Show 0.5
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Hello, and welcome to Developing Perspective.
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Developing Perspective is a near-daily podcast discussing what's new and interesting in iOS,
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Apple, and related technologies.
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I'm your host, David Smith.
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I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.
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Today is July 19th, and this is show 0.5.
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The format of Developing Perspective is that I'll cover a handful of links and articles
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and other things that I found interesting in roughly the last 24 hours, and then I'll
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on to a more general discussion. The show will never be more than 15 minutes. Let's
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get to it. So to start off today, I'm going to do a great article over on Sean Blanc's
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website discussing reading on the iPad. If you own an iPad, which if you listen to this
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I'm sure you do, he's probably one of the biggest and most enjoyable uses for it. It's
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a great form factor for it, and its size, weight, and general characteristics closely
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mirror that of a traditional book or magazine.
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However, it's not without its challenges
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and Sean walks through a lot of those challenges and specifically focusing
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on what are some of the challenges that
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we see from the actual magazine and content industry itself.
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If you're like me reading in
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Something like iBooks, Kindle, Instapaper, those types of applications is great,
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but if you ever try and read something in Wired or another traditional large form factor,
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or I guess traditional media, there's a whole range of challenges and problems that you have.
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A non-selectable text, giant, download size, non-reflowable,
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all kinds of things which are just awful.
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So, something worth checking out.
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Our second link this morning is going to be just an article over on the Flurry site.
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Flurry, if you're not familiar with them, is an analytics company
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that lets you track user activity inside your application.
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They're cross-platform and in this particular article, what's interesting is they have the ability
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to see and by proxy identify roughly how many new projects are being started
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on the various platforms, iPad, iPhone, and Android.
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And they have a little chart where you can see
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that with the Verizon iPhone coming out as well as the iPad 2
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in Q2 of 2011, and this is through July 30th of this year,
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the percentage of new projects starts.
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So this is developers coming into their system and saying,
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"Hey, we'd like to start a new project."
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of those being Android dropped from 36% to 28%
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with that difference being made up by both iPhone,
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iPod Touch and iPad primarily.
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So it's just sort of another indication that iOS
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and iPad are doing very, very well.
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The next article I have is an article written about designing
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and creating the new GitHub for Mac application.
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This is an application, if you're not familiar,
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that acts as a native client for interacting
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with your GitHub repositories, all from your Mac.
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It was created by GitHub for that purpose.
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And if you're curious at all about how to thoughtfully
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design a Mac application and also
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to get a bit of a flavor for how this process works.
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It's just a really good walkthrough.
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I highly recommend it.
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He talks-- pulls out some of the challenges
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that anyone is coming from, especially an iOS background has
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when moving to the Mac where you start seeing all
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of these just complications and challenges and where you end
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up with most of your application being the set
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of spliced Photoshop mockups and things like that.
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It's a really good walkthrough and highly recommended.
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Next, I have an article from the Atlantic.
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And this is just a sort of more of a sidebar article.
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But it's about the challenges and nature
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of Google's famous cafeterias.
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So Google famously provides 24 hours a day food
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for free for all of its employees at its main campuses.
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And some of the challenges that they're talking about here,
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which are relevant for most developers, are some
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of the health and related challenges of providing
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that amount of good quality food 24 hours a day for free.
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And some of the interesting things they do,
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they have a color coding system to identify
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which foods you can have a lot of,
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which ones you should stay away from.
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And interestingly, they also have apparently some vending machines
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in certain places within the campus.
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And these are priced based on roughly their health.
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So for example, there's one cent per gram of sugar,
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two cents per gram of fat, four cents per gram of saturated fat,
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and one dollar per gram of trans fat, which is just kind
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of interesting and not a way to do it.
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So if you ever thought about working at Google or just think
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about health and the developer lifestyle.
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It's worth checking out.
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Next, I was going to-- there's a fantastic pair of articles.
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And you may remember a couple of the episodes ago I talked
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about a diagram of the iPhone home button.
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Lucas Mathis over on Ignore the Code has a great pair
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of articles talking about some of the challenges
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of the iPhone's home button.
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And then he has a follow up talking about back buttons.
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And that is primarily focused on Android and its back button
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and the various challenges that you have there.
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If you're not familiar with Lucas, he is a--
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I guess you could call him a usability expert.
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And so he-- his perspective and the way that he talks
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about it is just very, very in-depth, very, very useful
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and kind of made me think a lot about how this--
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so sort of-- something as simple as the home button,
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something as simple as the back button.
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And from a usability perspective,
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how that could actually be very, very challenging.
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The last thing I'm going to talk about today is--
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for our main topic, is I'm going to talk a little bit
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about rumors.
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If you're at all involved in the Apple, Mac, iOS, any of those types of fields,
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you know that the last couple of weeks has been shock full of rumors.
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At first it was about, oh, are there going to be new Mac Pros coming out?
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Are there going to be new iMacs?
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Are there going to be-- sorry, not new iMacs, new Mac Minis, new MacBook Airs?
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Are they going to have an iPad HD, an iPad Pro, when's the line coming out?
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I think that I've just been struck by recently and increasingly it's just a filter that I put
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on all of the content I read is all of this rumor mongering is just a huge waste of time.
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And mostly I say that not because it in and of itself is problematic
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to have people whose job it is to speculate and to try and work that out.
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If you're a stock analyst or something like that, a day trader,
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that's actually very interesting, useful information.
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But for someone who actually consumes that, I've found myself having to catch myself
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from getting too wrapped up in that.
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And it's just wasting time on something that is by its very nature useless,
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Knowing that there's a chance that something may or may not come
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out at some time maybe in the future is rarely helpful.
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Maybe if you're in the market to buy a MacBook Air, it's helpful insofar
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as to say this is not a good time to buy a new one if you can wait
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because there's a likelihood that a new one is coming out.
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But in general, it's just not worth your time.
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It reminds me a lot of Christmas morning, in fact, and I remember this last WWDC,
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for about the last day or two before the keynote, I intentionally just sort
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of stopped following the news because what I really didn't want is for it to spoil the surprise,
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to spoil the fun of learning and discovering what it is that is coming out.
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And I would just generally encourage everyone to do the same and try and stay away
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from MacRumors, AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, the Boy Genius Report, all of these sites
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which make their money just by constantly saying something.
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And these claims are typically sensational and blown out or derived from all
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from the same material but are made to sound like it's new information
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and all those kinds of things.
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So just something I've been thinking about
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is we have just been so inundated with rumors.
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Things will come out when they come out.
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Enjoy the carefully crafted marketing, timing, and presentation
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that inevitably will be part of that.
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And be patient.
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That's today's show.
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Again, this is the end of, say, July 19th, Tuesday.
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Maybe Matt Lyon will come out.
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It doesn't matter.
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Anyway, I'll be talking to you tomorrow.
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I think some things to look forward to.
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I believe Apple's earnings will come out today and a few other things that should be kind
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of fun to talk about tomorrow.
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Till then, happy coding.
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Have a good day.