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iPhone Frameworks

TechKnow — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 03:52:18 +0000

As mobile devices become more and more entrenched and as more mobile devices become available there is a growing number of people that want to quickly develop an idea into an app. Developers of all sorts are picking up Objective-C to develop the next top selling mobile-based and touch enabled app. If you don’t want to learn Objective-C, there are several mobile frameworks to choice.

Rhomobile

Top Programmers on Twitter to Follow

TechKnow — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:57:32 +0000

Earlier this year I created a short list of top rubyist to follow on Twitter. At that time, that list was the first list of programming twitterers I had come across. Since then many other folks have created lists of programmers that are on twitter to follow. No matter how long the list of twitterers to follow is, you will always miss someone. So instead of coming up with yet another list of programmers to follow on twitter, I came up with a list of list of favorite .net, ruby, java, and technologist to follow on twitter.

If you like you can follow me too.

Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008

TechKnow — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:35:58 +0000

There was a large contingent of Microsoft evangelist at this years Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 pushing Microsoft Azure, XNA, and Silverlight technologies. I was able to see Microsoft Surface in action. Surface is an interactive table top, it reminds me of a large iPhone made into a coffee table. Just like the iPhone, you gesture at the Surface screen to manipulate objects. Java, Groovy, and Flex also had a good showing. Below are conference notes from each of the sessions I was able to attend.

Microsoft Surface

Foothill College

Pizza Party

Technorati Tags: sv, codecamp, ms, azure, silverlight, xna, flex, flash, groovy, java, ria, javafx, ui, 3d, iphone

Destroying the Universe with XNA

TechKnow — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:11:42 +0000

Jason Mauer set out to destroy the universe with Microsoft XNA at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008. No, XNA is not a doomsday device from Microsoft. XNA can be a confusing term thanks to MSFT marketing, but in a nutshell it is a next generation game development platform for PC, XBox 360, and Zune. XNA, as an initiative, is set to develop and improve the game development ecosystem. XNA is a pseudo acronym, it doesn’t mean anything.

Prior to XNA, the game industry was seen as very sick, games where mainly sequels much like the movie industry. XNA is set out to revitalize and revolutionize the game industry for casual gamers, hobbyist, academia, etc. Games are supposed to be fun, it is not just about graphics, blockbuster, licensed content, first person shoot and bomb them ups. Goals of XNA is to become the ‘youtube’ of games without the lawsuits for copyright infringements.

This session covered some of the history and basics of XNA. At the end of the session, we did have some time to see some demos created by the XNA Creators Club.

Technorati Tags: xna, ms, xbox, zune, game, development, directx, opengl, graphics, codecamp

Silverlight 2.0 Made Easy

TechKnow — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:24:39 +0000

At this year’s Silicon Valley Codecamp, there was a large contingent of .NET evangelists in the speakers list. I attended yet another Silverlight presentation, this time given by Lino Tadros of Falafel Software. Most of the Microsoft technologist present at this years codecamp seem to be under heavy NDA, and they make it be known as if they are dropping names, to seem like they are in the know. What they don’t know is that I am also under NDA by the CIA.

The idea of Silverlight is to run an application natively on the client, on any browser, on any platform. It runs on macs, linux, and obviously windows. Silverlight is built on the same technology as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) such as .NET and XAML. XAML is a markup language used to separate, design, and develop UI components. Lino joked that “for a long time development tools did not understand that we developer can not design.” In addition to Visual Studio, Microsoft has made available Expression Blend. Expression Blend is a designer friendly application to create XAML application.

WPF, Silverlight and XAML in particular try to solve many issues of past UI frameworks such as WinForms and MFC. With XAML you can add any content to a button, not just a text label as in most other UI frameworks. The power of this is that the content can be anything, a video, a list, anything… If you want a list in a button, why not, it is 2008, we are supposed to be living in the future, so says Lino.

Instead of subclassing UI component classes to customize the UI, the new model is to use stylesheets and templates to customize the look and feel of your UI. With the Expression Blend you can simply draw new components, or redesign existing components without having to override a paint method.

Silverlight, in essence, is a subset of WPF. If you want a project to work for both Silverlight and WPF, start with a Silverlight project. Many assemblies available for WPF projects are not available in Silverlight.

A current reservation with developing your next application with Silverlight is the market penetration but recently Microsoft paid for all development costs to have CNN and NBC run content, such as the 2008 summer Olympics, on Silverlight so as to start a bandwagon for other development shops to jump on.

Technorati Tags: silverlight, windows, xaml, expression, vs, wpf, flash, flex

Windows Azure

TechKnow — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:50:34 +0000

Sriram Krishnan wanted to defrag the room, it was a jam packed house like a tin of binary sardines, all for a new color from Microsoft, Windows Azure. Sriram Krishnan of Microsoft spoke at the Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 on Microsoft’s new cloud computing initiative. From the onset Sriram warned the audience that the technology is nascent, if the demo breaks, his colleague, a technologist evangelist, had to do one push up for each demo that crashed.

A minute of the talk was devoted on how to pronounce azure and Sriram joked how middle management at Microsoft distributed WAV files with the correct pronunciation. After we all had our pronunciation down, Sriram reminded the audience that the hardest thing about web development is not the coding, it is provisioning equipment, keeping them up to date, maintained, and well oiled, setting up load balancers, databases, routers, security, updates and upgrades, etc. Cloud initiatives like Windows Azure and Google’s App Engine remove the system administrator from the startup equation. With Windows Azure you can create application running on Microsoft’s infrastructure.

Windows Azure seems fairly familiar to App Engine, except that Azure has a lot more tooling and utilities to help in development. As you can imagine, many of the tools available are based around Visual Studio.

Sriram said that many of the configuration of Windows Azure application are done in config files, he said “what we learned over several years is that the registry in the data center is an evil, evil thing.”

Even though Azure ware recently announced at PDC2008, the SDK is already available to play with.

Technorati Tags: windows, azure, cloud computing, appengine, google, ms, webdev

Silverlight 2.0: It Just Keeps Getting Better

TechKnow — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:14:56 +0000

Dave Britton of Vertigo was at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 and gave a presentation on Silverlight 2.0. Dave highlighted that there is a tight integration between ASP.NET and Silverlight. Silverlight also has rich tooling support with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend. Dave also recommended Silverlight Spy, you need to be using Silverlight Spy if you are doing any sort of Silverlight development. A large portion of the talk elaborated how to have multiple Silverlight components coordinate and communicate with each other via a Silverlight/HTML/JavaScript bridge. Also known as the bridge to nowhere. A debate erupted as to having on large Silverlight application versus multiple Silverlight applications working in cahoots in a single web page. The speakers main reason for breaking an application into separate pieces is for code and component reuse.

Some in the audience also questioned the speaker as to why to Silverlight instead of common and mature AJAX toolkits such as ASP.NET AJAX. Again the speaker had to defend Silverlight, this time totting Silverlight’s rich media support.

The speaker also demoed how to bind data to a table grid in Silverlight. After seeing Silverlight in action I thought it should have been called MS Flex. The parallel between Silverlight and Flash runs like the long tail.

Technorati Tags: silverlight, dotnet, flex, flash, ajax, webdev

Microsoft DreamSpark

TechKnow — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:16:42 +0000

Even thought I am a Windows user, I am no where near a Microsoft lackey but recently I learned that Microsoft is giving away a ton of professional grade software to students. Through the Microsoft DreamSpark program, students can get access to Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, Microsoft Expression Studio, XNA Studio, XNA Creators Club, SQL Server 2005, as well as other free software such as their express edition software. That is well over $1,500 of free software. I am typically not a Microsoft fanboy but I do have to give credit to Microsoft for making its development tools free of charge to students across the world. Now I wish Adobe would do the same.

Technorati Tags: microsft, dreamspark, xna, visual studio, windows, sql server, c#, adobe

Top Programming Books on Google Book Search

TechKnow — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:24:00 +0000

Here is an extensive list of top programming books available for preview on Google Books. Google Books provides scans of thousands of textbooks. The scans are not the best, most books have visible scan defects in them.

Even though the scans are not the best, there are some features that just work well. Just like Google Maps, where you can send a link to a map (with a set size, address, etc), with Google Books you can send a link to a specific page in a certain book with specific words highlighted. Google also has handy links such as the table of contents, popular passages, and where to buy the book (perhaps in a better quality PDF format).

All the books listed here have a ‘limited preview’, meaning that some pages are not available for viewing but for the most part you can browse through most the the book. Google Books does indicate the pages that are not available.

Java
The Java Language Specification
Effective Java Programming language
Java: The complete Reference
Java In A Nutshell
Head First Java

C/C++
Practical C++ Programming
C++ The Core Language
The Concurrent C Programming Language
C++ Primer Plus

.Net/C#
The C# Programming Language
The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language
Pro C# 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Platform
Learning Visual Basic .NET
VB.NET Language in a Nutshell

Python
Python in a Nutshell
Learning Python
Visual Quickstart Guide: Python
Python Pocket Reference
Python Cookbook

JavaScript/DOM
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and AJAX
The Book of JavaScript
The Complete Reference JavaScript
JavaScript Bible
DOM Scripting

Ruby/Rails
Ruby in a Nutshell
The Ruby Way
Beginning Ruby
Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy
Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce

PHP
PHP in a Nutshell
Programming PHP
PHP Cookbook
Learning PHP and MySQL
Learning PHP 5

Database
Visual Quickstart Guide: MySQL
MySQL Cookbook
MySQL in a Nutshell
MySQL Tutorial
Programming SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2005: Developer’s Guide
SQL Server 2005: A Beginner’s Guide
Beginning SQL Server 2005 Express

Technorati Tags: java, php, database, programming, language, .net, ruby, rails, google, book search, dom, javascript, python, vb

Top Technology Podcasts

TechKnow — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 16:29:14 +0000

In no particular order here is the list of of technology related podcasts that I frequently listen to.

Cranky Geeks – Not cranky enough, but John C. Dvorak and guest rant on latest technology news.
Diggnation – A weekly tech/web culture show based on the top stories on Digg.
Drunk and Retired – They are not as drunk as one would hope, but they do tend to go off on Rails, software development, and zombies.
Google Developer Podcast – Googlers talking about the latest Google APIs.
The Java Posse – The seminal Java podcast put out by Google, Sun, and Apple engineers, just hope they never have to pronounce your name.
.Net Rocks! – A weekly talk show for anyone interested in programming on the Microsoft .NET platform.
Railscasts – Free, and most importantly frequent, Ruby on Rails screencasts ranging from 5 to 10 minutes covering testing, migrations, controllers, and more.
WebDevRadio – This podcast covers web development news with the occasional interview with engineers working on projects with .NET, MySQL, PHP, etc.
Polymorphic Podcast – Insight into software development in the .NET platform along with interviews with industry luminaries.
Code Sermon – The podast somewhat preaches to the choir. This is a somewhat semi-weekly sermon on the virtues of software development best practices.
Killer Innovation – A podcast about creativity, innovation, and idea generation. This podcast will present ideas to think outside the box, or IDE.
Grails Podcast – Keeps you up to date about the latest Grails developments.
NetBeans Podcast – Hosted by Roman Strobl of Sun, this podcast has the occasional interview with NetBeans developers like Tor Norbye and Geertjan Wielenga.
Ask A Ninja – Every programmer needs a break between hacking sessions.
Rails Podcast – News and interviews about the Ruby language and the Rails framework.
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders – This podcast is put out by the Stanford business school. It usually has business leader share their experience.
Floss Weekly – Free/Libre Open Source Software might be free, but it is not timely.
Late Night Cocoa Podcast – Usually has hacking cocoa and API discussions and Cocoa practitioners, currently on summer hiatus.
TWiT – Leo Laporte and gang talk technology, unless they are reminiscing about their TechTV days or how to monetize ‘netcasts’.
Scoble Show – Robert Scoble talks with geeks, technologists, and developers.
GigaOm Show – Om Malik and Joyce Kim talk with entrepreneurs in the valley and run down some of the latest tech news.

If you feel I missed any other developer noteworthy podcast please let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: java, dotnet, .net, twit, cocoa, rails, rubyonrails, ror, oss, entrepreneurial, google, development, podcasts