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Geeks are using science to make the best chocolate ever
Rob Anderson is a geek. So he makes chocolate for other geeks, or, more accurately, "people who really like chocolate and geek out about it." What does he mean by that? If you change one step of the chocolate-making process, you change the taste of the resulting chocolate entirely. And Anderson wants to show you exactly what that means. Fresco Chocolate, his company, roasts beans four different ways and conches (aka aerates and stirs) chocolate four different ways to create totally unique bars that bring the eater into the factory with him to be part of the process. Oh, and by the way, he built most of the machines he uses himself. The thing is, Anderson isn't alone. He's part of a new movement called bean-to-bar chocolate that is revolutionizing chocolate by making it from scratch with a strong focus on flavor. This distinctly American phenomenon has expanded in the past 12 years from five bean-to-bar chocolate makers to around 200 as of this writing. Almost all of these folks construct some of their machines themselves, and a large portion of them come from the tech and engineering world. Why? It all comes back to good old geekery.
Snapz Pro upgrades to v2.5, adds Cocoa, Retina support
Snapz Pro X has never been a particularly beautiful application. It is, however, a very handy one. For authors and bloggers, it's been an indispensable tool in terms of screen capture -- letting you get very simple easy-to-tweak results with a minimum of interaction. One of Snapz's key features is its ability to capture a movie from a user-selected portion of the OS X screen, adding optional Mac audio and microphone narration. For static screen shots, it's also multi-screen aware, lets you carefully adjust image framing, select a single window to capture, or choose a pre-set fixed size segment. Ambrosia's 2.5.0 is about to debut any second -- probably by end of business Thursday. This version is a complete ground-up rewrite of Snapz Pro X in Cocoa using modern APIs. You read that right. Seriously, Ambrosia just finally got around to dumping Carbon. It's a welcome update that dedicated users will breathe a sigh of relief to finally download. This update should fix compatibility issues with MacOS X 10.8 (aka "Mountain Lion"), as well as full support for Retina displays. It's not prettier than previous versions but, as I found when participating in the recent Beta program, it's just as effective. Pros: Easy to use, does what you need a tool like this to do. Cons: Soviet-era aesthetics Snapz Pro is a free upgrade for existing Snapz Pro X 2.x users or costs $69 for new purchasers. %Gallery-170967%
On this day in 1996, Apple acquired NeXT (Updated)
Updated to clarify that 10.0 was the first official client version of Mac OS X, and that Mac OS X Server shipped prior to its release. On this day, December 20, just fifteen years ago, Apple paid $400 million to purchase NeXT. That's the move that brought Steve Jobs back to the company he helped to found, and it was the beginning of the incredible run of success that continues to this day. According to CNET's coverage on that day, the company was shopping for an operating system to replace the aging Mac OS. It had recently abandoned the Copland system project and was negotiating with Be and other companies. With the purchase of NeXT, Apple bought the core of what is now Mac OS X. It also gained WebObjects, the powerful Web app development tool that had been licensed to 275 corporate customers by the time of the sale to Apple. In addition to WebObjects, Apple also gained the powerful programming environment known as OpenStep. That was the core of the NeXTSTEP operating system, and is the heart of what became Cocoa for Mac OS applications. In fact, Cocoa classes start with the acronym NS, which stands for either the NeXT-Sun creation of OpenStep or for NeXTSTEP. In retrospect, it's humorous to look at then-chairman and CEO Gil Amelio's comment that "Apple expects to ship products with the NeXT operating system in 1997." The client version of Mac OS X didn't actually ship in a non-beta version until 10.0 "Cheetah" hit the market on March 24, 2001. Mac OS X Server 1.0 shipped in March of 1999, but it wasn't really recognizable as the Mac OS X we know today; it was a hybrid of NeXTSTEP UI elements and Mac concepts, and lacked the Carbon APIs. That $400 million dollar investment paid off in spades for Apple, both in the technology that it acquired and in bringing back Steve Jobs to save the company. It's hard to believe that everything that's happened in Apple's modern era started just 15 years ago, but it's true: OS X, and eventually the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad were all made possible by Apple's purchase of NeXT, and Steve Jobs' return to his company.
Found Footage: Apple introduces Cocoa at the 1996 WWDC
In case you're thinking this footage is about Cocoa, the Application Programming Interface for Mac OS X, you're dead wrong. This Cocoa was a simulation tool and easy programming language for kids that was demoed at the 1996 WWDC by a young man named Gregory Miller. Miller does an admirable job in this video getting the developers in the crowd to cheer, including when he tells them that "I'm your competition." In 1996, of course, Apple was having some real problems -- in fact, many people thought that was the year that the company was going to collapse. The first PowerPC-based Mac laptop, the PowerBook 5300, had engineering issues that forced every unit to be recalled. Clone manufacturers were undercutting Apple's pricing, and Gil Amelio came in as CEO to start the renaissance of Apple by cutting expenses and writing a corporate strategy that is still, in many cases, followed to this day. Enjoy the video. It's a definite reminder of just how far Apple has come in 15 years. Tip of the hat to Graham Lee for this trip down memory lane.
Apple posts free developer documentation for iBooks users
If your resolutions for 2011 include teaching yourself to be a Mac or iOS developer, then Apple just gave you a very nice Christmas present. According to a tip from our old friend Nik Fletcher at Realmac Software, Apple has recently put a number of Apple Developer Publications books into the iBookstore for free. This makes it simple to grab these books, which range from "The Objective-C Programming Language" to "iOS Application Programming Guide," for reading on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. As our resident developer and iOS guru Erica Sadun points out, it's "kinda dumb" to have the books running on the device you're trying to develop for. It would be nice if Apple eventually made a version of iBooks available for Mac OS X. Although, as commenter Nick points out, once you have the books downloaded, you can open them with any app that supports the EPUB format, like Adobe's Digital Editions product. You can also get a Mac-compatible version of the books by going to the developer site and then selecting the PDF option to download them. The PDFs can also be used on the iPad or iPhone, but since Apple has done the work to convert these documents into nice EPUB-formatted iBooks, why not take advantage of their effort? By my count, there are six books available. To grab them, launch iBooks on your device, tap the Store button, tap the Search icon and then type in "apple developer publications." The books range in length from 44 to 200 pages, and they are great references to use with many of the other developer books from Pearson and Peachpit Press that can also be purchased in the iBookstore.
TUAW at Big Nerd Ranch: Aaron Hillegass
More coverage of TUAW's inside look at developer boot camp. See below for notes & disclaimer. On my last day at Big Nerd Ranch, I got a chance to sit down with with the biggest nerd at the ranch, Aaron Hillegass, and talk about nerds, NextStep, the iPad and more. Aaron has a unique vantage point on all things Apple, and it was definitely an enjoyable conversation. If you continue reading after the first video, there's a second short video of Aaron and I out at the site of the future Big Nerd Ranch.
TUAW at Big Nerd Ranch: now taking (app) requests!
More coverage of TUAW's inside look at developer boot camp. See below for notes & disclaimer. It's Wednesday at Big Nerd Ranch. I'll get to meet a few of the personalities behind the ranch today, as well as meet up with some blogger friends from Atlanta. Victor is even going to stop by ... it's like visitor's day, except without the rehab or prison part. We're well into learning to make use of the unique features of the iPhone SDK now. Yesterday we covered CoreLocation, the accelerometer, more Interface Builder and programmatically creating interface elements. I've done a little of this before, but I'm also learning solid memory management techniques, coding conventions and other areas that I definitely needed work on. My classmates are really starting to dig into their own projects, and I've put together a couple small ones of my own. I haven't come up with a great idea for a larger project yet, though, and I'd like your help with that. My only request is that it make use of at least one special hardware feature of the iPhone (compass, accelerometer, etc.). Beyond that, I'm just looking for unique ideas from our readers for an app that would be useful to as large an audience as possible. If this app makes it to the App Store, it will be given away for free, so leave me some suggestions in the comments and I'll get working on something we can all share! In order to give our readers the first-hand account of what it's like to experience developer boot camp, Big Nerd Ranch has permitted Brett to attend complimentary classes and has provided transportation/lodging assistance. Other than those considerations, no sponsorship or advertising relationship exists between BNR and TUAW. This series is not an endorsement of BNR's programs or teaching methodology.
TUAW at Big Nerd Ranch: cabin tour
More coverage of TUAW's inside look at developer boot camp. See below for notes & disclaimer. This is a quick video I shot on Sunday. It's a quick tour of my cabin, just to show you what the lodging and amenities at the Big Nerd Ranch look like. Participants don't spend a lot of time in their rooms, as the class schedule makes for a long day, and is usually followed by some lab time spent working on projects and getting answers to additional questions. Meals are served in the main building, so you end up spending a lot more time with the group than you do in cliques or on your own. The food, by the way, has exceeded my expectations, and the cooks have cheerfully catered to my dietary preferences (a picky pescatarian with a penchant for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches). Read on for the video of the cabin; I should have a video of the actual campus and some footage from our daily hike up soon, too! In order to give our readers the first-hand account of what it's like to experience developer boot camp, Big Nerd Ranch has permitted Brett to attend complimentary classes and has provided transportation/lodging assistance. Other than those considerations, no sponsorship or advertising relationship exists between BNR and TUAW. This series is not an endorsement of BNR's programs or teaching methodology.
TUAW at Big Nerd Ranch: meet Joe Conway
More coverage of TUAW's inside look at developer boot camp. See below for notes & disclaimer. It's Tuesday at Big Nerd Ranch, and we're deep into writing simple apps for our iPhones. Once Mark Fenoglio had finished teaching us some fundamentals of C and Objective-C, Joe Conway took over as instructor to lead us through actually creating iPhone apps. He'll be finishing out the course with us. Right now, we're studying CoreLocation, and creating maps on which we can find locations and add annotations. Things are starting to get interesting, and we're really starting to apply the knowledge to our own projects. The lab should be busy tonight! In the video after the break, you'll get a chance to "meet" Joe. I think the interview captured his Daniel Tosh mannerisms and humor pretty well (see the outtakes after the outtro). You'll see Joe at least one more time before the week is over. There will be some videos posted after the course, as we're actually in the middle of nowhere and the upstream connection isn't conducive to shipping large quantities of video to YouTube. That will be changing in the future, more on that when we talk to Aaron Hillegass. Continue reading for the video!
TUAW at Big Nerd Ranch: Mark Fenoglio
More coverage of TUAW's inside look at developer boot camp. See below for notes & disclaimer. I'm on my second day at Big Nerd Ranch, settling in and getting some blogging done between 3-hour lectures on Objective-C fundamentals. I sat down with our first instructor, Mark Fenoglio, last night to discuss Big Nerd Ranch from his point of view. He's a very dynamic guy, even if my "talking head" video angle doesn't portray that very well. If you're curious about the kind of people Big Nerd Ranch has on the teaching staff, this is a good introduction. I've also got a few clips of classmate "first impressions," some walking tour-video of the ranch and plenty to write today, so you'll hear more from me soon. To view the video, click on the "Read more" link below. In order to give our readers the first-hand account of what it's like to experience developer boot camp, Big Nerd Ranch has permitted Brett to attend complimentary classes and has provided transportation/lodging assistance. Other than those considerations, no sponsorship or advertising relationship exists between BNR and TUAW. This series is not an endorsement of BNR's programs or teaching methodology.
TapLynx media-based iPhone app builder from NewsGator released
The iPhone app platform TapLynx from NetNewsWire was released yesterday, after months of anticipation. TapLynx provides you with a way to build media-rich iPhone applications without having to write any code. It's basically NetNewsWire's way of leveraging their RSS expertise along with their iPhone development skills, in the form of Brent Simmons. Although TapLynx users don't need Cocoa knowledge, if you're a Cocoa developer you can use TapLynx to quickly add media management features to your app. In fact, NewsGator distributes TapLynx as a Software Development Kit, making its development roots fairly obvious. Beyond the ability to customize the user interface and choose the feeds you want your app to display, TapLynx offers the unique feature of being able to do remote updates to the app. This means that you can change a number of things in the app including the look-and-feel without requiring an update to be submitted to the frustratingly slow App Store. Brent Simmons, the developer behind TapLynx, is the guy behind the perennial Mac favorite RSS reader, NetNewsWire. What many people don't know is that before he did NetNewsWire he worked at UserLand, creating tools for developers. So in some ways this is Brent returning to his roots. [Update] As commenters have pointed out, the pricing for TapLynx is a little over the top: $3,499US for an Enterprise license, which is the only type of license they offer. That makes the news of TapLynx's release a little less interesting, in my opinion.
Is the future of Mac...the iPhone?
I was chatting with my TUAW colleagues this morning about Mac versus iPhone programming. And as per usual with these conversations, we veered in the direction of unfettered speculation. It's an occupational hazard. As someone who regularly develops on both platforms, I declared that the iPhone represents the future of Mac programming. The iPhone, I posited stated, offers a great new platform without the need to be fully backwards compatible like the Mac. Our own Victor Agreda challenged me to back up that position. After a bit of time and thought, I decided to do so in this post. My key point is this: Apple's engineers have learned a lot of important design lessons during the history of OS X. When the iPhone debuted, it gave those engineers the chance to rebuild an OS and an API from the ground up. Those engineers could craft a platform and its libraries that built on the Mac's successes without dragging along its less fortunate design decisions. Yes, there were some lemon frameworks that initially made the grade, but over time, Apple has reduced their number. Even now, Apple continues its iPhone design process, adding new frameworks and APIs at a prodigious rate. The iPhone OS remains a work in progress, developing in ways and directions that the initial release two years ago could not have anticipated. And Apple does this, knowing fully that the closed platform allows them a great deal of design freedom that would not have been possible on the open Macintosh. In contrast, consider in how many ways the Mac's successful history drags the platform down. A commitment to existing APIs and historical design practices show up in nearly every Mac development project. The simple elegance of the iPhone's built-from-the-start-as-Objective-C 2.0-based API is largely missing from Cocoa libraries. Whether you're working with buttons, menus or simple text views, the iPhone development approach simply works better: beautiful 2.0-style properties, consistent API design, better-thought-out object inheritance trees, and so forth. With the iPhone, you see a great new platform evolving without the need to be fully backwards compatible Snow Leopard, with its minimal API changes has bought the Macintosh a few years of stability. But I think it's time for Apple to rethink the platform as a whole, re-imagining its API through the lens of current iPhone OS development. While Snow Leopard offers Apple the room to stay still for now, I can see Apple moving forward in a separate engineering effort to Cocoa Touch Mac, a hypothetical cross-platform OS that supports general development on iPhone and future Mac devices like my imaginary snow-princess-rainbow-pony-iTablet. The ghost of NeXT-past, as TUAW-colleague Joachim Bean puts it, still haunts us. It's time to exorcise the unhelpful bits of that pervasive spirit and usher in the new age of the iPhone and its API design examples. Mac OS X is, and has been, a superb development platform. What I'm suggesting is that iPhone OS might just be a better one.
Earn a certificate in iPhone and Cocoa Development from the University of Washington
If you've already got a degree or a little knowledge in programming and you're looking to get in on the iPhone app craze (or maybe you wish to write a Mac app -- many people still do) you may want to look at the University of Washington in Seattle. They are now offering a certificate program in iPhone and Cocoa development, which should teach you the basics of iPhone and Mac development in a mere 90 contact hours (three classes).Ars reports that the program may be extended to an online offering next year. I'd imagine that would be quite popular far beyond the borders of the UW campus. The course itself was developed with a stellar cast of advisors, including developers from NewsGator and OMNI Group, plus experts from Microsoft, Google and Disney Interactive and is "already close to capacity" for this Fall.While there are myriad books, websites and other resources for learning how to write Cocoa software, this appears to be the first continuing education certification program specifically tailored to writing iPhone apps. Yes, you can write Mac apps too, but I'm guessing the majority of attendees with have mobile dollar signs in their eyes.[via Ars]
The iPhone is a platform for coding newbies
I love hearing this about the iPhone: the San Francisco Chronicle has a piece about how Apple's little revolutionary telephone has brought a whole new crop of programmers into the development mix. People who had never before looked at code or considered writing their own applications are getting ideas about how to make better software, picking up Cocoa and Xcode books, and going to town. And strangely, we might actually have fart apps to thank for this -- people aren't just seeing the iPhone as an innovative platform, but they're seeing the App Store as an "anything goes" environment, where even their silly little idea might work. I don't know if we can pin all the credit for the burgeoning iPhone development scene on fart apps and the impression that even a monkey can make bestselling iPhone software (certainly Apple has set the bar and price for entry pretty low, both with the extremely cheap $100 fee for a developer account as well as the high quality Xcode software that comes on every Mac), but there is definitely something in this little device that's driving people to try and create their own software for it. Oh, and the money probably helps, too. Still, whether people are taking up iPhone development because they want to make millions or are just looking for another hobby, it's us, app consumers, who will benefit.
iPhone Dev 101: Useful Cocoa Development Resources
It has been a while since the last iPhone Dev 101 post (and I must apologize for that -- sometime life can get in the way of different things, and this was one of those times). In this Dev 101 post, I want to take you through a few of my favorite resources for Cocoa/iPhone development. Some of these resources are books, while others are sites, but all of the resources are valuable to up and coming developers (and experiences developers) alike. BooksSome books are just invaluable and couldn't be replaced with another. Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac is just that book. Currently in its 3rd edition, the book gives you much of the Cocoa programming information that you need to program for both the Mac and iPhone. There are only a few subtle differences in programming for these platforms, namely the use of the Cocoa Touch. If you ever have the chance, going to one of the Big Nerd Ranch Cocoa programming classes gives you the ability to learn Cocoa hands-on. Another title that is useful to beginning iPhone developers is the Beginning iPhone Development book. This book has a useful approach to stepping into the world that is programming on iPhone. It talks about numerous topics including UI design, Quartz, and OpenGL. Also covered in the book are APIs like CoreLocation and interfacing with the camera. If you already know Cocoa and a little about iPhone development, Erica Sadun's iPhone Developer Cookbook is a great jumping off point to start development. She assumes, however, that you already understand Cocoa. Continue reading to learn about more valuable books, websites, and resources for iPhone/Mac developers.
Cocotron lets you develop in Cocoa for Windows, with a little extra work
It kind of sounds like a developer's dream: create an app in Cocoa that automatically works on Windows, too. But that's what Cocotron promises, and the folks at Ecamm say the dream is there, even if it requires a lot of elbow grease. They tried using Cocotron to port an app called FileMagnet, and two months after they started, they say they did it. You can see the results above, and as they say, "Visual Studio was never opened."But of course it wasn't exactly one-click. They had to implement a number of Apple-specific methods, and there were UI bugs, strings support, and dreaded Vista compatibility to work out. But the good news is that Cocotron is all open source, and from what the Mac Daddies say, the devs working on the project are super helpful and supportive. So, not only is it getting better every day, but every bit of implementation that gets done is something that won't have to be repeated. Sounds like a lot of "fun" (for varying values of "fun" of course) for developers to be had here. The lines between Mac and PC, no matter what the commercials say, are blurring more and more every day, and this could turn out to be a way to develop in an environment as welcoming as Cocoa, and then bring programs back into an environment as widespread as Windows.
Cocotron: bringing Cocoa to Windows
Cocotron is a potentially exciting open-source project that "aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc.'s Cocoa documentation." What this means is that, in principle, Cocotron would allow an OS X Cocoa app written in Xcode to be easily cross-compiled for other OSes, particularly Windows.Of course that in principle still leaves open a bunch of practical difficulties. The guys over at Magnetism Studio (developer of FileMagnet for iPhone) have a great account of how they used Cocotron to port their Mac FileMagnet Uploader to Windows. Of course it wasn't as easy as pressing a button and having a Windows executable pop out of Xcode, but after suitable adjustments (particularly to get rid of Mac-specific code) it did make a Windows version possible. In any case, Cocotron seems poised to make cross-platform development a much less costly and time-consuming process for Mac developers.Cocotron itself is a free download and released under the MIT license.[via Daring Fireball]
AppLoop brings automated application development to the iPhone
With the iPhone SDK, Apple is pioneering a new mobile development platform that is ahead of it's time; however, this innovation comes with a major caveat: It requires Cocoa (or Objective-C) programming knowledge. You may ask "Why is this a problem?" Well, someone might have a really great idea for an iPhone application, but not have the programming knowledge to back it up and follow through with the idea. This is where AppLoop comes in.AppLoop is a brand-new service that allows anyone with a web browser and RSS feed to create an application similar to the AP News app and submit it to the App Store -- without ever writing a single line of code. Their service works by generating a .plist file on the server side (based on your choices). The file is then passed through a couple of AppleScripts that generates the code based on the choices, and compiles it. The entire app-creation process takes less than a minute to complete, and you have an application ready to be deployed to the App Store. Ad-hoc versions can be requested in advance of the app being placed on the App Store. Currently, AppLoop is offering the RSS reader application, but they have plans to add additional paid features down the road.You can find out more information about this service by visiting their website, or by watching the video [link here] above. You can also see a gallery of screenshots from one of their applications.%Gallery-34925%Thanks for the information, Eric!
AI: 'Snow Leopard' to include rewritten Finder
AppleInsider claims that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will feature (among other things) a Finder re-written entirely in Cocoa. The Finder has remained Carbon-based for the entire history of Mac OS X so far, but the long journey from those frameworks towards Cocoa seems to be reaching its end for Apple's homegrown apps. Test versions of the new Finder are being seeded to select developers in revisions of Snow Leopard with build numbers beginning with 10A. AppleInsider notes that seeds could be more broadly available to the developer community as early as tomorrow. As Ars Technica noted in June, Apple apps will also apparently come "wrapped" in Cocoa. Further deprecation of some Carbon APIs seems likely as well, but it's unclear yet as to how Snow Leopard's support for Carbon apps will differ from plain-ol' Leopard's. In addition to the Finder, improvements to support for Microsoft Exchange are expected for Mail, iCal, and Address Book. Also included is a new option for booting a Mac called ImageBoot. ImageBoot takes NetBoot a step further, allowing administrators to boot a workstation into Mac OS X directly from an image on a local disk.
JSCocoa 1.0, write Cocoa apps in Javascript
Do you want to write Cocoa applications, but happen to be handier with Javascript than with Objective-C? JSCocoa to the rescue! Similar in concept to RubyCocoa, JSCocoa provides a bridge between Webkit's JavascriptCore and Cocoa, allowing you to call C and Objective-C code, as well as build Javascript classes which inherit from Objective-C classes. Visit the Google Code page for a quickstart and some syntax explanations. JSCocoa is open source and available for subversion checkout or direct download.
