DaveTaylor
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Origin Stories: Dave Taylor and Band Together
Dave Taylor has been building games for a while. You may have enjoyed some of his work on Quake or Doom, in fact. He's also the developer behind the indie game Abuse (for those who remember that one). But lately Taylor has been teaching a new generation of game designers how to make games. We caught up with him at WWDC 2012 to chat about his classes and the game some of his students made, Band Together.
TUAW Bookshelf: Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion
Dave Taylor's "Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion" offers an in-depth tutorial for OS X power users who have not yet mastered Unix. Written for technically competent readers, it focuses on introducing common command-line tasks. The book starts with Terminal, and then moves on to the basic forms of Unix commands. In just about 200 pages, it surveys common file tasks, application launching and even X11. There are a lot of useful nuggets of information to be found. The tone overall is a bit dry, and I was rather hoping for more motivation on topics. That said, the author has done a good job in surveying Unix. My favorite bits were the in-text notes that offered practical advice such as differentiating between absolute and relative paths, what noclobber is, and so forth. In those, the content got a lot more real-world, and the tone was a bit warmer. It's a good book if you are, for example, a developer who's considering exploring the command line, or someone who's regularly responsible for system administration, but it's really not intended for a general Mac audience. If you've ever wondered about permissions strings or wanted to access file systems directly, and need to basically understand what's really going on behind that lovely OS X GUI, Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion offers a basic introduction that will get you started. It retails for US$20 print, $12 e-book or $22 for both.
Interviews suggest iPhone developer experience not too bad so far
Dave Taylor wrote in to tell us about several interviews he's done with iPhone developers, and many have had less frustrating experiences than Mike Ash and Fraser Speirs. Of 11 people he surveyed for his blog, I would judge that five had a positive experience submitting their app to the App Store, four were neutral, and two had a negative experience. The SDK received similar reviews, with six developers regarding it favorably, four were neutral, and one developer regarding it unfavorably. Two of the developers with positive experiences said they submitted their app before the App Store was launched, and it was approved for distribution in about a week. The two developers with negative experiences submitting their app said that the most frustrating parts were waiting and the lack of communication. The positive, neutral, and negative ratings were not a part of his interview, but were indicative of the general tone that I could determine reading the interviews. They are subjective on my part, and opinions, of course, may vary. The interviews are interesting reading if you're considering developing an iPhone app. Thanks, Dave!
