It’s not a new feature of the Finder, but I think it’s cool and most folks probably don’t know about it.
In the Go to Folder... sheet, tab completion works. Makes it easier to type out a path.
‘The revolution’s just a T-shirt away!’.
“If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it.”
Just a tip, in case you didn’t realize — you can use Shark to profile an app running on your iPhone. It’s a little painful, but it’s do-able.
(Update 8:17 pm: Forgot to mention File > Symbolicate... You’ll need that too.)
Seattle Xcoders tonight: Objective-J/Cappuccino.
Seattle Xcoders: “Scott Koon will be presenting this Thursday (Nov 13th) on Cappuccino — the Objective-J web framework for building applications.”
(Afterwards we’ll go to the Luau.)
I often talk to people who are thinking of going indie — Mac and iPhone developers who want to work for themselves, who want to write cool apps and sell them without having to answer to anyone but their customers.
Here’s the advice I usually give.
Have faith
I don’t mean be blind to reality. I don’t mean give in to wishful thinking. Don’t be delusional: be rigorously honest with yourself.
I mean to have faith in your ideas and abilities. Getting recognition — or even that first bit of feedback — can be slow. It can take a lot more work to get there than you think.
But you can get there. When it looks like nobody’s noticing, have faith that someone is, or soon will be, if you keep doing your best work.
There are those nights when you think you should burn it all up and go back to the quieting hug of whatever-you-did-before. Faith in yourself, and in the world’s knack for finding good things, will keep you coding.
Work hard
There are distractions every day and night. It’s worse if you live in a city like San Francisco: there are opportunities to hang out with your tribe every minute of every day. It’s easy to talk big about your big app.
But you have to actually build it. You have to work every day. You have to sit in the chair and stay seated. And sleep and come back to the chair. You need to wear out that chair and then buy a new one and then wear out that one.
Have plans B, C, and D
Your first thing might not work out. Despite your faith, despite your hard work, your app may fail.
Be ready to write another one. As an indie, that’s one of your best strengths: turning your ship around is as easy as creating a new project in Xcode. Getting going is just a menu command away.
Write a weblog
I shouldn’t even have to say it, but I will: you need a weblog. People in the village love toys, but they also like to get to know the village toy-maker.
That’s you, and it’s a great job.
I’ve been working heavily and steadily on iPhone code lately, and it occurs to me that writing iPhone apps is like writing poetry while writing desktop apps is like writing prose.
I’m sure it’s been said before, but the point is still good: in an iPhone app, everything counts so much — every design choice, every line of code, everything left in and everything left out.
I was 16 years old when I got my first job. I was a busboy in a seafood restaurant with a view of the Chesapeake and Delaware canal. Big cargo ships went quietly by, gliding along the short cut through the peninsula, watched by people eating crabs, oysters, and shrimp scampi.
Whenever things got slow — which wasn’t that often, actually — Neelai the manager would tell us busboys to polish the silverware. "Polish polish polish!"
She always said the same thing, with humor but also in a tone that said: this is non-negotiable.
Sometimes I hear her voice as I work on iPhone code. You can’t hear her voice in text, which is too bad — you’d know why I’ve never gotten "Polish polish polish!" out of my head.
In fact, it’s in the plain middle of my head, right in the center, where the oldest stuff that sticks stays.
Not a bad start for a poet — or an iPhone developer.
Thanks to Google, I’ve found that she’s a real estate agent now.
Refresh.