Crash Thought Dummy

Here are the whys in 7 key points - enjoy!

1. Unix grade OS in the palm of your hand.
2. Multi-touch—no one else has it.
3. App store—complete end to end development, distribution, marketing and storefront for everyman developer. (Google’s app store is a accident waiting to happen.)
4. Along with the iPod touch, the iPhone could easily become a major player in handheld gaming. Mark my words. It’s ten times easier and cheaper to develop, sell and make money for the iPod touch, iPhone.
5. iPod touch & VOIP. ’nuff said.
6. People still forget that after 10 years, RIM only has 15 million subscribers, MS WINce is still crapp and Nokia can only dream of a 21st century OS. (Palm is already on life support.) Where is the competition.
7. In spite of it’s many “flaws” Apple could barely keep them in stock with a handful of countries online. By the end of the year, the iPhone will be available in over 70 countries and rumor has it that China & Russia are close to coming on board.

Whether you agree with any of my points are not, people are going to buy the iPhone like gangbusters for the next five to ten years. Yes, Apple is “losing” iPod sales to the iPhone but somehow, I doubt they are real concerned about that.

I’ve seen many people comment that they’re going to spend a few days learning Cocoa (from scratch!) and be able to come up with an application that will make them oodles of money.

In my experience, people will quickly discover that learning Cocoa isn’t that easy if your only experience is with Java, Ruby, etc. Having a background in C doesn’t help all that much, either. The learning curve is steep enough that many will quickly realize that coming up with a compelling application will be hard.

There will be much grumbling, and articles complaining about it all; and the end result will be tens of thousands of would-be developers never accomplishing much (other than learning a bit about how a modern IDE should work and the rudimentary aspects of object-oriented programming!).

The developers who have been working with Cocoa for some time will create astounding applications, make enough money to compensate them for their efforts, and propel this new platform into a new age of handheld computing devices.

I am ever so grateful that I decided to start learning Cocoa when OS X first came out!!!

Heh. XCode is years behind the IDEs available in virtually all other languages. It’s made great strides in the last couple versions, but it’s still seriously lacking. In part that’s a side-effect of having gcc be the core engine– gcc was not made with GUI integration in mind. In part it’s a side-effect of Objective-C syntax being much harder to introspect than Java, C#, or some of the more recent scripting language, making real-time refactoring, validation, and auto-completion a shadow of what’s been available in other environments for years. Some of it is former NeXT folks wedded to their 1980’s idea of what an IDE should be like.

Anyway, the SDK is some quality work and will enable great things, but don’t fool yourself into believing that Apple has anything to teach anyone on how to make a great IDE. They’re still playing serious catch-up.

A bliss is givien but, It’s ok to not accept a gift.

There was an URL floating around a while ago that pointed to a site that had a card trick on it. I sent the URL to my mom.

The web page asked you to choose a card out of a set of cards and then to click on a link. That link took you to a page with a new set of cards. The page stated that the card you picked was now missing from the set, because the site had read your mind and knew which card to remove. The way the trick worked was that none of the cards in the first set were in the second set — the second set contained similar cards to the first set, but none of the same ones. Many people first think that the web page somehow determined what card they had chosen even though they had done nothing on the computer to indicate any particular card.

A while after sending the link to my mom, I sent her an explanation for how the trick worked. She sent back email saying that she and her husband were rolling on the floor with laughter because they had spent the last half hour trying to fool the computer using various methods. One of them was this: her husband would go into another room in the house. Then my mom would call him on his cell phone using hers and tell him all the cards. Then he’d tell her that he’d chosen one — but not tell her which one — and then she would click on the link. They were frustrated and befuddled that the computer still “knew” which card to remove even though they had gone to great lengths to separate the person that chose the card from the computer.

you can laugh more here.

Thanks to Vadim, I met Sergey last year at his place. After that encounter I start following his progress through his blog. This morning I was doing my dayly blog refresh and I found out that Sergey is leaving Google and going back to Microsoft !

I couldn’t agree more with his view on both companies. His article is well thought out and well written. However as most of time happens in the blogosphere, comments become the real treasure of any article. A comment from an anonymous user knocked me totally off:

Google is an infant. It’s made $ on one thing: search. It’s done 2 other things very well: maps and gmail. Other stuff that it’s done is of questionable value.

Compare to MS. Word was better than Wordperfect. Excel was better than 123. Outlook better than Notes. Powerpoint, Visio and Project have no legitimate competitors. .Net has overtaken Java. Visual Studio is by far the best developer’s tool. The XBox is as good as any other game environment.

So to all the Google fanboys, I say come back in 5 years when Google is making $ on something other than Search.

Well said, it’s real, it’s priceless.

Software development is not an art and this picture tells you why. Click the image to expand.

The line between foolishness and right thing is too thin.