Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello, and welcome to Developing Perspective.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is a near-daily podcast discussing what's new and interesting in iOS,

00:00:07 ◼   ► Apple, and related technologies.

00:00:09 ◼   ► I'm your host, David Smith, and I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.

00:00:14 ◼   ► This is episode 0.6.

00:00:17 ◼   ► Format of the show is pretty straightforward.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I'll walk through a couple of interesting links, have a general discussion.

00:00:22 ◼   ► The show will never be longer than 15 minutes.

00:00:24 ◼   ► Without further ado, let's get started.

00:00:26 ◼   ► I said today is July 20th, the day "Lion" came out.

00:00:30 ◼   ► We'll be getting to that a little bit later after I walk through the links.

00:00:34 ◼   ► First, a couple of links to get you started with today.

00:00:37 ◼   ► Yesterday, VBEdit 10 came out.

00:00:40 ◼   ► As you may remember from a couple of episodes ago, this is increasingly becoming the de-facto

00:00:46 ◼   ► text editor for programmers on Mac OS, as TextMate seems to have largely been abandoned

00:00:53 ◼   ► or at least is falling into disrepair.

00:00:55 ◼   ► BvEdit 10 comes with a variety of new stuff, though I would say the most important thing

00:01:00 ◼   ► that I saw is that it is finally compliant with Lion.

00:01:06 ◼   ► And so you can do things like full screen and a couple of related things, and so that's

00:01:11 ◼   ► great.

00:01:12 ◼   ► I recently finished installing Lion onto my machine from a clean install, and at this

00:01:17 ◼   ► point I have not installed TextMate.

00:01:19 ◼   ► I'm going to give it a try with BvEdit as my go-to text editor for a little while and

00:01:24 ◼   ► see what happens.

00:01:25 ◼   ► So definitely check that out.

00:01:28 ◼   ► Next article I have is a fascinating little piece from the Wall Street Journal about Google

00:01:33 ◼   ► and its early days.

00:01:35 ◼   ► It's basically a piece written by the employee number 59, Douglas Edwards.

00:01:41 ◼   ► It recently published a book about the early days at Google.

00:01:45 ◼   ► And this article is sort of some of the highlights of that.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Just a really interesting thing if you kind of get a sense of the culture back then and

00:01:53 ◼   ► And you can kind of see and understand some of where the company has become now.

00:01:58 ◼   ► So it's also interesting to check out.

00:02:01 ◼   ► Next is an interesting discussion that's been happening over on Stack Exchange.

00:02:05 ◼   ► And specifically this is talking about why companies don't buy developers the best hardware

00:02:11 ◼   ► they can.

00:02:13 ◼   ► And if you're a developer who works in a large company, I'm sure you've run into this.

00:02:16 ◼   ► There's this inevitable challenge within most IT shops that, "Well, we have a standard machine

00:02:23 ◼   ► this is how we do it and they give the same machine that they have to their sales guys,

00:02:27 ◼   ► to their developers. And I imagine if you're listening to this you're probably a developer

00:02:33 ◼   ► and if you are you're probably of the same mindset that I am that that's just foolish.

00:02:38 ◼   ► Developers should have as fast of a machine as is physically reasonable for their their job.

00:02:45 ◼   ► You'll almost certainly make the money back in terms of increases in productivity, retention,

00:02:51 ◼   ► those types of things, especially when you're considering that a brand new computer, for

00:02:56 ◼   ► example, every two years, maybe every three years, but say brand new top end computer

00:03:01 ◼   ► every two years, you're talking about probably something like $1,500 to $2,000 a year, which

00:03:07 ◼   ► given the cost of a high level employee is probably well over $100,000, if not $150,000

00:03:13 ◼   ► a year, that's a bargain to keep them happy, to keep them engaged and ready to go.

00:03:20 ◼   ► So that's just an interesting article to look through there.

00:03:22 ◼   ► There's just a lot of back and forth, which might be fun.

00:03:26 ◼   ► And our last link that we're going to talk about today is there's an interesting article

00:03:30 ◼   ► in Ars Technica that came out before the big Syracuse article today, seven under the radar

00:03:37 ◼   ► line features you may have missed.

00:03:39 ◼   ► If you're going to read the whole article over by John Siracusa, you probably don't

00:03:44 ◼   ► need to read this, but if you want some of the highlights, it's an interesting place

00:03:47 ◼   ► to look.

00:03:48 ◼   ► Alright, today's going to be a little bit different than normal because we had two absolutely

00:03:53 ◼   ► major stories today that I need to spend a lot of time talking about.

00:03:58 ◼   ► The first is yesterday Apple renounced its third quarter results.

00:04:03 ◼   ► So this is Q3 2011 results.

00:04:07 ◼   ► And as you would imagine or as you may have guessed, they were again record – blowing

00:04:15 ◼   ► records and doing amazing things.

00:04:17 ◼   ► So they posted a record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion and a net profit of $7.31

00:04:25 ◼   ► billion, which is an absurd amount of money considering that every quarter, I think for

00:04:30 ◼   ► a while now, they've set records for the revenue and income.

00:04:33 ◼   ► And especially when you consider this is not a holiday quarter.

00:04:37 ◼   ► This is essentially June, May and April.

00:04:42 ◼   ► So not exactly the usual time when consumers are buying lots of things.

00:04:48 ◼   ► The company sold about 20 million iPhones during that quarter, 9.25 million iPads.

00:04:57 ◼   ► And the only thing that went down was iPods, which is hardly expected considering the number

00:05:04 ◼   ► of iPhones that they sold.

00:05:07 ◼   ► I think I remember the COO talking about how they sold roughly 33 million iOS devices in

00:05:17 ◼   ► the quarter, which if you work it out is about 4.2 sales per second of iOS devices.

00:05:25 ◼   ► That's a user who's either upgrading or purchasing for the first time their iOS device, which

00:05:30 ◼   ► is as an iOS developer, that is an absurd number.

00:05:34 ◼   ► The number of new customers and perhaps even better, the customers who are upgrading and

00:05:37 ◼   ► allowing me to do more and more with new higher performance devices is just astonishing.

00:05:44 ◼   ► Just for a little bit of context on that, the global birth rate, so the number of children

00:05:48 ◼   ► born every second, is about 4.28.

00:05:53 ◼   ► So it's only slightly more people are born every second than are buying an iOS device,

00:05:57 ◼   ► which is quite remarkable.

00:05:58 ◼   ► I'll have a link in the show notes about if you want to get all the details and the nitty-gritty

00:06:03 ◼   ► of it, but those are some of the highlights.

00:06:05 ◼   ► Essentially as an iOS developer, as an Apple developer, the Apple ecosystem is doing well.

00:06:11 ◼   ► Apple has lots of money and is doing good things with it.

00:06:14 ◼   ► My last little sort of footnote that I thought was a fascinating thing that Simco pulled

00:06:20 ◼   ► out is that Apple's R&D as a percent of sales is now at a record low of 2.2%.

00:06:29 ◼   ► So if you imagine that that's all they're spending to accomplish all the amazing technologies

00:06:34 ◼   ► and hardware and all kinds of things that they're developing, using only 2.2% of their

00:06:40 ◼   ► sales in order to drive that innovation.

00:06:43 ◼   ► And that is quite impressive.

00:06:45 ◼   ► All right.

00:06:47 ◼   ► And the second part of today's discussion is, of course, I'm going to talk about Lion.

00:06:51 ◼   ► Lion came out at about 8.45 Eastern Time today.

00:06:55 ◼   ► And there's the usual stampede to go get it, to download it, to make sure everything,

00:07:02 ◼   ► make sure you can get the latest build.

00:07:04 ◼   ► It appears that the build is the exact same as the gold master that was published to the

00:07:09 ◼   ► Mac developer's portal a couple weeks ago.

00:07:12 ◼   ► So in fact it was a true gold master.

00:07:15 ◼   ► So in case you're wondering if Apple was still having those challenges with, like we did

00:07:20 ◼   ► with Xcode 4 where we had three gold masters, this was in fact the gold master.

00:07:25 ◼   ► So good news there.

00:07:28 ◼   ► I think I'd mentioned a couple episodes ago,

00:07:31 ◼   ► I was going to do a clean install for myself

00:07:34 ◼   ► for this build.

00:07:35 ◼   ► And so I blanked my main boot drive, installed Lion,

00:07:40 ◼   ► and have been merrily installing applications so far.

00:07:43 ◼   ► So far, I'd say it's fantastic.

00:07:44 ◼   ► It has a series of small changes that I

00:07:48 ◼   ► think make a lot of difference.

00:07:49 ◼   ► I really like full screen editing.

00:07:51 ◼   ► I really like the new mission control.

00:07:54 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to hopefully using FileVault 2,

00:07:57 ◼   ► assuming that the performance for it is up to snuff.

00:08:01 ◼   ► If it is, I think that would be a fantastic thing.

00:08:04 ◼   ► I've often wondered and worried about some of the data

00:08:08 ◼   ► that I store on my machine, especially considering

00:08:10 ◼   ► that data is my lifeblood.

00:08:12 ◼   ► That's how I make my money for my apps.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And so its security is vital to me.

00:08:17 ◼   ► So I'm looking forward to that.

00:08:19 ◼   ► If you're looking for probably the best walkthrough of that,

00:08:23 ◼   ► There's no better place than to read John Surakusa's Mac OS 10.7 Lion review.

00:08:30 ◼   ► This is over on Arshteknica.

00:08:32 ◼   ► If you at all follow his show on 5x5, Hypercritical, you've probably been looking forward to this

00:08:37 ◼   ► for quite some time.

00:08:39 ◼   ► And I've read probably the first third of it at this point, and it doesn't disappoint.

00:08:43 ◼   ► If you want really good, detailed, in-depth discussion of what's happening in Lion, what's

00:08:48 ◼   ► new, things you may not have noticed or picked up on, that's definitely the place to go.

00:08:53 ◼   ► And one other thing that I would mention about Lion that I thought was kind of interesting

00:08:59 ◼   ► is they have now started, it seems, distributing the release builds of Xcode via the Mac App Store

00:09:06 ◼   ► rather than necessarily through the dev portal.

00:09:09 ◼   ► As of right now, so as of about 12/38 on July 20th, at this point the Xcode 4.1,

00:09:16 ◼   ► which is the current shipping version of Xcode that you would use to submit apps to the App Store,

00:09:21 ◼   ► as opposed to Xcode 4.2, which is what you would use if you were going to play with iOS 5,

00:09:27 ◼   ► is only available through the Mac App Store for free. Xcode used to be available as a $5

00:09:34 ◼   ► purchase. It is now free for anybody to go and download and use. And if that is in fact the case

00:09:41 ◼   ► for how they're going to be distributing it in the future, that's just an interesting thing to see how

00:09:45 ◼   ► they're gradually moving more and more towards the Mac App Store as the primary

00:09:49 ◼   ► and main way in which apps are distributed to users, including developers.

00:09:55 ◼   ► Alright, well that's about it. I'm going to get back to merrily installing

00:10:00 ◼   ► applications on Lion, getting set up with that, and like I said, enjoy Lion Day, have

00:10:06 ◼   ► fun, and I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye.