4s

Cristmas came early, I've got myself a present, the new iPhone, the 4s. To say I am satisfied is to say nothing - I am very happy and excited about the latest Apple product! Especially considering the fact that my current phone is iPhone 3G (not even 3Gs).

It is very snappy, quick and powerful, the camera is great, and even half-working Siri (which still does not support European maps and locations) is quite useful. It is fun and easy way to set reminders, calendar events and quickly check things. I am yet to check how it works for messages and e-mail, though I suppose it'll work just fine. I'm also surprised on how accurate the speech recognition is. Most of the times Siri gets what one says exactly right!

As much as I enjoy the fact of this upgrade, there is also a practical issue: I'm now able to check all my iOS apps on the latest hardware, which will be relevant at least a year. This is not to mention that developing for iPhone 4s would be my priority.

Christmas Comes Early!

My blog posts are going to become irregurlar for at least a month, and the main reason for that is... Christmas and New Year holidays! Unfortunately for me (or maybe just the opposite, a very fortunate side-effect) the main job I have (acting) features a 'reverse' schedule: when everybody else is having day-offs I am working and when people usually work I have a day-off.

This comes out badly only in the situation of long holidays: the New Year. The business in theatre starts looming, so drains my free time for any side-projects! :)

And these times have started early this week with the first rehearsals. So, I'm late already on this post, and this will continue into the following weeks. I'll do everything possible to keep up with the studies and blog updates, but it's going to slip from time to time: gotta make living and it's not by coding just yet! :)

Also I had some family emergency business this week which complicated things even further. It all turned out to be just fine eventually, but I had to take time off from all my other activities.

To end on a positive note though there is going to be official launch of iPhone 4s in Russia on December 16th, and that's when Christmas actually kicks in for me! :)

Watching, Watching, Watching

Week went by, and the results are quite nice, though no coding just yet.

I've watched The New Boston series of tutorials by Bucky, a really good introduction into OS X and iOS development (as well as into many other programming topics).  Overall it's a great project, but for me it's very basic, still I've learned a couple of nice tricks.  Want to thank Anton for the links once again!

I've read 3/4 of Apple's 'The Objective-C Programming Language' textbook, and also started one called 'iOS Human Interface Guidelines' also by Apple.  Fascinating read, I must say, lots of design insights there.

I've updated my iPad to iOS 5, and already enjoy it!  The two greatest features for me are Messages (now I basically do not need to SMS somebody who has a recent iPhone or an iPad), and wireless sync with iTunes (it all happens in the background).  

Reading and watching how people react to the new iPhone 4S (especially the camera and Siri), I've decided this model to be my upgrade of current iPhone 3G, which feels very old to me (not in a negative way, it's a great phone, and works just fine, but there are no updates for it).  I'll still keep it around, probably for compatibility reasons to test apps on and such just as I intend to do with the very first iPod Touch.

I am also considering applying for developer's account for MacOS X and iOS later this month to get everything set up and ready to go.  Hope will have no problems.  :)

That's it for this week, preparing to code a few examples and make a simple number-guessing game using standard Apple Foundation and UI.