Justomatic

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development

 

I'm Writing An iPhone App

I've been tossing a few ideas around for a while now. Most of them weren't very good. Then something happened; I had a problem. A problem I've had many (many) times. A problem with a small, but distinct audience. A problem without an existing solution!

"What is it?" you ask?

Unfortunately, this is the part where I tell you I can't reveal exactly what that problem is. I can't tell you because it would keep me up at night waiting for someone who actually knows what they're doing to knock out this application in a week and leave me with nothing to do but cast disparaging remarks at them on Twitter. Suffice it to say, it's niche.

"Well, from what you've told us so far, it sounds great!" you say, and I thank you for that.

So now I've got this idea, like I said, and it's pretty good one. But there's a catch, you see. I don't really know Objective C, or Cocoa, or Cocoa Touch if you want to be a jerk about it. I have little experience writing desktop applications and I'm honestly still a little uncomfortable around words like "retain" and "release". While I'm a pretty quick study, there's something to be said for hitting the ground running.

So this gives me a new idea! Maybe if force myself to document my experience writing this application it will help motivate me. Maybe, it will help someone else and I'll earn some brownie points with the Universe. Maybe if I actually finish this thing someone might stumble across this blog and feel so sorry for me that they buy the application out of pity! That's a win-win-win by my reckoning (it's also a lot of "maybes").

So what's next? I'm not entirely sure. I'll probably try to summarize what I've done so far to prepare myself (you know, montage style). I might also get distracted and lose interest. I don't know, and that's what makes this fun.

Filed under  //   apple   cocoa   development   iphone  

Google Launches Its Own JavaScript Library CDN

Google just launched it's AJAX Libraries API. This is great news for the smaller, independent libraries but with Dojo already being hosted by AOL this move would seem to actually hurt their ability to optimize client caching by splintering deployment. I imagine the Dojo team is supporting this so maybe they know AOL is a horrible company with deplorable customer relations and an even worse environmental track record something I don't.

Filed under  //   aol   development   dojo   google   javascript  

Because You're Smarter Than XML

While developing Atom Syndication support for the new site I started to get fed up (ha!) with the standard methods of XML generation in Python. Obtuse and verbose, the number of lines of code it took to generate a simple feed grew to an order of magnitude greater then the number of lines it took to serve that same feed. I wanted something a little less error prone and a little more convenient than string manipulation, but I didn't need any sort of validation or schema support or any of the other things that make the standard XML libraries "smart". The end result was StupidXML, a genuinely "stupid" XML generation library. I've put the code up on Google Code in case someone else will find it useful, let me know if you find any bugs!

Filed under  //   development   oss   python   xml