RIPPLE RESEARCH

Couple of quick updates, so far I have not turned on a windows machine at home since getting my Mac on Crack Mini. Its working awesome. Got a “Hello world” app written and a proof of concept app written for something that I will release to the app store when I get it polished up. Initially I found objective C to look strange and alien, but am slowly getting to know it… although it still looks weird and strange to me at this point.

I am enjoying the coding though, it reminds me of when I started learning C for the first time 20 years ago.

Second is that I am trying to teach myself to type with the right fingers on the right keys, this sounds dumb coming from someone who spends so much time at a keyboard.. why don’t I use the right fingers now?? well I never too typing lessons and learnt to type fast using things like instant messaging, irc, and general document and code writing. I generally don’t use my pinky fingers when I type and have never been able to break the 80 words per minute. I need to retrain my brain to do that, and start ensuring that I use the correct fingers to type everything. I have dropped back to around 20 wpm and am slowly increasing my speed back as I use the right shift keys and include my pinky fingers. I am hoping to have broken the 100 wpm point within the next month or two by using all the right fingers, when I stop thinking I can get quite fast already but tend to drop my pinkies off at times doing it hahaha its hard.

well thats it for today, I am going to do some typing exercises now.

• 

Well as I have previously posted, I have been setting up my new Mac to start coding some iOS apps. I have been on holidays for the last two weeks and am going to be short on time to code so I wanted to make sure that I got everything set up and ready to go.

I now have Xcode for the programming, Gimp for image creation, and Word for documentation all installed tested and working. I have enabled and tested the time machine for constant backups, and set up mapped drives running on my file server (Raid Protected) for data storage. I think I should be safe to start…

So I broke out the Objective C manual, fired up Xcode, and created my first iPhone app. It took me less than 5 minutes to get “Hello World” working on the iPhone emulator. I am going to be just like Fonzie soon…

I have a habit of writing down all the ideas I have, whenever I have them, stupid or not and most are stupid. But I had one of those defining moments where you realise you have been looking at an idea from the wrong direction and suddenly you see it from the right angle and it makes so much sense that you wonder why you didn’t see it that way before. I guess what I am saying is that I had a fantastic idea for an iOS app.. One of those million dollar ideas, now I just need the time and motivation to get it done. Goodbye world, Ill be back in a year or so, hahaha.

Lastly for today, I am going to have to work out how to reverse the scroll wheels on my PC’s because I am getting used to the Mac scroll being backwards, and Im starting to realise its the right way. But I still get confused often. [wave].

• 

After using the Mac Mini now for 24 hours I have started to warm up to it some more. I rebuilt my iTunes library anew, recreated my playlists and synced my iPad first. It moved my icons around, but I didnt lose a single app or its data. Next I synced my iPhone and it too went well, although there was some confusion with the song transfer. It only coppied about a third of the songs over the first time, so I had to remove the songs, stop syncing music, and then start it all again and it all came over. While doing that I started setting up some software.

I have so far installed:

• iAuthor – For writing books that work in iBooks. It looks sweet, although a little confusing, previewing my book on the iPad looked awesome, truly sweet. I am not convinced that an epub format wouldnt be better though. Will post on this later.
• XCode was next, to write apps with. Its a huge download, but it installed fast enough and was up and running in no time. I cannot test anything on my phone or pad yet as I dont have a developer account, but I wrote a test app and can run it in the included emulator. So far impressed, but I needed to make some icons.
• Gimp should let me make some images, so I installed that, it worked out of the box and I made some icons for the test app. It looks almost exactly like the windows version and has zero learning curve if you have used it on either platform. Well done gimp developers.

Photos.. I installed Picasa, but then realised all my photo’s were missing from my NAS drive. After throwing a child like tantrum, and listening to my missus tell me they would be there somewhere, I found them again but by this time I had seen an update to iPhoto. Supprised once again at the size of the updates, I downloaded the almost 800Mg update and got iPhoto working. The main feature here was the use of photo stream. I can now take a photo on my phone and it will upload to the stream and download to my photo library.

Lastly I installed VLC Player so I can access my movies, the kids have made some we encoded in XVid, and others in M4V. The M4V movies play a LOT cleaner, but I may have used a higher bitrate on them, they do play well though.

Well thats it, as you can see I am warming up to this tiny beast and look forward to stacking it full of memory.

• 

I love lego…

Oh and there have been 3 downloads of My Wave… Im on my way!

•