pshapiro

Sometimes I feel like that. I mean, after all, I am working my day job to make money as a first priority, in order to take care of myself and my life. If I were able to do what I wanted purely without a need to make money I probably wouldn't be working where I am. That's not to say it isn't often fun and engaging to work on iOS, web, and business development with a team of people who are great at it. The developers on the team all seem interested in learning more, like you, and I don't get blank stares when I mention github, but I used to get blank stares when I talked about things like the Earth's environment, physics, and the way that the world works. Gradually, with patient persistence over a few years, as I shared some good problems of why it is important through whatever appropriate opportunity it was, they began to realize. Now I don't get only blank stares and mocking smalltalk, but there are some questions that they ask me about them and I can show them things through the questions they have.

Anyway, we are a small development firm that works with design partners and other clients, we build software for them, and we have a CMS platform that we tailor to their needs too. This is a big reason why the environment at my office is different than yours (we have a team of about 8 right now). Each person has to pull his weight for things to turn out well and we each recognize it, so many of us try to get to the level of expert in our own specialties. If expertise is recognized or rewarded then it provides an incentive to for self cultivation.

If you don't mind me asking, what is the specific area of software development your group works in?

"Supercomputers" here we come... :)

The determining factor in economics varies as a function of the problems and matters connected to what is inside people themselves. "Because the consciousness that moves us is making a world."

A simple example to demonstrate that it is possible to predict things about this society to a nontrivial degree, is the products and activities of Apple Inc. They have great marketing foresight. But besides that, it sounds like they were building mobile devices for a long time before the touch-based smartphone market really took off in the last few years, enough to get it right. I'm not an Apple employee but I've been using an apple for ages. It seems to me like the people at the group had to very carefully understand what kind of questions there are in building something like that and making it work best. Granted, Apple has lots of problems, but what I'm trying to point out here is that by funding and working on the problems in order to get it right, is usually going to result in the best products which if able to be made available widely enough will become very popular for a period of time. As a result, objective-C has come into use much more, and jobs were opened.

The question of how to see and predict the course of the world lies in understanding what exists in front of us.

Products that were developed by copying others or with ignorance of the problems in the matter, will eventually exhaust themselves. On the other hand, products from a company that had see what exists in their life and generates work matching what they see in problems, assuming they are adept at protecting themselves in business, will be able to be more successful. Even people who don't have any university education can be successful through their knowledge of what is. So we have to be able to comprehend human consciousness in order to understand how an economy will move. Luckily, to understand consciousness is simple, if you are really willing to know. Consciousness is changed for better or worse by what happened to it.

In this society where people have undertaken large-scale industrial production on Earth, people in presently affluent circumstances can afford to use cell phones more profitably than without them. But in a different society, the problem that makes the economy exist may be different but the principle through which it exists remains the same. Things are either getting better or worse through what is in the principle.

This principle isn't precisely comprehended in those economists' education and that results in lots of thinking that turn out to be misguided. But things in reality are very simple. It's just that we need to search what kind of problems we have inside of us in order to know what they are like.

Found this quote interesting.

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Black-Scholes and the many financial risk models that have evolved from it (including Felix’s friend the Gaussian copula) are all about volatility being measurable and predictable. “When Black-Scholes came out, I said, ‘Well, it won’t last,’” he told me in 2005. “‘I’ll come back when it’s gone.’”

I wonder what kind of electric propulsion they're working on....

Here's the engadget link. It contains some audio from the call.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/18/steve-jobs-drops-knowledg...

I tried to convince my boss of this a few years back... no dice yet.. ;)

In fact, we have a sign in the coffee lounge (diagrammed in art deco style with an idealized picture of a lady holding a coffee cup) that says, "Coffee! You can sleep when you're dead!"

We agree on those points, however. It's a big pain in the backside that they don't document their API better. And many of the classes, like TTPhotoViewController and TTScrollView, have some big problems that require modification to overcome.

But besides being a free library, I used three20 in many of my recent apps because I have been working with publishers to build navigation-based apps that require things like image caching and URL navigation. A number of other features of three20 are quite welcome, despite their quirks.

I usually try to do a quick test of the framework before I integrate it into a project and guarantee that it will work, because, you're right, some of them don't behave as advertised. This is even the case with some of Apple's libraries, but I daresay their documentation is better than three20's.

This connection with net neutrality occurred to me when I heard about this row between Fox and CableVision a few days ago too.

Well... anyway, even if they aren't connected issues, the fact that conglomerates & government have repeatedly colluded makes it difficult for somebody my age to have good faith that they wouldn't do something like that on purpose. Not saying they did...

I started with Core Animation. Now that you know C and some objective-C, you need to learn about Quartz, NSWindows, MVC, AppKit, Foundation, and other parts of Cocoa like Core Data (more on this later).

My first serious project with Cocoa was on a fairly tight timeline (a month for two apps, in fact) and I had only attempted tictactoe in Obj-C years before. What I did was immerse myself in the material and my project.

The project itself was for a museum in NYC, which has 30" touch-screens that let the visitors interact with a visual catalogue of the collection. This was a great introductory project for a few reasons.

First of all we had a great design partner. He built a very simple interface that remained constant through the entire project because he thought it out concretely before implementation. In other words, he considered the data very carefully and determined the fixed way to present it.

The second thing is that in order to import this collection's catalogue into the app, I had to build an XML parser that runs on a background thread while the UI displays a loading screen. That part was a good introduction to building an app and watching what it does in the Console, without getting into the nuances of Core Graphics and drawing, etc.. I recommend you start with something like this so that you don't get overwhelmed. It's extremely important to learn about correct memory management. Once you've got the basics, look into @property also.

From there, I had to learn about how make an application with a special kind of window, work with drawing NSViews and CALayers onto the window, learn about CAAnimation, Core Graphics, etc.

Before I built the app, I worked out my equations for laying the content on the screen and what kind of transformations I'd need to apply. Then I was able to set about building it simply.

At the time I didn't know this, but I can tell you from experience that it's very much worthwhile to look into Core Data. Even if your project is very simple and you require persistent data storage. I personally like to use json-framework and serve my app bundled JSON at initial lunchtime, with net updates after that, then do an import into my Core Data model, but this is really decided by what kind of app you want to build. I used XML for the museum project because we didn't know about json-framework yet. But it turns out that JSON translation into Cocoa objects has been much faster.

From here, you have a few options. You can either continue to develop on the desktop or you can move to iOS without very much difficulty.

If you are going to write mobile apps later and your app will interface with an existing web service, you may be better off using three20 and its http request libraries with JSON support to get data in real time. The Facebook app works like this. Actually three20 is a great option to go with for many apps. It's worth a look too, but make sure you understand UIKit as well as you can before you use three20. You still need to know UIKit to use three20 properly.

In order to determine what project you should build try to observe what kind of problems you have in daily life and what could be built to facilitate them. OS X is a wide topic and you could be talking about a GUI application, a kernel extension, or perhaps a web server. Each of them are projects which could take a month to build.

Hope this helps. Don't hesitate to ask any questions, and remember that Google and the Apple dev forums are great resources.