It's snowing

In Seattle ... in March.

iPhone SDK: Now with IB!

The iPhone SDK has the Interface Builder now ... this will be great for making already-easy-to-create UIs even easier on the iPhone.

She must have had a whole library in there

With the proper reading material, two hours is no problem. Two days, I could maybe do on a bet with a good Dostoyevsky novel. But two years?

My brother-in-law is African American in the future; I'm a dumb guy

During the Spaceship Earth ride at Epcot, they take your picture so they can put you in a "future scene." I always do my classic "dumb guy" face (i.e., my normal face) ... I was sitting with my brother-in-law Dan, but he showed up as a fun-lovin' black man in outer space (he is, in fact, a not-very-fun-loving white guy on planet Earth).

I'm full

Here is the complete menu from last night's meal at Disney's Victoria & Albert's restaurant:

• Amuse bouche, smoked trout custard baked in the shell, house-made lobster bisque, smoked sablefish with hearts of palm, deviled quail egg with Iranian Osetra Caviar
• Duck with pickled and roasted beet salad, beet "air"
• Yellow edge grouper with petite French lentils, winter corn and saffron foam; sumac crusted Maine scallop with bok choy and coconut emulsion
• Ballontine of poulet rouge with chicken consomme, hedgehogs and black truffles
• Kurobuta pork tenderloin and belly with banana squash ragout
• Pan roasted foie gras with Fuji apple bread pudding and mostarda di cremona
• Tasting of Japanese Wagyu strip loin and Australian "Kobe" tenderloin and Kansas City Angus Beef with Oxtail Jus
• Colston bassett stilton, gruyere and fourme d'ambert fondue
• Wild strawberry sorbet, mango-yogurt panna cotta and miniature banana gateau
• Tanzanian chocolate pyramid, Hawaiian Kona chocolate souffle and Peruvian chocolate ice cream and puffy pastry
• Coffee, tea and Friandise

Each course had a specific wine pairing. Plus, Laurel had a totally other menu, which I don't feel like typing in. And tonight, we're going to Raglan Road for another big meal (though not as fancy).

Control yourself

I was having problems with code completion in XCode (iPhone dev platform), even though I fixed the obvious problem of it not being turned on by default.  It seemed to still not work like I expected (that expectation was basically that it should work just like Visual Studio, of course).  Well, it doesn't, and it still feels inferior, but at least I've figured out the "trick" (insofar as I don't see it immediately in the docs).  You have to press Control-Period to force the autocomplete to happen (and to cycle through the list if it has already triggered but is stuck on an entry you don't want).  Pressing Control-Slash (which was in the docs) takes you to each param in the param list.

iPhone SDK: Bittersweet

Well, after playing with the iPhone SDK for a few days, it's going slowly, for two reasons. The first: Apple didn't include a visual designer, so there is no way to build an interface via drag-and-drop.  This is planned (and they demo'ed it), so at leat this will be possible in the future, but it is a tough thing not to have for those of us who are new to building UIs on a Mac OS.  The exclusion of this piece makes a little sense in that it was the only piece of the SDK that was really tied heavily to the iPhone other than the simulator, which you must have, so they probably just ran out of time and made the right call. Second, and way more problematic, is Objective-C.  I kind of "get" Objective-C in that it is basically a set of macros on top of C to help you get some object-oriented features, but man, is it hard to read for someone who knows C++, C#, and Java.  Objective-C definitely took an evolutionary branch off of C that is far different from those other languages and feels like it is stuck in the early COM era of Windows C/C++.  And it is far less productivity-enhancing than C# or Java.  Oh well ... I thought I was done learning new languages, so much for that!

More iPhone amazement

Not only did Apple knock the ball out of the park with their SDK (and Exchange Active Sync) announcement today, they drove to where the ball finally landed, ground it up, stuck it in a rocket, and shot it to the moon.

iPhone SDK and the race to June

Apple released the iPhone SDK today -- but people won't be able to run applications written with it until June, when the next firmware release comes out (and it will take that long to set up the iTunes store for it). That gives everybody about three months of catch-up time to write iPhone apps (sucks for those who were hoping to be first out the door the day after the SDK shipped)... not sure that's enough time, but I'm going to give it a try, *if* I can get my hands on the SDK (I got a clearance code for it, but their download servers are overwhelmed at the moment).