Tuesday, April 06, 2004|
popping up from the gopher hole for a moment Sorry I haven't been posting regularly. I've been busy getting lost in a few different things. Mainly, I had an attack of gout in my knee -- those of you out there who have gout can understand what that was like (they drained 100cc's of fluid from my knee, which was just as enjoyable as it sounds). I've also been dealing with the afore-mentioned poker obsession, and I've been delving into Cocoa some more. The poker obsession has been maintained by the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour series, a vast number of Poker-related blogs, and some wonderful software (poki-poker, which is based on some AI research software that has done pretty good in the online poker games). The software has learned enough about how I play (badly, of course) that my initial run of good luck has been trimmed back, and I can no longer bluff it out of a pot. Damn you smart software! My latest foray into Cocoa involves the NSController family. I've raved about it before, but I just have to rave about it again. I don't know how many times I've written the code that keeps the values in the UI consistent with the values in the internal program... It's some of the most tedious and error-prone work that I've had to do. If I had a dollar for every time I've thought "The computer should just know how to do this," I could buy us all a sandwich, and briefly end hunger in our time. More importantly, and probably a bit more scary for those of us who have honed procrastination into a finely calibrated art, it removes a lot of the easy excuses as to why we haven't started (or finished) the Great American Software Product. On the other hand, it could also result in the same thing that happened when programs like Pagemaker became available -- a lot of people suddenly thought they were layout artists, and we were all subjected to horrible fonts and strangely colored flyers. In any case, that is already happening to a certain extent in Cocoa software circles. We can blame RealBasic for that. (Funny, I wanted to verify a link to PerversionTracker here, but the company I work for has blocked that site because it thinks it's a sex site. It's not, it's a site that ruthlessly skewers badly designed software (and was among the first to point out the correllation between RealBasic and badly designed UI's). I understand why my company thinks it's a sex site. The name is a play on the name of another software tracking site, VersionTracker. It's a funny joke, but one that filtering proxies don't get.)
I guess I'd better get busy. |
Last update: 6/29/2005; 4:23:31 PM .
