Friday, January 01, 2010

Year of 2010

Today is first day of 2010 and Cuppa wishes everyone a GREAT year ahead!! :)

I am now sitting in office with a cup of warm water in hand, typing my blog. No doubt today is a public holiday and the whole office is empty. I still choose to go to office for two reasons:

First I want to meet a deadline on Jan 6, and this deadline was only known to me 2 days ago. However this time I take up the challenge voluntarily. The reasons behind this leads us to the second reason why I wanna to work...

The platform is on Mac OS X, and in fact I am asked to develop an iPhone application. For this purpose, my boss bought an iPhone, an iMac, paid for my Apple developer network subscription, and got me a reference book.

As you may recall, I have been a standard Linux fanboi for sometime, always extolling the virtue of open source and how pretty Linux is. However after many years of tinkering with the Linux (10+ years, count it) and a full year of kernel development, I found out Linux is just still acting like a young, angry teenager at puberty, with ad-hoc, and often messy appearances. What I mean is its evolution has not been stabilized to the point developers can actually invest time and energy on developing something, without worrying the investment would go south in the next few releases. A lot of features have no documentations, and even documentations exist, they are either outdated, or down right wrong. And we are talking about a time span of roughly 10 years. Having said all these, I am not turning my back to Linux, in fact, I am typing this blog on my Ubuntu machine. What I plan is Linux development will be put on backseat for sometime while I am exploring the mac. I think I have pretty much enough of Linux after seeing the state of its kernel, and messing around with the kernel will be something I don't really enjoy doing in the near future.

Back to Mac platform, I have been thinking to explore it for a long time, but until recently I have no much motivation to jump in due to the steep prices. This time I am given a real world requirement and all development tools free, I really have no reason to let the opportunity slip pass me.

So far, I have been playing with xcode, the Apple IDE, and the rest of development suite. These applications are quite easy to use and so far I am trying to wrap my brain around objective C, which is a superset of ANSI C with support for objects and messaging.

Still reading...

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