An unashamed apologist’s perspective on the loveliest language i’ve worked with.I’ve worked with a lot of programming languages in my time. Not a huge number, mind you, but enough that i can say that i’m open minded and seasoned about it. And, as they say: ‘Don’t feed the trolls’ – well, i’m about to do exactly that: feed the trolls at work who love to rag on about how awful obj-c is! So here i go, foolishly treading where no sensible man dares go: justifying why i love obj-c.Ugly?But it’s so ugly! Brackets!This one is a fair...

Now that I've had my iPhone 4S for a couple of days, I'm amazed with what Siri can do. I've asked a number of questions -- real ones, not questions like "What is the meaning of life?" -- and have been totally impressed with how my interaction with the iPhone has changed. But there are more things I'd love to be able to do with Siri, which is the reason for this post.Everyone should understand that Siri is currently a beta product from Apple. A lot of the things I'm talking about here should happen once the product is out of beta and developers are given access to a Siri API. This is my way of ...

Some quick comments on using Siri in practice—for things other than asking it to open the pod bay doors. Siri’s voice recognition is very impressive, and the scope of what it understands is very good given the difficulty of what it’s doing. But it has a lot of trouble with certain sorts of names—Irish names, for example, which often are not written as pronounced. For example there are a lot of people in Ireland named “Aoife”—it’s a very popular girl’s name, pronounced “Eee-fah”. As you might expect, Siri can’t hand...

Comex, the hacker behind JailbreakMe.com, is joining Apple as an intern. JailbreakMe.com made it extremely easy for iOS users to jailbreak their devices simply by visiting a website. He announced the hiring on Twitter: It's been really, really fun, but it's also been a while and I've been getting bored. So, the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple.Forbes unmasked Comex as Nicholas Allegra, a 19-year old Brown University student from Chappaqua, NY, by Forbes. In that article, Allegra described jailbreaking as "like editing an English paper... You just go through and look ...

We’ve heard a lot about Android’s popularity; it’s a machine that’s clearly outpacing its rivals like Apple’s iOS… in market share. It seems that, although Android is super popular and great at attracting customers, it loses support from other parties that are vital to the success of the OS, like developers.Why does Android have such a hard time winning over developers? More importantly, how can they win over the developers? Well, let’s take a quick look at the state of Android for developers right now.Bigger Is Not Better?The iOS App Store is mu...

Mobile devices of the first generation were not capable of playing any sounds except monophonic ringtones. Today any smartphone platform supports playback, record and to some extent manipulation of digital sound, often up to CD quality.Android is no exception to that. Even older 1.5 devices can do a lot of things with digital audio. However, due to lack of guidance, a developer who is doing his first audio feature might miss some of the available API facilities, or might choose the approach that is not optimal to her use case. This article is supposed to clarify the three major APIs for workin...

In a previous post, I mentioned how user-friendly Android is for developers. There’s extensive documentation and information on the architecture, the different components and best practices. However, the documentation has a few blind spots. Many of the tools have little documentation and no usage examples. The information is there, it’s just hidden behind a few layers of Android theory.So I’m going to try and document a few of the basic things that you’ll probably need to know to start developing Android applications. Only for beginners and intermediate Android...