. If he had done any research, he would have known that a marathon is measured as the absolute shortest distance along the course; this means taking all of the inside corners and not zig zagging on the course, like many runners have to do in order to pass slower runners. In addition, while the Forerunner 305 is an excellent training device, it is not 100% accurate. I ran the marathon in 2006 and 2007 and my Forerunner 305 also registered 26.5 miles; I know that I had to zig zag to avoid runners and definitely didn’t take all the inside corners.
Joe should have done a little more research before accusing the organizers of stretching out the marathon.
Scott Gruby
San Diego
I’m not sure if they’ll publish it, but it felt good to write it. If the author was around, I’d slap him upside the head.
Asking for (USB) trouble
I was doing some testing today and had to re-arrange my USB hubs to put certain devices at the beginning of the chain. Hubs, you ask? Yes, I have 3 powered USB hubs and a ton of devices. Does it all work? For the most part, yes. I really wanted a 14-21 port hub and not have to chain hubs together, but I’ve been unable to find one, except for one that someone hacked together. Am I that unusual to have so many devices? OK, I may have a few more devices than most people, but aren’t people collecting more devices? Here’s my current list of what is plugged in:
- iPhone
- iPod Nano (2nd generation)
- Fujitsu ScanSnap
- DocketPORT 465 scanner
- NEAT Receipts scanner
- Playstation 2 headset (actually a Logitech headset)
- Garmin Forerunner 305
- DYMO LabelWriter 330
- Generic Flash Drive
- EVDO Rev. A modem
- EPSON CX9400
- Sewell DisplayLink
- MacAlly Keyboward
- Logitech Trackball
- UPEK Fingerprint scanner
- WiebeTech TrayDock