Tag: Cocoa

The product I want to see next week at WWDC – Apple TV 2014

Whoa! Hey!

Apple’s amazing World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) starts next Monday June 2  in San Francisco.  As a geek, it is truly an amazing week and the pinnacle pilgrimage for most of my Apple loving colleagues to attend.  I am quite thankful to have been one of the lucky 5000 that attended the last three years and have thoroughly enjoyed the time with fellow developers, the terrific product introductions, the excellent sessions, and the delicious seafood and biking within the beautiful city of San Francisco!   I have seen tremendous progress in developer tools.  I was there for Steve’s last keynote and introduction of iCloud.  We were there to see the introductions of iOS 5, iOS 6, iOS 7 and some of my favorite OS X updates including multi-touch gesture support, the fantastic magic trackpad, and AirPlay.  I even saw the Alex Skolnick Trio ditch real amps and jam thru an iPad in a nearby hotel lobby.  Yes, they were three fantastic years!

Sadly, I will not be boarding a plane this weekend.  I will not be biking the bridge and sniff sniff I will not be getting up at the crack of dawn this year to join the long line of fellow geeks eagerly waiting the infamous 10am Monday morning Keynote.  I do vow to return next year but for next week I will be watching every move and every announcement from our office in Ohio.  I will be sitting on the edge of my seat, streaming the live stream  with much anticipation and excitement.  Why?  Because I hope (and if you know me, you know I have been ranting about this for almost 2 years) that in these 90 minutes of product announcement euphoria we will finally see my dreams of the new Apple TV, SDK, and App Store come to fruition.   This is all of course in blunt ignorant defiance of the several recent rumors to the contrary.

Here are the simple and rather modest specs of my dream machine!

Note this picture is from my 720p model and yes I know I need to dust!photo-1-768x1024

Introducing!  The 2014 AppleTV set top box –

  • Design – no change
  • Memory –  32GB
  • Processor –  A7
  • Runs iOS 8
  • Proudly introducing the new App Store for AppleTV – finally play your latest candy crushing, zombie eating, farm animal game here!
  • 802.11ac (might as well update the Airport Express too or better yet just integrate it)
  • Price – $99

So there you have it.  I am not asking for too much!  Amazon has the Fire TV, Google is working on iteration x of y, and Roku yeah…  If you agree that this would be a splendid addition to Apple’s existing lineup, how about a RT, +1, shoutout, hell yeah, or whatever!

For those heading to dub dub next week, enjoy a truly stellar week! Please take at least some time to see the beautiful city and safe travels my friends!

 

Day 3 at the ranch – Development is exciting again! Bezier Curves, FFTs, Matrices oh my!

Time for my end of day ponderings for day 3 at the Big Nerd Ranch.

I thought about this a bit yesterday but today it really struck me.  This class and really the power that the iOS framework provides really taps into every major point of interest I have in software development and technology.  I have not gotten to think about some of the concepts we have discussed here since my days studying electrical engineering at UC or my time at ITI working with graphics modeling and Open Inventor.  For me, this week has truly been a wonderous trip down memory lane.  I feel like I am in the Land of Oz.  Thanks to the instructors – Jonathon Blocksom, Jonathon Saggau, and Michael Ward for that trip!

While we have covered the Cocoa frameworks in a broad, sweeping sense, the Jon’s and Mikey have added interesting historical viewpoints and perspectives.  Bezier curves and surface normals take me back to fond memories struggling with the challenges of writing CAD/CAM data translation software and 3D model viewers.  Those days were really the most challenging and fun in my career and while I still have fun today, I miss some of that excitement!  I left the engineering software realm  to go into corporate IT web development many years ago.  Now with my present focus on mobile development and the driving market forces of the day I find that I may be ready to go full circle.

How and why?  Demands for advancement in software development in the corporate IT field used to drudge along – typically held back by operations and security teams not wanting to move forward so as to protect things the way they are.  With so many people now owning iPhones, iPads, and Android devices consumer expectations towards technology and above all the user experience has totally changed.  This demand will drive us in the IT field to do better! The boring days of Windows and the status quo are thankfully over!  Note this is an opinion piece and certainly I am sure some of you have a different one.  Regardless, it is my belief that the opportunity to develop really cool, engaging, and challenging apps will now be forced upon every business entity or the consumers will simply move somewhere else.  So to the simple, boring, 1980s style web forms and ugly web pages of the 90s I bid you adieu.  To developers without passion, you are going to miss out on a lot of fun!

Today one Jonathan led us thru the power of OpenGL ES and GLKit.  Yes I know OpenGL has been around for years, but most developers have never had to worry about it.  Unless you are writing video games why would you care?  Again, I can see a lot of people caring about this a whole bunch as we are forced to develop solutions that become more engrossing and more 3D.  Good grief Dominoes Pizza even has a game now.  I have been looking forward to a business need to get back to 3D development and this is it!

FFTs?  What is that?  Fast Fourier Transforms are something I haven’t looked at since my Signals and Systems class at UC.  I use pitch shifting (just one of many uses for FFTs) quite a bit as a musician but never had the chance to work on incorporating that into a development project until yesterday.  Again, it was great to have this discussion appear in the class.  The possibility and capability afforded by today’s consumer grade hardware is truly astounding!

More than anything this week I have began to appreciate the parallels at the technical level between two of my favorite things – audio (MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC!) and video and the power that Apple’s collection of frameworks has given today’s developer to create new things using both.  The mathematics using linear algebra, modifications with filter chaining, and low level patterns for hardware acceleration are common to both.  I haven’t been this energized about development for many, many years!  It was pretty hard to get excited about SOAP and EJBs.  Yesterday I tweeted that I had spent more time in this computer lab than any other time since college and I have truly enjoyed every minute of it.

The one sad note for the day…  It rained so unfortunately no afternoon hike and thus no new pictures.