Cocoa Touch vs. Cocoa

What I would love is to transfer my iPhone/iPad knowledge to the Desktop. Some of these applications would look fantastic and work perfectly if they could be ported as is straight to the Desktop. I love the look and feel of the iPad application. Applications are a breeze to put together once you understand iPhone/iPad development. It would be brilliant if the universal binary could extend to the Desktop.

USA

After a 2 year journey that took me to the United Kingdom it feels good to be back in the United States. There were a few interesting tech companies to follow in Europe (Spotify, Skype, Opera, Layar), but I seemed to spend most of my time looking across the Atlantic.

Finger Pointing

For 30 years I've grown accustomed to using a tool to write text. I use either a keyboard or a pen. The simple gesture of using your index fingers to draw objects and text should be easy but it's not. Unfortunately it's faster, cleaner and more precise to touch a button on the screen and get a nice clean character to appear at a specified location as opposed to drawing it with an index finger. I don't like the stylus either but until we have software assisted sketching maybe that is the answer.

Android

The one thing I'm starting to notice through all the iPhone/iPad buzz is the amount of phones being produced with the Android OS. HTC and Samsung are putting out some marvelous looking phones. The exciting thing is that the iPhone is produced only by one company where as Android can run on any companies device. This gives Android a huge distribution boost. Where as Apple release only 1 new iPhone model a year, Android can debut on 10 or more devices easily. I've met a lot of anti-Apple people who would be happy to go for a smart phone that doesn't suck and Android could well deliver. That's pretty exciting for Android developers.

Atomic API?

Seems like an oxymoron. Atomic and API. API's aren't built to be atomic. They are built to be light weight. And because of that they must be always on. This sucks when you are building a client where offline access is a feature.

Here's the example. I'm riding in a train using my smart phone. I create a todo item right as I go under the tunnel. The request went out but never came back. The todo item is sitting on my screen and it is in a transient state technically. I have no idea if my request reached the server or if the response never made it back to me. It's been created locally but hasn't been persisted on the server. How do we know the request was actually received by the server?

We need an uuid to go up with our request. When we receive our model on the next synchronize from the server, we can examine our transient states and determine if the server is out of sync or if the client never received confirmation of the server persistence by examining our uuid.

There are scenarios where this isn't always correct. Say we someone changes our model after our request went up. Then we will receive a different UUID back from the model we created but never confirmed. It's a tricky tight rope this atomicity in distributed systems.

One can dream.

Tablets

January is tech month. CES, Macworld, and Apple events galore. The year of 2010 will be the year of the tablet. Apple is rumored to unveil a tablet towards the end of January and I'm guessing CES will display a slew of tablets starting with the Steve Ballmer introduced HTC tablet. It will be interesting to see how tablets play out in terms of importance in 2010. Will people carry around a device that won't fit in their pocket? Will it replace the desktop and laptop around the house? Will it replace the Netbooks that have become so popular in the last two years? Who knows. It will be very exciting to see what kind of traction these devices will gain in new year. If I can get my hands on Apple's tablet I will. Here's to hoping they even release one.

Tablets vs. Netbooks. A Tablet will be more important than a Netbook because you are getting rid of the keyboard. I'm not a hardware guy, but my best guess is that the clam shell design is only necessary because of the keyboard. Just taking a stab in the dark on this one. Get rid of the clam shell and you have one sexy device. Granted it probably won't save you on cost. It will save you space and grant you convenience. The smaller the device proportional to a larger display will yield the largest gain in terms of relevance. No longer will I need a laptop on my coffee table, but a tablet.

I'll attribute all these advances in computing thanks to Apple for their wide spread adoption of a single device. Thankfully we now have one piece of hardware that can function beautifully in part to it's inclusion of a software solution that solves the missing hardware problems. Cool!