Mark Roseman's Blog

Mac Programming Refresher.

I've been doing a bit of brushing up on the latest and greatest Mac development technologies. It's been interesting, to say the least.

To some degree or another, I'd been doing Mac programming since 1988 (ok, who else remembers the "phone book" version of Inside Mac?)... Lightspeed (later Think) Pascal, Think C, MPW, CodeWarrior... including a range of applications, networking tools and even printer drivers. Recently its been more cross-platform stuff, either lower-level C/C++, things like Tcl/Tk, and so on. I've done little bits and pieces with XCode/Cocoa, but nothing substantial. Having said that, I've remained interested and have followed along with what's new, i.e. I could name the technologies and tell you what they do, even if I couldn't use them.

I wanted to take a closer look at a few of the "newer" things... Cocoa bindings, Core Animation, Core Data, etc. Like with most frameworks (vs. libraries) there is a big learning curve to actually putting together an application, since you really need to know what holes to fill and how to fill them. And with everything building off of everything else, plus compatibility with older ways of doing things, it can at times be tough to follow. There's a lot of good documentation and examples luckily.

It is pretty cool how much these new technologies will help take care of that you would have had to do manually before. On the other hand, it does seem like Mac development is less and less like programming or coding (in the classical sense), and more like wire-wrapping...

Communities and Connections.

This post by Jevon from StartupNorth I think completely gets how geography and the startup mentality in Canada are different than in the US: [link]

The opportunity for Canada is first to build strong communities individually, and then the job is to build strong connections between those communities. Canadians (who are still here!) are different from those who flock to San Francisco in search of the holy grail. Canadians love their own city, and they aren’t very excited about the idea of all making their way to another city in search of success. Most of us will choose to make a go of it in our own backyard, where we are connected to our great communities and where we feel like we can all have an impact.

Step away from the keyboard...

I've been kicking around an idea for a new application for a few weeks now. It's something that's technically quite different and in a different domain from most of what I've done over the last many years. It's also different in that I see it being quite focused and constrained, which is a huge departure for me ("hey everyone could use this, for anything... and if I add a few more options, Martians could use it for stuff too!!!").

I know that the technical platform this will be built on is one I'm only passingly familiar with, so the urge to just jump in and code is almost wholly absent. It means that doing all the "on paper" stuff is coming first, it's in greater detail, and it's more specific than it otherwise would be. Thinking through the positioning, how to describe it, benefits, pricing, the easily described main points that would be on the website, audience, how successful products targeting a similar (or comparable) audience do things, and so on.

While I'm somewhat overstating this (other than preliminary fun hacking, any real project would get some form of similar analysis early on), the medium and lack of an electronic artifact do change the process. Hopefully, they'll also pare things down a lot by the time it gets to the implementation stage...

On turning 40...

While I've still got almost a year to go, and don't think I'm particularly freaked out by the thought of it, I still spent an extra moment or two reading Eric Sink's reflections on his reaching that milestone. The humorous "decide whether or not to have a mid-life crisis or not" todo item I particularly liked...

New Slogan for Tcl.

I'm not sure exactly why this popped into my head (though I think I'll blame it on jcw, for no particular reason), but I thought that "nice legs, shame about the face" (for those who remember punk-spoofers The Monks) would be an accurate if not flattering slogan for Tcl.

Angel Investors.

Via Gary Will's post at WatStart, an investor handbook (PDF), put out by the National Angel Organization.

For entrepreneurs considering dealing with professional angels, this is a good resource covering the types of issues and considerations that you'll be involved with if you go down that road. Most early stage entrepreneurs these days would probably come away from it with a better appreciation of the value of bootstrapping! As Gary notes, the tone reflects a certain inflated self-importance that is certainly not universal.

Reboot.

Another 20 feeds and bookmarks into the 'procrastination' folder. It's been too easy to keep scanning some of these higher volume sources of "news" under the guise of "staying informed", but the reality is that 99.9% of the stuff isn't something that's going to be actionable. Given all that time spent is definitely reducing work on things I should be doing (but am all too happy to procrastinate about) it's again time to try to realign priorities.

Not having real deadlines is definitely a double-edged sword. Not that I'd want to in running-out-of-cash startup mode or anything, but still...

Micro-ISV Anti-Patterns.

Great post. 1. Joining a fractured market with long existing players. 2. Differentiating on customer service or ease of use. 3. Ugly product. 4. Ugly website (including poor marketing, or not following the USP pattern). 5. Not seeking personal or product fame. 6. Not selling first. 7. Not constantly improving something.

Mobile development and iPhone.

A lot of people are quite excited about Apple's SDK (etc.) announcements for the iPhone - see this post from Jason @ 37Signals for example.

Much of the commentary has been quite positive (typical for an Apple announcement) but I actually tend to agree with most of what I've seen. The SDK seems to give a ton of access to the device. The distribution mechanism, including the economics of it, are right on; for a device that's 90% user experience, having this be a free-for-all would have been a disaster. Plus for Apple it's an obvious gateway drug to increase the number of Mac developers.

I've never done much in the way of mobile development, but it is something I've always thought would be attractive (modulo most of the shitty development tools). With the screen and input device constraints, it really brings user experience to the forefront, and developers can't get away with the cluttered interfaces and excess information found in typical desktop and web applications (guilty). A highly focused, task-oriented and Tufte-esque presentation counts for so much more in that kind of environment.

Post Holiday Recovery.

We did another winter cruise to the Caribbean last week, along with Pauline's parents who had never gone on one before. It was a nice relaxing break except for the travel days on both ends, and a very unfortunate and unscheduled tour of the ship's medical facilities on the last day.

The whole cruise thing still causes me some cognitive friction, if only because I don't think it's really the right type of holiday for us... we're more the wandering around somewhere a bit randomly, very unscheduled and so on. But the whole food allergy thing makes that kind of trip frustratingly difficult these days. At least with the floating hotel, they're able to take very good care of us in that regard, which removes a huge source of travel stress. Our cruise experiences may have a bit less dessert, drinking, melanoma seeking, shopping and weight gain than is typical, along with more salads and exercising, but in the end, that's ok too.