http://alexvollmer.com Optimistic reflections based on hard-won pessimism Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:16:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Getting objects to talk to one another in Objective-C is a easy as passing a message from one to the other. These messages are typically passed through the message-invocation mechanism of using the square-braces to bind a message and arguments to a receiver. Most of the time this is a ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/06/24/cocoas-ways-of-talking/ The iPhone Ecosystem We live in a very interesting time for application development. The distinctions between desktop, browser and mobile applications are blurring more and more every day. "Ubiquitous platform" applications, like Evernote, are where the future is because it reduces the major hurdle of access for users. As time goes ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/05/26/the-iphone-and-web-apis/ I am pleased to announce the release of Peepcode's latest screencast about MacRuby written by yours truly with Geoffrey Grossenbach and technical editing by Laurent Sansonetti. Ever since I saw Laurent's and Rich Kilmer's presentations about MacRuby and HotCocoa at RubyConf '08, I've been jazzed about what MacRuby brings to ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/05/15/peepcode-meets-macruby/ This is the first in a series of posts I'll be writing about my experiences developing the EvriVerse iPhone application for work. Since the end of 2008 I've been getting more and more into Cocoa for both the iPhone and Mac. The more I work on it, the more fun ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/05/14/typeahead-search-on-the-iphone/ After several months of work, I'm pleased to announce the release of Evri's EvriVerse for the iPhone. We've tried to capture the unique things we do at Evri into the awesomeness that is the iPhone. I won't spill all the details here, so check out out the "official" company post. I've ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/05/12/introducing-the-evriverse/ One of the best ways to really learn the ins and outs of anything is to immerse yourself in all the gory details. Not only do you learn what works, what doesn't, what's elegant and what sucks, but you also start to grok the inner-workings. I just spent the last ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/05/07/the-great-git-setup/ I spent the last week on a top-secret iPhone application at work. It has been a blast, in part, because it's been so fun to learn so much new information so quickly. That has meant trying out lots of ideas and, more often than not, rolling them back and trying ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/03/14/using-git-as-a-safety-net/ In the last few days at work I've been migrating a home-grown REST framework over to the Jersey project (the reference implementation of JSR-311 or, JAX-RS). Previously I had done some work moving JRuby into the VM and launching Merb. It was satisfying to figure out how to do that, ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/03/04/what-jersey-means-to-java/ In the latest update of The Chronicles of Stuff Alex Figures out at Work, our intrepid hero figures out how to run Merb inside an embedded Jetty instance! Now you may ask yourself, "for the love of God, why would you want to do something like this?" Well, at work we ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/02/11/you-put-merb-in-my-jetty/ This past week I spent some quality time with git's history-rewriting capabilities. Over the past few weeks I had been working on a rather long-lived branch full of JRuby and Merb patches. Some of the fixes and changes were ready to go in the next release, others were still a ... http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/01/31/rewriting-history-with-git/