Anthony Panozzo's Blog

Last Wednesday, I went to a one-day session in Chicago titled iPhone Tech Talks. I am currently taking the Cocoa Academy course, and thought that this would be a nice way to get some additional information. The conference had probably about 400 people or so. I was a bit worried because I have neither an iPhone nor a Mac, so I thought that I might have been out-teched. :) However, it seemed like most people did not bring their laptops, and some of the people that I talked to had as much or less experience developing for Apple platforms.

I took like fourteen pages of notes, so I will probably break it up into a few posts. This one, which gives an overview, one about usability (I was writing the entire hour and a quarter session) and one about performance and using different libraries.

What's in it for you?

Hmm… Well, maybe you are doing or planning on doing some kind of iPhone development. That would be nice.

But I was talking with someone who has the G1, and the features are pretty much the same aside from native multi-touch, so most of the design principles and considerations will be present there. Indeed, any mobile device has at least some of the constraints that you need to think about when creating an iPhone app: usability, market reach, battery life, screen real estate, interrupts, performance, and more.

I would say that this was my first foray into mobile development, so it was definitely an eye-opener. If you have developed for a mobile platform before, then some of these comments will be old hat, but there still might be some gems in there.

Title: The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market Is Down Author: Peter D. Schiff Published: 2008 Length: 263 pages

Overview

With the current state of the financial system, I was looking for a book to make sense of it all. I had been reading about the decline of the dollar, the poor state of the financial sector, and the huge deficit the United States is running, and thinking that there were still some people out there who thought that things were going to get better in the very near future. Although I don't have all that much in long-term savings yet, I was wondering how to keep what I had in there and what markets might be nice to invest in given the current state of the US economy. In the introduction, Schiff states: "The goal [of this book] is to help you preserve and enhance wealth that can be reinvested in America after fundamental economic reform takes place."

Context

The book was written in early to mid-2008 after Schiff's book Crash Proof. That book accurately predicted what happened in the last year or so, even though various pundits scoffed at his work. I was excited to read something that contained timely information. One thing that Schiff did not talk about was a potential government bailout plan, although that is probably a subtext with inflation and other government manipulation. He does talk about the 2008 elections and how they might influence policy, and plugs Ron Paul because of his Austrian economic roots and the desire to return the gold standard. He correctly observed that the "smart money" was on Obama, and he indeed won.

I've been using Vim for about a year now, and am pretty much addicted. Once I reached a certain level of proficiency, no other editor seems to be even close. The keys are very intuitive to me now, as is modal editing.

Of course, there is a problem when I have to type in other programs. For example, in OpenOffice, I routinely hit j a few times, and am surprised when that letter actually pops into the screen instead of moving the cursor around.

To overcome this, I've been messing around with ways to make Vim more friendly to general writing. Here's what I've done or found:

Autocorrect

This section outlines my major actual contribution. The rest are just tips. Autocorrect is a key feature of almost any word processing program, and it's tough to do by default in vim. When you type 'teh' and then have to go back and fix it, you are much less efficient. Vim has the concept of abbreviations, where you can map one word to another.

Title: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us Author: Seth Godin Published: October 2008 Length: 160 pages, or 3:40 spoken

"A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea."

This book is self-described by Seth as a book that was supposed to be about leadership that happens to have a lot of marketing information, or a book about marketing that happens to have a lot of leadership information. The main point is that with the advent of tools to facilitate interactions between groups of people with common interests, being a leader is easier but even more important than ever. Tribes can be smaller and more precise because geographical limitations are mostly gone now. Apart from others' need for leaders, being a leader increases your happiness because you are in control of your destiny and are constantly challenging yourself. Seth makes an even bigger point: we need YOU to be a leader, and there are huge benefits to be gained from doing this. Sometimes the going can be tough, but if everyone were doing it, then it wouldn't be worth as much when someone provided true leadership. Godin emphasizes creating a movemen and working with it to allow it to thrive.

Most charity events take manual labor, so maybe you had an excuse before. But "IndyGiveCamp Charity Challenge Weekend 2009 is an initiative designed to allow developers, designers, DBAs and web enthusiasts to donate their time and talent to developing applications for charities." Hey, charities need software too!

You list your proficiencies, and are paired up with other developers (optionally of your choosing) and you work on a project for the weekend. With a schedule like this, you can be sure that you will be challenged. Heck, they say that "copious amounts of caffeine will be provided." Don't worry, you don't have to participate the whole weekend. It happens on January 23-25, 2009, which comes sooner than you'd think due to the holidays and whatnot.