• Working with blocks

    In Mac OS X 10.6 and iOS 4, Apple added blocks to Objective-C. When I first started looking at them because various APIs used them, the syntax confused me, and I pretty much ignored them as I was still doing work that ran on iOS 4 and Mac OS X 10.5.

  • Siri and a 4 year old

    I've been playing a lot with Siri on my iPhone 4S and am finding it pretty neat. I add reminders when running and when in the car. I'm also asking it the weather, temperature, etc. My 4 1/2 year old son saw me asking it "What's the weather?" and he tried to do the same. Unfortunately he doesn't enunciate well, so Siri gets very, very confused. He's managed to get Siri to respond to something this evening; he asked it "What's the weather in San Jose?" and it responded correctly.

  • iOS 5's most useful feature

    Now that my wife and I both have iPhones running iOS 5, the single most useful feature for us is Reminders. I've used to do lists on and off for years, but never found anything that was always accessible and easy to use. With iOS 5 and iCloud, I have access to my reminders on my desktop, iPhone and iPad. Furthermore, with Siri on my iPhone 4S, I can add reminders when I'm running or when I'm driving.

  • Apple Remote Desktop vs VNC

    Lately I've been doing a lot of work between my multiple computers and since I like having only one monitor/keyboard/mouse shared amongst them, I've been using VNC to control then. A friend of mine has told me that Apple Remote Desktop is faster, so I decided to spend the money and order a copy. I received my copy this morning and I have to say that I'm blown away. My network is no slouch (gigabit ethernet) so it wasn't the bandwidth that was the problem in the sluggishness of VNC. Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) is not only faster, but easier to use. If I want to move a file to another machine, I just drag it to the window. It does lots of other stuff, but just being able to control machines (share the screen) makes ARD worth it.