Pro Apps
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Pro apps suck. I wish they didn't.
Apple would never ship an app that looked and worked as bad as Final Cut that they expect normal people to use. Why is it okay if it's a "Pro App"?
How To Learn Rails
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A lot of people ask me how to learn Ruby on Rails. I usually forward this email I wrote awhile back to a friend. I figured it would probably be better to post it on my blog so more people can benefit from it.
Here's the email:
Hey man,
Rails is awesome. If you're not familiar with Ruby, I'd recommend getting acquainted with it first. I spend 2 hours reading a PDF online and then jumped in. The more you understand Ruby, the less magical Rails seems. The Ruby Programming Language is a great book. Matz (the creator of Ruby) is one of the authors. A lot of it is like "this is they way it is because when I designed it I though this". I liked it a lot.
The Poignant Guide is another really popular way to learn Ruby. There's a bit of history to it, but nevermind that for now.
Once you feel semi comfortable with Ruby (i.e. you can make a class that has methods, inheritance, control structures, etc), watch this 15 minute video. It will blow your mind. My next step was going back through it and trying to build it myself. This was really hard at first cause I had no idea what I was doing and didn't understand the syntax yet. Don't worry.
Try to write something simple in Rails. Maybe a blog or to do manager, etc. I learn by doing. This was the best for me. I've rewritten my blog at least 20 times. (By the way, it's open source on GitHub.)
The best resource I've found is Railscasts.com. They are really well done. Pretty much anything you could want to do, he has already covered. After I got several under my belt, I sorta "got it" and started really understanding what I was writing. #carlhuda on freenode (IRC channel) was also super helpful. @wycats (he's on the core team of Rails and jQuery) is in there and he's really great about helping new comers and teaching you stuff.
Ruby5 is also really great. It's a biweekly 5 minute podcast about news in the Ruby and Rails community. I've found lots of great stuff there.
Let me know if you need any help or have questions. I'd be happy to help.
Sam
Hello Internet: Old Spice Guy & Retweet Contests
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I had a lot of ideas for my Hello Internet series, so I'm going to do one a day until I run out or get busy.
Thoughts on the @oldspice videos and retweet contests.
Hello Internet: iPhone 4
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So I have a lot of thoughts on various topics. I was joking with someone that I should start making videos for all of my rants... so I did. I'm going to call these videos Hello Internet. I'll be super biased and slightly arrogant because I am the most awesome person ever.
Thoughts on the iPhone 4 antenna debacle.
Archiving Objective-C Objects with NSCoding
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For the seasoned Cocoa developer, this is a piece of cake. For newer developers, this can be a real pain, especially if you don't know what you're looking for. I get this question a decent amount, so I figured I'd put a quick guide together.
You can't put just any object in a plist. This mainly gets people when they want to put something into NSUserDefaults and get an error (because NSUserDefaults archives to a plist under the hood).
Plists only support the core types: NSString, NSNumber, NSDate, NSData, NSArray, NSDictionary (and their CF buddies thanks to the toll-free bridge). The key here is NSData. You can convert any object to NSData with the NSCoding protocol.