Quarter Life Crisis

NSConference Day 1¶

711 words on Software

The first day of NSConference was interesting. Just some short notes to help my memory:

• Too much death and too little beef in Mike Lee’s keynote. While making valid points, I think I’m not American enough to really appreciate this ‘emotional’ address, even in a keynote that’s supposed to set the mood.
• Debugging fun with Wolf Rentzsch, pointing out all (?) the ways to poke a non-running and a running application on the Mac. Probably starting out a bit too basic and thus missing out on some of the good stuff which must be out there but which I don’t know. Including respect for the awesome / magic HexFiend, disassembly using otool -tV, the otool postprocessor otx and the various techniques for getting your own code into other applications.
• People’s notetaking of that in SubEthaEdit is awesome and will be useful to find / use the examples shown in the talks. Thanks to Uli Kusterer for setting all that up.
• It’s probably a given: The hotel’s Wifi with a weird login page that seems super-slow on the iPod and loves forcing you to frequently re-enter of all info to use the network was a bit annoying. As were the common losses of signal. On the other hand, I had expected much worse for the catastrophic scenario of well over a hundred people with at least one wirelessly networked device descending on a venue at the same time.
• Dave Dribin on clean code: Good to be reminded of many of the things there. Again, nothing overly non-obvious but it’s always good to be reminded of a clean style and pointing at the easily made mistakes. Not all of his points were equally good and one has the impression he may be teased about his ‘KVO is evil’ stance and singleton hate, which became a bit of a running gag, for a while.
• I was too busy watching the little lunch-time talks to manage to get a dessert, bummer!
• Drew McCormack about data presentation: Goes through many styles and points out how they’re all lists. Points to the core-plot graphing framework project he helps run. Interesting stuff, even though I currently have no use for it. Having a way to draw graphs and do it performantly will be cool. The talk also pointed out the existence of NSCollectionView to me, but it sounded like it’s not better than a table view if you have a really long table.
• Final talk was by Marcus Zarra on CoreAnimation. Interesting but not overly exciting if you’ve used CoreAnimation before, which he has bunch of posts on on his site. I had to laugh when he said most of the code in his demo app was for drawing the path he’s drawing and that he had to program it from a sketch he made. Totally reminded me of my efforts when creating ESCursors.
• Dinner was fine with special kudos to Tim for having gone through the effort of making sure we actually get good wines with it.
• Now if only I could remember the names of all the people I spoke to…
• Notes with photos by Alex Rozanski.
• There seemed to be many iPhone people at the conference and many who are relatively new to Cocoa.
• One thing I find hard when speaking with iPhone people is figuring out how to speak to them. I have a fairly low opinion of most iPhone applications, a sentiment which doesn’t seem too far off the general perception. And creating them probably is where the money is because people with bad taste and money will hire iPhone developers to create them. That’s certainly not my style of doing things and it’s hard to talk about people (after all they seem reasonable and probably don’t think they’re creating the greatest thing in the world when making some junk advertising app) about this topic.
• Of course the missing semicolon in [[NSConference alloc] init] on the smart banners that decorated the stage made people talk. For my part, I welcome our new semicolon-less-C-overlords. Certainly makes things less painful. [I really recommend compiling with LLVM by the way, because its error messages for this stuff are just much more human-comprehensible].

Read on for notes on the second day…

A few notes on the first day of NSConference 2010 in Reading. February 1, 2010, 23:59

Tagged as cocoa, development, mac, nsconference.