I’m back from San Francisco after getting my brain stuffed with so much material that it almost hurts. The conference was great and the people I met aswell but the food sucked (as expected). What I learned is that don’t hesitate to skip sessions for labs. The problem with the sessions was that they were often either too basic or too advanced.
Some sessions marked as ‘intermediate’ should have been filed under ‘beginner’ but I tried to leave those as soon as I got the idea of the material covered.
On the other hand, the expert sessions were sometimes so hardcore that the engineers had to rush through the material to get everything done in time. I wouldn’t mind having some of those sessions a bit longer and at a decent pace.
However the labs rocked! Apple engineers are very, very nice people, both patient and willing to help. Talking to the person who made the stuff you are dealing with is invaluable.
Overall, I would highly recommend going to WWDC for any serious developer. Also, you are guaranteed to meet other like minded people, which is both useful and fun.
I’ll be attenting WWDC for the first time this year, sucking in as much as I can in five days. It’s going to be a blast for sure. I haven’t decided what to see yet but at a quick glance it seems to be packed with both sessions and labs. If you are going aswell please leave me a comment, I’d love to meet up.
Sources tell me it sold out faster than ever and I’m guessing that the iPhone is playing a big role this year.
Peel 2.0 has been in development for a while and I’m now ready to seed out a beta version.
If you would like to be involved in the beta testing process please send me a short email with the following info:
Your name, email and your twitter name (if you are following peelapp)
If you’ve used Peel before
How comfortable you are with geeky stuff
If you are a musician, mp3 blogger, journalist, developer etc
Anything else you think is relevant
If you are not comfortable answering some of these questions don’t panic, just ignore them. It will however help me a lot when going through the bug reports and suggestions.
I’ve been working very hard on the next version of Peel for the last few days. It’s been more than a year since I started a new fresh project for Peel 2.0 and unfortunately I haven’t focused enough on getting it done. I’m really feeling good about this now and I think it’s coming along strong this time. Here is a sneak peak of the current state of the app.
If you’ve used the current version of Peel, you should be able to see a lot of improvements.
Here is a list of few of my favorite new features:
RSS Support
The ‘web’ feature has now been replaced by a RSS-view displaying the post containing the song
Folder structure
Smart lists (two showed here, ‘Today’ and ‘Unplayed’)
Clicking a song in the RSS-view plays the song
Currently playing song is highlighted in the RSS-view
Refreshing blogs has been sped up a lot
Last.FM support
Hope you like it and don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you think something is missing.
Ps. It should be noted that this is not just a Photoshop mock-up and some of the interface elements will probably change.
Interesting post describing the process we go through when creating a new game.
This means that ideas are very important to us. Polished game mechanics, innovative features and games that fit the intended platforms perfectly are all things that we look to incorporate in an initial idea. A lot of our time is spent on ideas. Everyone can participate and pitch their ideas. At any given time.
Next week the Iceland Airwaves festival will kick off for the 10th time. The last four years me and my friend Addi have put together an event calendar since the festival homepage doesn’t have one. We’ve added a nice feature so you can generate your own calendar with only the bands you’d like to see.
I just received the updated version of Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X written by Aaron Hillegass. I already owned the 2nd edition so I’m quite familiar with the book. I strongly recommend this book for anyone wanting to start developing for the Mac.
There are lots of developers producing Mac applications and utilities. And they’re actually making an effort with them. Conscientious developers, who care about making an application that looks good, works well, and exploits the capabilities of the OS, are putting out great applications for MacOS X. We see applications like OmniGraffle, Adium, NetNewsWire, Delicious Library, Quicksilver, Coda, Unison… these apps are all well put together, a lot of effort has clearly gone into them, and there’s a real sense that their developers care that they don’t suck.
Windows software has never struck me as being like that. The third-party software ecosystem for Windows is big, no doubt about that. But it’s also incredibly shoddy. Most Windows applications—from both major software companies and minor ones alike—are ugly, poorly-thought-out, clunky pieces of crap. While there are a few artisan developers for Windows, most Windows devs just don’t care.
I just ordered Windows XP from the Microsoft Software Center. It’s simple, you just order what you need and immediately you can download it… or so I thought. What I got was a 400KB Windows executable. What am I supposed to do with that? I’m not running Windows since I was just buying it, hello? I had to ask my colleague to run it on his machine and all it does is download an image of the Windows install disc.
In my last article I mentioned how Mac applications tend to be more straight to the point. Tonight when I was reading through the updated HIG from Apple I stumbled upon this.
“During the design process, if you discover problems with your product design, you might consider
applying the 80 percent solution—that is, designing your software to meet the needs of at least 80
percent of your users. This type of design typically favors simpler, more elegant approaches to
problems.
If you try to design for the 20 percent of your target audience who are power users, your design may
not be usable by the other 80 percent of users. Even though that smaller group of power users is likely
to have good ideas for features, the majority of your user base may not think in the same way.”
I’ll be attenting 
