When asked, “Hi. I am learning to program and I was wondering what do y’all do at work on a daily basis? I want to get an idea of what a job will be like so I can focus my attention on those areas”
This gif springs to mind with regard to engineering jobs:
For management, well, we have…
I spent a good deal of today fixing and updating some personal apps that I use for creating other software and for writing books. Occasionally I fix these up and put them on the store for friends. Most of the time, they end up joining the gadzillions of others in my app folder.
Today, I thought I’d revisit a few of these and just see if they struck a note with anyone.
I have a hate-love-hate-hate relationship with Notes. I love that Notes is built into both iOS and OS X and that it automatically syncs between devices and my home computer. I hate that individual notes constantly clone themselves into a dozen nearly identical versions of the same information. Apple does a terrible job in resolving conflicted edits. It also has a nasty tendency to entirely lose stuff. Life lesson learned: If it’s important, email it, don’t note it.
Plenty of room in the WWDC calendar this year for various Dev Tool topics. The 5 announced Swift sessions (Improving Apps, Protocol Programming, Optimization, Profiling, and Value Types) all sound exciting, but there are also (if I’m counting correctly) 9 other slots, which I hope have details of Xcode 7, Swift 2, and Better-IB-that-finally-works-smart.
There are 4 “Featured” slots in addition to the Platforms SOTU and the keynote, all on Tuesday. Any ideas?
Finally, what’s interesting to me about the “What’s new” talks is the one that seems to be missing: “What’s new in Cocoa Touch” What’s up with that? Last year there were 15 What’s New topics, of which one (What’s new in Xcode 6) used a spoiler-ish version number.
Pardon me, sir, your Ref is showing. Here are five important things you might not know about using Core Foundation in Swift.
Swift remaps type names to ignore the dangling “Ref”. In Swift, all classes are actually reference types and the suffix isn’t needed.
Apple writes: “When Swift imports Core Foundation types, the compiler remaps the names of these types. The compiler removes Ref from the end of each type name because all Swift classes are reference types, therefore the suffix is redundant.”
Jeff Kelley’s new book is short. How short? Under a hundred pages short. That’s because it’s part of Pragmatic Programmer’s new Pragmatic exPress series. Developing for the Apple Watch ($11 Ebook $17 Paper, $27 Combo) offers exactly what it says on the label, a quick, focused take on Watch development.
With only 100 pages to worry about, this is a terrific series for getting information to the market quickly and effectively. I love how Pragmatic is pivoting to handle Apple’s quick-change reality.
I was recently discussing ads on IRC with some fellow developers. In many ways, ads currently form more a barrier that can be removed with IAP than a revenue stream in and of themselves. They’re commonly a gateway for try-than-buy. Could there be another approach?