Cocoa Is My Girlfriend

Having finally decided that I prefer the 1920×1200 display of the 17″ Macbook Pros I am finally committing to one size of laptop. To help force myself into that commitment I am going to be selling my gently used late 2008 15″ Macbook Pro.

The specs are:

• 2.53 Ghz Intel Core Duo
• 4GB RAM
• 320 GB Harddrive
• 512 Nvidia Video cards (9400 and 9600)
• 2 USB
• 1 FW/800

All of the original hardware and equipment are included.

The asking price is $1,800.00 plus shipping.

The machine is in perfect condition as shown in these photos on flickr (http://tr.im/kQ11).

If you are interested in this machine please contact me at marcus at cimgf dot com.

Thanks to the ability to have configurations in a Core Data Managed Object Model and being able to save data to multiple Persistent Stores, it is possible to have a Core Data Model that is constructed from not only an internal model, but from the models of all the plug-ins that are loaded into the application.

In this example we are going to build a basic application with the following requirements:

• A plug-in framework
• Plug-ins can extend the managed object model of the application
• Removal of a plug-in should not corrupt the persistent store.

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In some recent discussions I have been shocked to realize that many developers treat DEBB as gospel. This is a terrible idea. DEBB is written by people like me and I am a moron.

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As part of working with the print world I occasionally have to actually print something out. Publishers like to have paper copies of contracts, tax documents, etc. Its a pain in the rear and outdated but a necessary evil at this point.

One such occasion happened today and I needed to mail out a new signed contract to THe Pragmatic Programmers. As luck would have it, I lost my aging copy of Mail Factory, an app that prints nice mailing labels, since the last time I needed to print a label. No big deal, I went to their website and tried to download a new copy. Since the last time I used it, about a year ago, they have cancelled that product and rebranded it Labels & Addresses. Still no big deal, I downloaded the new application and recreated my label.

When I went to print the label I saw in the preview window that they printed “trial version” on the label. Ok, now this is starting to get annoying. If you are going to let me demo the software, let me demo it! Don’t put trial version on the very first label I try to print!

I took a deep breath, remembered that I have been using their software for many years now and decided to just buy a license. They even took my old license in and gave me a discount. Blood pressure dropped, things were fine. Then I ran into their payment processor — Digital River.

I am stunned, stunned, that anyone is still using these thieves! Immediately they try to charge me a “license backup” fee which is an Opt-Out. Annoyed, I opt out of that. On the payment page I have a choice for PayPal. Surprise, there is a $3.50 “manual processing fee” for PayPal. This is NOT 1998! Still, I wanted to print a pretty label so I back out, add a credit card and hit process. I am then presented with this:

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Did my order go through or not? Who knows? I check my credit card provider, no charge. But are they slow or did it fail?

I contact the software vendor but they are only open until noon EST. Guess I will find out tomorrow or the next day since their site claims they strive to respond within 1-2 days. A happy customer this does not make.

Advice

Do not do this to your customers. Stop using these payment processing services that charge you insane amounts of money and screw your customers over. Spend a day (yes it only takes ONE day) and write your own that links to Google or PayPal. Or just use E-Junkie like I do. This is a customer facing system. When you bend your customers over with additional fees, cryptic error messages and other junk, they are not going to come back to you and say “please sir I would like some more”.

Also, respond to customer email within 24 hours. Don’t let it sit. Don’t give your customers a 7 hour window per day that you handle email. This is just bad.

My Solution

I deleted their software, will be asking for a refund (IF they ever charge me) and I wrote the label by hand. I will not be going back to them any time in the future for any of their software unless they stop using Digital River.

As most of you know, Scotty is hosting a developer’s conference next year in England. To make this event even more enticing, he has just announced a Christmas offer.

Sign up for MacDev2009 before the 24th of December and get FREE copies of both Code Collector Pro and Changes App together worth over £40.

There are going to be some great speakers at this event and I am looking forward to it.

Now that the NDA has been lifted we can all finally come out of the closet :)

If you have not heard, O’Reilly is hosting a conference on November 18, 2008 to discuss all things iPhone. I have been invited to attend the conference as a Panelist.

Please come and join the conference, if nothing else, to heckle me :)

iPhone Live

The list of speakers (as opposed to panelists), is quite impressive and definitely worth the trip.

Speakers

After reading Fraser Speirs’ excellent write-up on his conversion over to git, I followed a few of the links to find a bash script to display your current git branch in the command prompt. Following yet another link from that post showed how to convert the bash script to zsh.

Here is my contribution to move that from the prompt to the right side of the screen.

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function parse_git_branch {
  git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}
function precmd() { RPS1="%~$(parse_git_branch)" }
export PS1='> '

Note that the last line just gives me a very short left hand prompt which I prefer.

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I was not born an Objective-C developer. I know that in some circles that is considered a mortal sin. Before learning Objective-C and Cocoa I had developed in a great number of languages dating back to the early 1980’s. I tell you this so that what you are about to read next is taken in the light that it was intended.

Take a look at the following lines of code:

- (void)doSomethingSpecial
{
	myVar.itsAttribute = 10;
	myOtherVar.itsAttribute = 20;
}

Now tell me, what is myVar and myOtherVar. Is it an object or a struct? Can’t tell from that piece of code can you. That is half of my argument against dot syntax in Objective-C. It makes the meaning of your code unclear. Objective-C is known for its self documenting nature. Dot Syntax removes that.

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As you can probably imagine, we have been heads down coding for the past month. Can I tell you what I am working on? Nope and if you are in the community you can guess why.

However, here is a hint.

What does a deadline look like?

And my desk to go along with that link:

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