Howboring

Review: 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro offers optimal choice for lightweight laptop users

During the unveiling of the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, Apple Senior VP of Marketing Phil Schiller said that the 13-inch MacBook Pro is Apple’s best-selling Mac. And with good reason: People love the combination of performance and portability that the 13-inch MacBook Pro provides. The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro is poised to continue the legacy of Apple’s mighty little laptop.

Even since using a 12” PowerBook I’ve been enamoured with the form factor. The 13” still doesnt seem to have the same pleasant proportions as the old 12” but I’m totally in the market for one of these. 

Shame there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my current 13” 2.7Ghz i5 with 8GB of RAM and a hybrid drive.

I do use the DVD drive fairly often: to burn those kids DVDs we get given so the kids can watch them on the AppleTV. We dont actually have a DVD player in the house. 

The new 13” Retina makes the MacBook line very confusing. Maybe the 13” Air goes away and we are left with just the 11” MacBook Air ?

Or more likely, once the transition to Retina is complete and they get cheap enough I can see the MacBook Air line-up just going away completely. So then the Apple MacBook range becomes:

• MacBook Pro Retina 15”
• MacBook Pro Retina 13”
• MacBook Pro Retina 11”

All with 1 or 2 Thunderbolt ports, 1 SD card slot, and 1 or 2 USB3 ports. Thats all you need for the future. 

The Air brand is strong and synonymous with lightweight and portability, but as iOS has become a more useful choice as a mainstream computing OS, the lighter MacBook Air 11” and new faster iPad 4th generation begin to look like close siblings. 

The implicit proposition of the Air brand is that it’s lightweight but compromised on performance. Now that the 13” MacBook Pro becomes is almost as light, the compromised appeal of the 13” Air is diminished.

If I had to put money on it I’d say the Air brand is going away and it’s 50/50 that the 11” form factor sticks around.

Finger Lag

This helped me think differently about some multitouch finger based meat lag problems I’m having, and hopefully solve them.

http://blog.parse.com/2012/07/12/loading-remote-images-in-a-table-view/

Looks good, I’ll have to try it out. Might simplify one of my projects. 

I wish Xcode had the ability to Scaffold up iOS View Controllers like Ruby on Rails does. 

I’m repeating myself in code all the time at the moment. 

So if the iPhone 5 gets a bigger 4inch screen I wonder if that means the keyboard will be able to accommodate a top number row?

Switching when typing passwords is an error prone annoyance.

Ruby Motion

Even though I’m mostly comfortable with Obj-C and the Cocoa Touch API these days, I still don’t like it. 

I know these things are ultimately going to be painful and sticking with Apple’s one-true-path with Obj-C is the best way, I’m still so tempted because I enjoy Ruby so much. 

John Siracusa has never been impressed: Bridges of Siracusa County and The Housewives of Siracusa County and I’m inclined to agree. Getting comfortable with Obj-C is the best way.

But honestly, I really don’t like Obj-C. I’m paddling up hill all day with Cocoa Touch just praying that one day I’ll start enjoying it more. The end result is just so good though that that pain is worth it. Thank god for ARC I guess :)

Apparently some people think Ruby Motion is not a bridge.

RubyMotion is not a bridge; it actually generates native applications that are as fast as the ones written in Objective-C . 

John Siracusa would disagree…

Either way I’m tempted to take a look. Especially as you can mix in Obj-C if you need to - which is important if things are not going your way and you need to get to the metal. Which is sort of a point against Ruby Motion. 

But in it’s favour:

Simple, as in Ruby

Ruby is a very high-level programming language designed to make humans productive and happy. It has a concise and flexible syntax that can be used to express powerful algorithms in very little code.

While Ruby was designed on the same semantics as Objective-C, it is syntaxically different. Ruby has no header files, no complicated syntax to define classes, properties or builtin types, and doesn’t suffer from single namespace issues. We can go on. And Ruby offers many more features, while remaining simpler.

RubyMotion brings the Ruby language on iOS, allowing you to make use of the iOS frameworks from a very convenient and productive language.

You already know Ruby? You can write iOS apps, today.

Less is so much more to me. 

I wonder if they’ll release a non-commercial licensed version for people to kick the tyres with. I just buy it anyway and take a look.

The Pragmatic Studio intro video is great: http://pragmaticstudio.com/screencasts/rubymotion

When I’m swapping between ‘Rails dev and Cocoa Touch the ability to stay in Ruby is appealing to me.

For what ever reason (bug?)  you can’t delete local calendars you have created via the iPhone’s Calendar app. 

A few lines of code can however. Which of course you need to super careful when running because you can easily erase Calendars you actually want and then have that propagated over iCloud before you can say “Oh fuck…”

EKEventStore *eventStore = [EKEventStore new];

    for (EKCalendar *thisCalendar in eventStore.calendars){

        NSLog(@”Calendar: %@”, thisCalendar.title);

        if ([thisCalendar.title isEqualToString:@”My Calendar”]) {

            NSError *err;

            [eventStore removeCalendar:thisCalendar commit:YES error:&err];

            if (!err) {

                NSLog(@”deleted %@”, thisCalendar.title);

            } else {

                NSLog(@”%@”, err.localizedDescription);

            }

        }

    }

iPhone Advanced Projects

I actually think it was a bit irresponsible for Apple to not include this option in the code in its tutorial. That first tutorial leads developers down a set path, a simple path, a clear path, but it is a path that leads directly to a cliff. The developers will try to change their schema, and their app will crash. 

It’s is worth buying the “iPhone Advanced Projects” for that paragraph alone. I’m already off of the Core Data cliff. 

I want my ‘Rails and Active Record back. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. 

Scrolling with UIScrollView

A useful straight forward pattern for putting UIView content in a UIScrollView on iOS using a XIB.

In my last project I’d just StoryBoards in iOS5 with a TableView and a Static cell, which is easily stretchable to house the content and can be designed visually in IB. But that wasn’t what I wanted for my current project and the linked technique works a treat.

Apple - $97.6 billion in cash and equivalents

So hey Apple, how about kicking some of those billion back to the developers that support the iOS platform and cut that 30% tax on App Sales?

It means little to Apple but a lot to small indie developers.