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This was my first “handheld” device.

Mobile Pro 200

It was a NEC MobilePro 200. My neighbor had bought it, but never found a use for it, so I got it in exchange for some web work I did for him. It had Mobile Word and Excel, Solitaire, and a 56k modem in the PC card slot I could use for dialing up and checking email. I couldn’t sync it with my Mac, but aside from that it worked great. I could do spreadsheets and documents in science class comfortably, and when I wanted to be a real nerd, find a phone line someplace to check my email. It was a really big device, but it was a great work companion.

But eventually, like everything else electronic, it died. I don’t remember why. I just remember being sad it wouldn’t boot anymore. So it was time to upgrade. And I upgraded to this…

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If you follow me on Twitter, I’ve made a lot of noise about how I don’t think developers should be adopting Swift in it’s current state. My problem isn’t with the idea of Swift, or replacing Obj-C. I believe Swift could, in the coming weeks or months become a language suitable for writing production code. But I don’t believe it is such a language today.

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One of the basic Objective-C design paradigms is Model-View-Controller.

Views is views typically have two components. There is the logic that drives a view: formatting, management of subviews, and lifecycle management. And there is appearance of the view. This might include the positioning of subviews, the color of the view and subviews, how the view scales, and so on.

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Recently there has been a lot of discussion about skeuomorphism vs. flat user interfaces, but I think the entire discussion is broken. Let’s go back to the beginning: The original Macintosh GUI. An extremely flat UI, but full of skeuomorphism.

Source - http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/operating-system-interface-design-between-1981-2009/
Source – http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/operating-system-interface-design-between-1981-2009/

Folders look like folders. File deletion is done through a trash item, that not only emulates a trash can but looks like one. Floppy disks that are inserted into the Mac appear as disks on the desktop. The desktop itself is a metaphor based on a real world object. Continue reading →

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I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months talking to people about CoreData’s iCloud syncing features. One complaint I hear is that Apple should make the API easier to implement and handle problems automatically for the developer. CoreData’s persistent store iCloud syncing API has it’s faults, but I think developers underestimate how many issues are out of Apple’s control. Continue reading →