Blocks on iPhone

I really do no need to start writing, but just one more thing that came out of last Thursday's meetup. We talked a little about when some of the cool Snow Leopard features like Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch might be coming to the iPhone.

Again, I'm purely speculating, but I think we will see blocks sooner rather than later, maybe in iPhone SDK 3.5. Grand Central Dispatch is harder to predict. Although there is some value in it now, since the iPhone has two processors - a CPU and a GPU - the real power of GCD comes with even more processing cores, and I have no idea if or when we'll get a multi-core iPhone.

But, blocks? Blocks on the iPhone would be cool, and you know what? You don't have to wait.

Sure, by using this, you don't get block support in the Foundation and UIKit classes, but you do get blocks, and you can always create categories to add block-based methods to existing classes, so you might want to check it out.

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On iPhone Competitors

At the New York City iPhone Meetup last week, Steve Kochan and I were tasked with talking about the future of the iPhone and the iPhone SDK. I'm not sure either of us were particularly qualified to speak on that. I'm not being modest; I'm not sure anybody outside of One Infinite Loop is qualified to speak about that, and anybody who is qualified is almost certainly not allowed to speak about it. But everybody's got ideas of where things should go and where they might go, so we talked for a little while about some of the things we might see in a hypothetical iPhone SDK 4 or in the next generation of iPhone OS devices.

First of all, I hope nobody took anything I said as gospel. Although I do know a small handful of people inside Apple, none of them are close enough friends that they'd be willing to risk their jobs by giving me secret information, and if any of them did give me secret information, I wouldn't stand up in front of a group of people and spill that secret. I do NOT know what will be coming out when. I don't know if there will be a tablet, or what it will look like. As far as hardware is concerned, I don't know what the future holds at all, and as far as software is concerned, I don't know all that much that hasn't already been made public. I don't know that we'll get garbage collection or, at least, I don't know when we'll get it. I know Apple is capable of delivering a tablet. I highly suspect that they've prototyped several ideas, but Apple prototypes lots of ideas that are never turned into actual products. I know that there are indications of a move toward a completely resolution independent OS, but that's not a secret. Apple has been moving that way for quite some time in the Mac OS, since even before the iPhone OS was forked off.

So, just for the record, anything I said last Thursday night was pure speculation. Do not buy stock based on it, or spread anything I said as if it came from somebody who actually knows something.

And with that out of the way, I noticed that John Gruber has tackled one topic we discussed at the end of the night, which has to do with challengers to the iPhone throne. John's specifically speaking to the Android platform in his posting while we were talking about a handful of platforms, including Palm, RIM, Android, and Microsoft, but a lot of what he says echos what I said during that discussion. And John has a much, much better track record than I do with regard to making predictions about technology and specifically about Apple, so for that part of the discussion, at least, I feel like I was on fairly solid ground.

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Workshop Done

I am back home, at my desk for the first time since last Thursday.

The workshop went pretty well. Being the first time I had taught a class of that length, it was a bit stressful. It ended up being even more stressful than I had anticipated. A combination of a really, really bright group of students, and the fact that we provided the exercises in digital rather than printed form, meant that exercises that should have taken an hour, often took fifteen minutes. Because they were smart students, they absorbed material quickly, and because the instructions were provided digitally, they were able to copy and paste the code portions of the instructions, which is not only faster than having to type in the code, but it also has a considerably lower possibility for making mistakes. Frankly, we learn a lot more from making mistakes, than we do from having things work right the first time.

For the future, I will probably use printed exercises. I think the way most people learn, something that can be copied and pasted bypasses the type of brain processing that moves stuff from short-term memory to long-term memory. Now, I'm no psychologist, so I could be making it up, but I know that in my personal experience, when I've been able to just copy and past and then tweak somebody else's code rather than figure it out myself, the next time I needed to do it, I didn't really remember it.

All things considered, though, I felt like it went pretty well and I hope the students felt it was valuable and worth attending. I did run out of steam toward the end of the day Sunday, having only gotten about two hours of sleep each of the two previous nights (thank Dog for caffeine!), but we covered a lot more material than I ever anticipated over the course of three days. I think that the Keynote presentation I have right now is more honestly a week's worth of material for a more typical classes working from printed exercises.

Now of course, I'm scrambling to catch up even more than I was before. My inbox has really piled up, and I'm even further behind on the book. On top of that, our annual family vacation is coming up next week, so you probably won't see a long tutorial post for the next two weeks.

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Boot Camp Imminent

Well, it's not just under 48 hours until I teach my first workshop. I'm a little harried right now. I'm comfortable teaching and speaking in front of groups, but I've never taught anything of this scope before, so I underestimated the prep time involved. I haven't slept much this week, and the situation doesn't look like it'll get much better before Friday.

If you e-mail me, IM, or tweet me in the next few days, please don't be offended if you don't get a response. I will try to catch up after the weekend and will be responding only to urgent e-mails in the meantime. I'm going to be mostly shutting out the world in an effort to get everything done and make sure that I'm satisfied with the workshop materials.

Despite the stress, I'm actually very happy with what I've gotten done so far. I think I'm really starting to understand what makes iPhone programming hard for both new programmers and experienced programmers coming from other languages. I guess we'll find out in a few days if I'm right about that, though.

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The best new software for your PDA/Smartphone

Here is a short review of software to help make practicing medicine a little easier.

Includes a review of device characteristics:

Android,Apple,BlackBerry,Palm,Symbian,Windows, memory issues, input methods, WiFi, 3G and EHR integration.

Includes products from:

AAP,AAFP,ACP,Epocrates,Johns Hopkins, Merck,Skyscape, UpToDate. SV

Medical Economics Article

Modern Medicine Podcast

Related Article: Consumer Health Applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch

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OpenGL ES Update

I know there's probably one or two people out there who would like to see another entry in the OpenGL ES from the Ground Up series.

The good news is, I started one a while back, right after WWDC. It's a fairly extensive introduction to OpenGL ES 2.0 and shaders.

The bad news is, I have no idea when I'll have time to finish it. I'm behind on writing the next book, plus I'm frantically trying to get ready for the iPhone Boot Camp NYC this weekend (boy, that snuck up on me). I will finish it at some point, though.

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My Last Word on Dot Notation

The dot notation discussion has taken far more of my time lately than it was wise for me to spend. I've said pretty much all that I need to say on the topic at this point. I don't care if you use it, just don't tell me I'm wrong for doing so.

Just for the record, I was horribly opposed to Objective-C's dot notation when it first came on the scene. i had programmed in both C++ and Java over the years, but I much preferred Objective-C, and I saw dot notation as being a step backwards and a really bad idea for a number of reasons.

For the book, Dave and I decided we were going to follow Apple's lead when it came to coding style and coding conventions, so I bit the bullet and started using properties for the book exercises. Now that I've used them regularly for about a year and a half, I have completely changed my opinion, and I'm pretty sure a lot of my original issues with dot notation were just rationalizations of my own resistance to change.

Arguing theory has only so much merit. In practice, with a little thought and understanding, properties and dot notation work well and can be used to make code considerably more readable and faster to write. If you haven't spent some real quality time using them - if you are arguing only from language theory - then you need to spend some time with them before you condemn them further.

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