Posted by Kieran on November 30, 2008 under Mac | 
As a long time PC user (Windows and Debian/Ubuntu) coming to the Mac was not without some fear, now that I have done it, for the mobile and web developers out there heres my top pieces of software thus far
1) Textmate
http://macromates.com/
This Text editor in itself is almost reason to switch to Mac
2) Timemachine
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html
Built into Leopard, having what I assume is an Rsync based backup system built into the operating system is something all operating systems should do, especially with how cheap storage is these days and how imporant the data that many people are storing on relatively fragile laptops!
3) Coda
http://www.panic.com/coda/
text editor + file transfer + svn + css + terminal
This is a true joy to use, if anyone knows anything similar for WIndows please let me know, its great to have all the tools that you use when doing web development in one place
4) Skype
Same as the PC version really, and as a heavy Skype user, I was very pleased that everything worked flawlessly and out of the box
5) Adium
www.adiumx.com
Supports the rest of the instant messaging clients that you are likely to need in one handy application
6) Preview
Again part of Leopard will open most pdf and image formats it seems, and seems to be a lot smoother scrolling through large PDFs and theres a handy preview of each page on the right 
7) Parallels
http://www.parallels.com/
For those apps that havent made it to OSX or you cannot find this really does everything it claims to which I was very suprised at!
8 ) Xcode
True pleasure to use the inbuilt documentation makes the progression to Objective C a very painless one
Posted by Kieran on under J2ME, Mobile |
After attending FOM 2008 and seeing Tom Humes presentation on the strengths weaknesss and trade offs of mobile platforms, The slides of which can be found here
http://www.slideshare.net/twh/strengths-weakness-and-tradeoffs-of-mobile-platforms-presentation/
The mantra of fewer builds rather than customising for each individual handset where ever possible is something I have long believed in and practiced
Whilst I can see how certain applications such as Trutap can achieve this with great success, (we ourselves have managed one application that only had 2 builds small and large, by using a clever graphics set, clever jad and conditional logic in the code).
What happens when conditional logic for testing APIs breaks down (JSR 205 on certain Samsung handsets for example) that will report availability, however will work with undesired results, To solve this we moved in to JAD parameters to conditionally switch our code.
However whilst getting the number of builds down the root of this problem is still that the team that is developing the application still needs to know all the niggles with J2ME, luckily as you state we are no longer limited to 64kb and sub 100kb builds where the conditional code was too “expensive” to consider including in a generic midlet and preprocessed out.
Layer on top of a now completed functional build signing via Java Verify, Operators, manufacturer or in house signing via a CA such as Verisign, all of which root certificates may or maybe not been present on a particular operator handset combination, and the necessity to bring builds down to a handful is very apparent
However is the effort not just being pushed up to the logical place of the main application rather than trying to fork for each build, with the main advantage being that for a tested, signed and certified application you already have support in a given build, rather than having to port for a fresh handset. This is really just leveraging years of experience into an elegant solution, for people new to the mobile market you quickly see the appeal of platforms such as the iPhone and Android.
These new platforms have effectively made the problem worse for J2ME once you get into the realm of connected applications as people are now expecting to be able to access their contacts, connect to a network and save information without having the continual nags of a Java application that even trusted third party signing does not fully negate!
For anyone who needs introducing to the headaches of J2ME, Intohand published a white paper back at the beginning of this year
http://www.intohand.com/javamobilepdf.php
Posted by Kieran on under Android, Mobile |
Having recently delivered the Android workshop with Carl Harroch from Novoda at the Future Of Mobile 2008, we have made the slides available at
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dc2cgzjn_72grzmfqcv
Posted by admin on November 21, 2008 under Misc |
Well it had to be!!!
