My thoughts // Emre

WWDC Bash

bontouchcommon:

WWDC 2012 has come to an end. The Moscone Center will now host other events, among them Google I/O 2012 later this month.

Last Thursday the annual WWDC Bash was held in Yerba Buena Gardens. All the attendees were invited. There was food, drinks, music and great people to meet and talk to.

Neon Trees had a live performance.

It has truly been a great week, and an awesome first experience to WWDC. I’m already looking forward to next years conference.

Even if the WWDC is over, there will be more posts coming soon. We will discuss new technologies, share code and knowledge. Stay tuned!

WWDC Update

bontouchcommon:

For the last 2 days I’ve been attending sessions and labs at WWDC. Sessions are ~1 hour lectures where Apple developers explain current and new technologies. Labs are where you can bring you own code and ask experts for help. It’s amazing how much you learn in a day. And night :)

Yesterday I happened to be in line for a session with Ben, a software engineer at GoPano, a successful kickstarter project for an iPhone lens that records 360° videos.

It has some issues with focusing, but still a really cool product! Below is a recording I made, it’s possible to pan the video and look around while it is playing!

At the conference there is also a big *** table made out of 120 iPads, that display the top 20000 [sic!] apps in the AppStore. When an app is downloaded, the icon flashes in realtime, its very cool.

I’m also very happy to see that our own Rebtel app is one of the apps displayed!

Now it is time to get some sleep, but I will keep you posted with more soon.

WWDC Day 1

bontouchcommon:

The alarm was set to 5:00, but at 4:30, I was already awake. Using jetlag to my advantage I arrived at Moscone Center at 6:00, 4 hours before the Keynote, to start lining up. It’s clear that the keynote is very popular, the line was already huge, and was getting bigger by the minute.

The keynote was both entertaining and informing. There are a lot of new futures, hardware and software under development. We’ll look into those shortly but first you have to watch the first 2.5 minutes of the keynote if you haven’t already done so!

New MacBook Pro

Besides announcing updated hardware for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, Apple introduced a whole new line of computers. MacBook Pro with Retina display. It has a 15.4 inch screen with 2880-by-1800 resolution, just amazing. With a thickness of 1.8 cm it’s almost as thin as the MacBook Air and weighs only 2 kg.

OS X Mountain Lion

Apple’s next operating system is due next month at a price of only $19.99. There are lots of improvements and new features that unify the user interface of iOS with OS X. With iMessage you can send and receive messages between all the iDevices and other Mac computers. Swiping left with 2 fingers from the right side of the trackpad slides in the notification center, which looks and behaves like the notification center on iOS. Want to do a presentation without connecting a cable to the computer? Now you can do that with AirPlay mirroring, which lets you show the contents of the screen on an Apple TV. These are just some of the new features, there are a lot more!

iOS 6

Since Bontouch is all about mobile, the improvements on iOS is the most important topic for us at WWDC. Fortunately there are lots of new exciting features! While the complete list can be found on Apple’s website, here is a summary:

• Redesigned Maps app The Maps app has been recreated with Apple’s design. It now provides turn by turn navigation with Siri directing you to your destination. Also there is a breathtaking 3D flyover view of big cities.

• Improved Siri Siri now understands a lot more, in a lot of new languages and works on the new iPad. She now answers sport and movie related questions. Unfortunately Swedish is not one of the new languages.

• Facebook Like the Twitter integration, Facebook will now be integrated into the operating system. Similar to tweeting from anywhere in the phone, you will be able to post to Facebook as well. The apps on the app store get a like button and will display the total amount of likes.

• Passbook Passbook is a new built-in app that contains your tickets, coupons and more. It can for example contain your flight ticket. When you arrive at the airport it will automatically notify you to use your ticket.

• Facetime will now be available on cellular networks, so you better get a good data plan!

As you can see a lot is happening. Developers attending WWDC can’t wait to learn the details of the new features. I’m one of them and the rest of the week will be all about mastering these new features!

What I do at Splunk

Yet another timelapse, this time I wanted to capture an important part of my work at Splunk.

Also see my previous timelapse post!

Tourist in San Francisco

A while ago when my girlfriend, Sofie, visited me in San Francisco we compiled a list of stuff to do. Here is the list incase anybody wants some quick tips!

Parks and outdoors

• Bakers Beach
• Buena Vista Park
• Dolores Park
• Golden Gate Park
• Coit Tower
• Twin Peaks
• Seward Street Slides

Neighborhoods

• Fisherman’s Wharf
• Neighborhood around Coit Tower and Fisherman’s Wharf
• Russian Hill, Longbard street
• Union square

Museums

• California Academy of Sciences
• Aquarium of the Bay

Food

• China Town
• Japan Town
  • Sushi Train
• Ferry Building Marketplace
• Cheesecake Factory
• Chipotle
• P.F. Chang’s
• Corn Dog
• Deep-fried Oreos
• Deep-fried Mars bar
• Ben and Jerry’s
• Funnel Cake
• HRD Coffee Shop

Sightseeing

• Golden Gate Bay Cruise
• Golden Gate Sausalito Vista Point
• Alcatraz
• Cable Car Powel -> Fisherman’s Wharf

Sports

• Climbing
• Rent a bicycle and ride over Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and ferry back to Fisherman’s Wharf
• Hiking in Redwoods (Muir woods)

Coding @Bodega Bay

This weekend me, Boris, Marcus and Petter got a house in bodega bay and just coded for the whole time!

Here is 72 hours pushed into 2 minutes.

The time-lapse was created using iMotion HD and edited with iMovie. Both apps running on my iPad 2.

Don’t repeat yourself

We programmers love to create! That’s why we often want to start over what somebody else has done instead of reading and understanding the code. And sometimes the reimplementation doesn’t replace the original code and the project ends up with more than a single implementation for the same functionality. This will probably create more code that has to be debugged later. The old code may already been bug fixed once or twice and will contain pitfalls that you haven’t thought of.

So don’t repeat yourself. Search the project or ask someone on your team for the functionality you need. Read the code, understand it, learn something from it, refactor it if needed and enhance it.

And most importantly if you are implementing something new that may be used by others, discuss it with your team first. Put the code somewhere reachable and make it easily usable for everybody.