Trails Challenge 2009

EBRPD is celebrating its 75th Anniversary and has partnered with Kaiser Permanente and the Regional Parks Foundation to make the Trails Challenge program free* for everyone (while supplies last). In an effort to go “green,” this year’s program will be hosted completely online. Register to receive the 2009 guidebook filled with 20 of the best hikes in the Regional Parks, an organic T-shirt, and commemorative pin for those who complete the challenge.

Sign up and Get Out There. See you on the trails!

My unscientific survey in the library today yielded the following numbers:

That breaks down to 60% Apple, 40% Microsoft.

Now that’s what I like to see! Maybe the recent discussion on the macsb about Mac market share isn’t so far fetched after all. Here are a few interesting links:

• Mac OS X Market Share
• Mac Market Share to Double in Three Years

Who knows if this is all true or not. With the recent announcement that Steve Jobs will be taking a six month leave of absense from Apple due to health concerns the future for Apple is less clear than it once was. I’m sure Apple will do just fine over the next 12-18 months since there are a number of products already in development. The big concern has to be about the sort of innovations that Apple can concieve of and execute on after the current pipeline runs dry. Will there be other folks at Apple with the same vision and forsight as Steve Jobs? Probably, but it is far from certain.

Atleast for now it seems like the market share for Apple will continue to climb. Microsoft will have to hit a home run with the new Windows 7 operating system if they want to fend off the onslaught of Mac OS X. Being a long time developer on both platforms I can say that from my point of view having more users on the Mac makes me happy! I look forward to developing, releasing and selling more applications on the Mac platform.

Just use MFC. It’s free and we don’t really see a need for the application to be cross-platform anyway.

or sometimes I would hear

Use the GPL version of Qt and just keep it under the radar until we are sure the application will be released to our customers.

It was always frustrating to try and make the case that Qt was a better solution than MFC for UI, was more comprehensive for general development than other frameworks, and that it was worth planning for the possiblity of releasing the applications for Linux or Mac as well as Windows. In the end each project did adopt the Qt Framework, but it really was a distraction to try and justify the use.

Thankfully with the purchase of Trolltech by Nokia we are seeing a change in the licensing terms for the Qt Framework. Starting with the 4.5 release it looks like the framework will be placed under the LGPL license making it much easier to adopt as part of commercial development efforts.

Here are a couple links that discuss the development further:

• ARS Technica
• PC World

and you can read the news directly from Nokia on the Qt Licensing Terms page.

This new development on the licensing front and the recent inclusion of WebKit into the Qt Framework make me very optimistic about a long and prosperous future for developers who know the Qt Framework! Thank you Nokia!

To build great software you have to listen intently to what the customer is saying so you can identify the pain and suffering that usually lies unexpressed just below the surface of comments like “All I need is a widget that does X.”

Check out what BusinessWeek magazine had to say about this phenomenon:

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
– BusinessWeek, May 25 1998

Probably my favorite quote about building great software came from someone on the team that built the NeXT computer. I think they really understood what it takes to build quality systems (software and hardware) that last.

“It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.”
– Someone on the NeXT Team

It all comes down to making a decision to apply your knowledge and understanding of technology to address the immediate problems for the customer and to push beyond so you can give the customer a system they can grow with. The ultimate measure of success is when a user says “Hey, now I need to do Y with the widget.” and you can reply with something like “Okay, this is how you do that with the system we built.” If you find yourself replying with something more like “Hmmm, we could add that to the software but it will cost you.” then you are doing it wrong!

If you are planning on doing Test Driven Development (TDD) you may also want to get the following packages:

• OCMock – OCMock is an Objective-C implementation of mock objects. (http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/software/OCMock/)
• Hamcrest – library of matchers for building test expressions (http://code.google.com/p/hamcrest/)

Other good articles on Xcode Unit Testing that I came across:

• Unit Testing with OCUnit – http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/04/23/ocunit.html?page=1
• Test Driving Your Code with OCUnit – http://developer.apple.com/tools/unittest.html
• Xcode unit testing articles – http://chanson.livejournal.com/tag/unit+testing
• Unit Testing with Xcode – http://www.stiefels.net/2007/05/01/unit-testing-with-xcode/

By reading through the documents references above I was able to get OCUnit up and running for one of my projects. It took a bit of experimentation, but in the end it looks like OCUnit will work just fine for doing TDD in Xcode with Objective-C. Anyone wanting to try out TDD should give it a try. The benefits for your project are significant. Go for it!

What really caught my eye was this graph:

Notice anything special about July 11th? Yup, that’s the day the iPhone 3G was released. I happened to be one of the brave soles that tried to upgrade my iPhone 2.5G, and I wrote about the problems that ensued. It looks like you just have to talk about the iPhone if you want to drive traffic to your blog!

In late 2002 Microsoft was pushing the .NET Framework, C# and WinForms as the heir apparent for Win32, C++ and MFC. Converting a decade of legacy C++ MFC code to .NET and WinForms just wasn’t an option. We all felt like Microsoft had just abandoned us for greener pastures.

Our solution at the time was to start a long difficult process of moving away from MFC toward a cross-platform class library built by Trolltech, called Qt. In many respects this turned out to be a good decision since it meant we could begin to seriously consider offering our applications on Windows, Linux and the Mac instead of just on Windows. Still, it felt like Microsoft had hung us out to dry.

The WinForms classes just were not rich enough to build complex desktop applications at the time. Many of the conveniences we had come to rely upon from the MFC class libraries were missing and it would have been up to us to roll our own alternatives had we gone down the WinForms route. I think Microsoft was too focused on building web applications to devote sufficient resources to WinForms.

Here we are six years later and Microsoft has announced that they are providing a MFC Feature Pack for Visual C++ 2008 that will add significantly to the capabilities of the MFC class libraries. I can hear MFC development teams all across the Internet celebrating this change in stance from Microsoft.

Here are a couple links to information from Microsoft on the topic:

• MFC Feature Pack for Visual C++ 2008
• Pat Brenner: New Updates to MFC in Visual Studio 2008

Couple MFC with a good third-party widget library like the toolkit offered by CodeJock Software and you have everything necessary to build some awesome new desktop applications.

Long Live MFC!

Yup, once again Apple’s servers are not up to the task. Here is the message I was greeted with shortly after the initial user interface was displayed in the browser window:

Apple builds some killer hardware, a great desktop OS, a great music device, some excellent applications, and a really cool phone. They just don’t seem to be able to get server computing right though.

I’m not sure if it’s that they don’t allocate sufficient engineering resources to the problems, or if their data centers are under-powered or what, but these problems just aren’t acceptable. This isn’t new territority. Companies in the on-line space such as Google, Amazon, eBay and AOL have been doing this for years. Building scalable, robust server farms that can handle the kind of load .mac subscribers (oops, I meant MobileMe) exert on the infrastructure just isn’t rocket science.

The new user interface in MobileMe looks promising. I just want it to work reliably and to always be there when I need it.

Come on Apple. You make great XServe servers. Throw more of them at the problem if it’s just a resource issue. Looking at the growth of Apple stock share prices, the increased sales of Mac desktop and notebook computers, and the insanely successful iPhone I think you can afford to hire some top-gun server developers if what you need is more engineering talent to correct this problem.

Please, make MobileMe something everyone loves and can’t live without. Show the rest of the on-line world you mean business here!

So, this morning when I sat down at my desk and pressed the “Check for Updates” button in iTunes with my iPhone connected it said that the iPhone OS 2.0 update was available for download and installation. I ran through the process and everything seemed to be going well right up until when it restarted the iPhone with the new 2.0 software. Then I get the dialog box shown below.

WTF! An unknown error? What sort of an iTunes Store failure is this? My phone appears to be bricked at this point. All I can do is make an emergency call. Oh boy, just what I wanted from Apple! If only I could make an “emergency call” to the Apple technical support line maybe they could let me know what the -9838 error is. I am not very happy right now.

The dialog box says to try again later. Well, I have retried this operation by ejecting and reconnecting my iPhone at least ten times now, and each time I see the same dialog box.

When I get this resolved I will post an update. For now, if you are eager to get the iPhone OS 2.0 I would suggest that your best bet is to go buy a second iPhone. Clearly Apple has not fully baked the iPhone OS 2.0 support for the first generation iPhones. How disappointing!

Update @ 9:05 AM

It is now 1 hour after I started this upgrade process and the iTunes Store is now reporting a different unknown error code.

What fun!

Updated @ 10:12 AM

Still no luck getting my phone to work. I am getting the “unknown error occurred (-4)”, and have been for more than an hour now.

There is a discussion of this issue on the Apple support site. Here is the link:

Topic : Cannot connect to store (error -9838): can’t activate iPhone !

Someone at Apple should be held to the flames for not anticipating this sort of issue and taking steps to eleminate it. They had very similar problems when the first generation iPhones were released and people couldn’t activate them.

Think Different, indeed….

Updated @ 10:20 AM

Finally!

Apple is very fond of reminding people that they build great user interfaces for their applications. Here is a perfect example of where they failed miserably. I think a lot fewer people would be complaining about this server scalability issue if the iTunes application had a “retry” button. Instead of just asking you to try later the software should do that for us. After all, the computer is more than capable of retrying the connection until it succeeds. There is no reason at all for all of us humans to be sitting here clicking on play lists and then clicking on the iPhone item and then waiting for an error and then repeating the process FOR TWO AND A HALF HOURS!

Apple, you need to put more engineering resources into this sort of thing. The scale you are dealing with on the iPhone and the iTunes Store and now the App Store is way beyond what .mac ever was. You need to THINK DIFFERENT!