So, some time back in the beginning of June (or maybe July), I subscribed to this new iTunes U class, Coding Together: Apps for iPhone and iPad, which apparently presumes you to have more programming experience than I actually do (it talks about pointers, and other big words that I’m vaguely familiar with hearing, but don’t fully comprehend) but the walkthrough was fairly straightforward, and I got myself a working calculator. Working with very limited functionality, and not at all how I’m accustomed to entering numbers into a calculator. I may have to try writing a variation that works the way a standard calculator does – where you enter the number and then the operator and then the number you want to operate on and press equals to get a result – instead of the way this one works – where you enter a number and press enter, then another number and enter and/or the operator you want to perform on them… which totally doesn’t make any sense – maybe I’m getting ahead of myself and the class will proceed to that, this was only lesson 1.
I don’t know. It seems like I may need to learn C# and Objective C in unison instead of trying to fuck around with Visual Basic and Objective C. But I do have years of stumbling around in Visual Basic to fall back on. But then again, why not learn all three? I guess I shouldn’t limit myself. I need to do the JavaScript “Modern UI” app tutorial still. That actually seems like my best bet for anything less complex, being supported on virtually any platform. I hate to say it, but web apps might actually be the way of the future.
I disagree with this philosophy. Cloud computing has it’s benefits. It has it’s drawbacks also. For instance; I have just spent the last 2 weeks trying to upload my music collection to Google Music. And right now, I’m only at 15k of 18k songs. And Google allows 20k for free, so I’m sure I’m not the only person with this large of a music collection. I presume iTunes Match doesn’t upload anything that it already has, but it’s $25 a year that I don’t want to spend for something I already carry around on an iPod. So what if it doesn’t all fit on my phone. I would rather not have to stop my radio to take a call anyway, that’s why there’s a volume knob. But it’s sorta neat to think that I have access to my entire music collection anywhere in the world. It’s too bad Google doesn’t support iTunes smart playlists… because that would make actually listening to any of my music much easier. So, for now, the iPod wins over the Cloud. I suppose, if my iPod were to stop functioning for some reason, I might consider iTunes match.
But then there’s the question of connectivity. What happens when you’re out of range? Shit, I can’t send a text message from the back of the Raleys down the street. Actually, anywhere near the store seems to suck service from cell phones like a black hole swallowing up a star. Not to blame the grocery store. I’m sure they didn’t actually ask to be built from the cell phone’s darkest nemesis: steel beams and rebar reinforced concrete. But, that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t check my grocery list in Notes or Evernote if I didn’t remember to sync BEFORE I GOT INTO THE PARKING LOT! Now, maybe I’m blowing things out of proportion. Sure, I could be less of a retard, and make sure that the shopping list is on my phone before I even left the house. But what about when you’re on a road trip, and you’re a 100 miles from anywhere, you’re rocking out to your road trip playlist, and all of the sudden, there’s nothing… you look at your phone, and it says ‘No Service’ or ‘Searching…’ or some other devastating message indicating that your connection to the world has been severed. You are helpless and alone. Well fuck that. I’ve got an iPod.
Apple needs to make 120 and 240 gig solid state iPods though. Abandon the hard drive, and make an iPod that runs for a week. Make it the size of the original classic, or say, the first 160 gig model (that’s the one I have, it’s a little fatter than the newer classics, but I’m okay with that) and if you want to make it a touch screen, that’s cool… but I really think that you need click buttons. Maybe a touchscreen on front with a click wheel on the back. That would be a cool compromise. Then you can enjoy the tactile feedback you get with starting a song or skipping a track, while also getting the sweet iPod Touch real estate up front to watch movies and play games. Doubt that Apple would do that though. They’re about minimizing, not adding buttons and wheels.
So, anyway, I don’t really know what the point of this whole thing was. I did talk about my app writing kung fu. Going to turn it into mixed martial programming. That’s going to rock. I still haven’t figured out what I am going to write though. But now I’ve decided that I’m destined to make it multiplatform. That’s a good goal to work towards. First, decide what to write. Then, write it for Windows 8, iOs, and Mac OS. Depending on my C skillz, I might even be able to put something together that works on Linux. That seems like a lofty goal though.
Speaking of Mac… I tried out Mountain Lion. Seems to me like it’s just a patch on Lion. No major changes. They haven’t destroyed anything that I was particularly fond of. Everything autosaves. That’s nice. It tries to save it all to the iCloud. Very iCloud oriented update actually. So, apparently, you can have accounts on a bunch of Macs (ha, like I can afford a bunch of new Macs) and when you save something, it just shows up on the other computers. Provided that they all have that magical connection to the cloud.
Is it funny that I’m typing this on the WordPress app on Windows 8 Consumer Preview, installed in VMware Fusion on my early 2011 PowerBook MacBook Pro 13″ which is running Mountain Lion, and that when I needed to look up the name that Microsoft is using to replace “Metro” (due to legal issues, though they claim it was always whatever the fuck they called it), I did it by switching to Safari on the desktop of my Mac? (by the way, I really like what they have done with Expose Mission Control and gestures) It’s not that I don’t like internet explorer (okay, that might have been part of it) so much as that fact that with Quicksilver, all I have to do is swipe all 4 fingers to the right on my trackpad hit ctrl+space, s and safari opens. On Windows, I would have to go find the launcher icon (which happens to be as easy as clicking the apple button start button and then clicking the icon on my start screen (which I have decided IS better than the win95-present start menu). But I’ve only been using Windows 8 off and on for a week or two, and so I’m still used to having to search through the start menu for things on windows.
Anyway, if there was a final point to this, it would be that I don’t think you should keep everything in the cloud. It’s neat, and it could be handy, but network connections are still fragile and prone to breaking. And slow.