Go Xcode yourself

Got a new Macbook Air 13". It's a neat machine, and osx feels great, even for a windows fan like me.
Office for mac is cool, Webstorm is working, and now I'm brushing my unix skills (Installing mysql and activating the built in php and apache), and setting up my work environment.
The good ol' x40 will remain in the family, and go to my older brother.

Another thing I got a mac for was to begin learning iOS development.
Xcode is the official iOS IDE, and after a little bit of fiddling, I still haven't decided whether I really hate Objective-c, or really misunderstand the language.

The principal is supposed to be simple - Drag and drop stuff to the view, write the outlets (Bad name), write some code and then connect them (By doing lots of ctrl+clicking).

But the Objective-c language is, well, quite weird. And the whole concept is a little more complicated than windows phone IDE, FLEX, or even Android.

I will update more about what I've learned once I do some real programming (Some web request and more elaborate controls stuff) rather than just connecting a slider and button to a label...

In the meantime, I'm really, really enjoying the Air's form factor and great performance. Only minor disadvantage - 13" screen with 1440x900 display = Really really small fonts in some web sites.

From MVC to MVP to...

MVC used to be the buzzword for client development.
Implement the model, bind it to the controller and the view, or get a framework to do that for you, and there you have it - A fast client, connected to the server, great way to deliver your application.

Or is it?
I have never seen 'clean', by the book, MVC implementation. The controller and view logic gets mixed and messed up after a couple of iterations, binding makes manipulation of data formats hard, view business logic gets implemented in controller, controller code gets implemented in the view (Sometimes because of binding), and after a while the whole code gets impossible to understand and maintain.

So what do you do?
Find a simpler paradigm, which would work!
MVP says a simple thing:
- The model stays the same. Handle data and communicate with the server/ container/ host/ whatever.
- The presenter does all the work. Business Logic, View Logic, Validation, string formatting, whatever the user does NOT do interact with.
- The view handles GUI. There's no relation between the view and the model, the presenter takes care of that.

Now let's take this a bit further, and create inheritance based MVP component:
The View extents the presenter, which extends the model, et voila!

Now you have a simpler paradigm which could actually work and expend, you can rewrite or use different views (Different devices, for example) and have your factory create the client class according to the device...

As for frameworks - There are a lot of frameworks which would do the trick, though most of them do not use the inheritance paradigm. And anyway, I like to program my own frameworks, and use 3rd party frameworks to simplify specific infrastructural tasks (Like jax-rs for REST servlet implementation, or jQuery for DOM manipulation).

So next time you hear MVC/ MVP - try to see if the inheritance model suits you. You might be surprised how simple things could get...

Bye bye flash.

In July, I published a comparison between FLEX and HTML5, and a quick follow up a week later, stating that Adobe is going HTML5.
Well, it seems like Adobe finally realized, that there is no way to make the Flash VM run over a mobile platform without either killing the machine's performance, or draining its battery.
The FLEX platform isn't dead though - Adobe is making its Air platform run as a VM for native applications, both in Android and iOS (And, of course, desktops). But as far as the web goes - Flash goes where Microsoft's Silverlight platform goes - Into the history books.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/adobe-kills-mobile-flash/

Open source support pays off!

I know JetBrains for a while now.
At Time To Know, it's the tool of choice for our leading development group. (The other one is using Flash Builder).
My team uses Eclipse and Aptana for web development, but it is far from being a good HTML/ JS/ CSS development tool - Even Developer Studio is much better than Eclipse.
Luckily, JetBrains has an open source program, that gives you a one year free license of their products for your project. I've tested PHPStorm, and it's a really, really cool tool for PHP and web development. Got my license, and liked it so much, that we're getting it for my whole team now.
Only problem - you need a strong PC to run it, but on the other hand, most IDEs these days are.
I'll be testing zend studio soon as well.

So thanks JetBrains. Open source support pays off.

Another small update about simple gallery management: A fifth site is in the works, plus we're over 100 downloads so far, which is relatively nice (I don't promote that project too much...).