Thoughts and Commentary
Steve Jobs keeps calling the iPad "Magical". While a lot of marketing hype and buzzword bingo is always a part of Apple presentations, there is something to be said for the iPad. Not so much that it's magical by it's creation, but by what it makes possible through the ingenuity of other developers. Through the applications for the iPad that have helped my productivity, I've gone from buyer's remorse to vindicated fanboy!
Apple recently introduced iPhone OS 4.0 at a media event showcasing some of their upcoming mobile technology. Being in the developer program, I have the new OS on my phone and wanted to share some of my initial thoughts regarding the new OS and how it performs, behaves and otherwise looks on the iPhone 3G. (Note: I do not have an iPhone 3GS).
About two months ago, I began investigating the finer points of iPhone and mobile device application development.
I was reading an article on one of my favorite blogs, Coding Horror and came across this article which has caused me a bit of conflict. At the heart of the matter is the philosophy of shipping software and the topic raised a very important question: Is it better to ship unfinished software on time, or deliver a "perfect" product significantly late.
I started looking through some of the old Myth series archives today. Mostly looking through the tool we refined and polished up to edit Myth III game content. I even dug out the old iBook laptop (366mhz clamshell) to see if I could get the last committed revisions of the tool to build - and sure enough, everything built right out of the box. This is giving me a little bit of fire to do some of the things I've been wanting to do with Myth for a long time, but lost both time and interest in several years ago.
This week a friend of mine at work turned me onto a new web-based service that aids you in tracking the time spent working on projects. Cashboard (www.getcashboard.com) is a service that lets you download a small application (or in my case, a Mac OS X widget) that I can use to start and stop a clock and assign the resulting hours to a client, project and task. It's not free, but it's not expensive either. I signed up for the $12 a month service which gives me the ability to track up to seven projects at once.
While doing some research for one of my classes at Kaplan, I came across the following article cached in Google's search engine. Since the page is no longer available and will likely be de-indexed over time, I have decided to re-print the information/research here.
The research is on the history of programming languages and presents some information that is cited and not part of what is in the current Wikipedia entry on the same topic. The researcher's name is Andrew Ferguson who I am assuming did this research while a student at Princeton University.


