A little off topic, but a good tip none the less…

Apple recently released Safari 4 beta and if you haven’t given it a try, I highly recommend you do.
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This post is the third in a series on the book Xcode 3 Unleashed, by Fritz Anderson. I’ll wrap up the review in this post by covering both highlights of the book and suggestions for future editions.

Highlights
Let’s begin with the highlights of this book, and there are many. You’ll notice from the moment you crack open the book, it’s filled with color. Not just color figures, all code examples are in color, as in, color syntax highlighting. And the colors match what you’ll find in Xcode, how cool is that?
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If you’ve been reading the iPhone related tips on this site, you’ll want to point your browser to my new iPhoneDeveloperTips.com blog!

I’ll continue to write tips here as well, however, the primary focus of my career is now iPhone centric, so the bulk of my writing will focus on the iPhone.

To get things rolling on the iPhone blog, I have migrated the iPhone tips shown here to the new blog. If you are the author of any comments on iPhone tips that started on this site, and have a few minutes to spare, I would encourage you to copy/paste your comments onto the new blog.

For the iPhone developers in the crowd, I hope you find the new site a valuable resource.

John

I’ve been getting a great deal of interest in the iPhone developer tips section of this blog. So much that I’ve decided to move all iPhone centric tips to another blog, you guessed it, iPhoneDeveloperTips.com.

If you have ideas, suggestions or questions that might make for good iPhone tips, pass along your thoughts by commenting here or dropping me an email.

This blog won’t vaporize, however, I am in the midst of a transition after nearly 8 years in mobile development with J2ME to move the iPhone, so the pace may slow a bit.

If you are involved in working with the iPhone or Xcode as a developer, author of a book, trainer/courseware development or otherwise working on the iPhone, send me an email if you are interested in exploring the possibility of a partnership or other opportunities for working together. It’s been a good run with J2ME, where I’ve had the opportunity to work with many of world’s most prominent names in the mobile device business. I’m ready for what’s next, and this time around it’s all about the iPhone!

I was contacted by VisionMobile, a market analysis and strategic advisory firm in the wireless sector, to pass along a link to their most recent survey for developers who are building mobile applications.

Although this is not a Mac tip or trick, I know there is a great deal of application development done on a Mac for a range of mobile devices and platforms. Also, seeing as all developers who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing to win an Amazon voucher worth $1000, I thought you might be interested :)

The survey consists of 5 pages of questions, somewhere around 10-15 minutes of your time. The deadline to complete the survey is Friday, June 27th. The winner will be announced on Friday, July 4th.

If you are working with mobile devices, give it a go, your insight might be helpful to someone else down the road…

My day job is to lead the developer relations and community building efforts for Mojax, an Ajax framework for writing mobile applications. This type of work is a good fit given I’ve been in software development for nearly 20 years, working in roles from software engineering to training, chief architect to principal consultant, along with the fact that I enjoy an outward facing role that offers the chance to get out and talk technology with others.

The primary goal of an evangelist is to create a thriving community around a technology and/or product. One key aspect of this effort is to educate by providing insightful content and tutorials. To that end, I recently wrote an article for Dr. Dobbs that demonstrates how to build a Mojax application that searches for and displays real-estate property information.

The example that I created is built around the web services offered by Zillow.com, which provides a set of interfaces for accessing real-estate property information.

The figure below is a screen shot of the application running on a mobile device emulator. The information shown is from the primary residence of Bill Gates (and just who has the unenviable job of cleaning those 19+ bathrooms?)

Another tool of a developer evangelist is the screencast. If you’d like to see some of my work, and learn more about Mojax, you can kill two birds with one stone by following the links below:

• Mojax Introduction – A Short Tour
  
• Developer Tools Installation
• Build Your First Mojax Application
• Importing Mojax Examples into Eclipse
• RSS Viewer in 15 Minutes (Eclipse Project Source)

And I’d be remis if I didn’t tell you that I don’t really advocate killing birds with stones :)

…NetBeans TV, that is. The short screencast I created on using NetBeans, Ruby and rb-appscript to control scriptable applications on a Mac can now be seen on NetBeans.tv! If you aren’t familiar with NetBeans.tv, it is a popular extension of the NetBeans.org site, focused on connecting the people, projects and technologies surrounding NetBeans.

Rob Demmer from the NetBeans team contacted me about posting the video on NetBeans.tv. I’m all for spreading the word in the developer community and if the video I created can play even a small part in helping to reach a few more developers or otherwise introduce a new technology to this audience, count me in.

As far as NeBeans.tv, there are several sections to the site: Interviews, Community, News, Screencasts and On the Road. The last section is quite interesting as it is a video diary of sorts that chronicles the days and nights of two guys traveling around the world meeting NetBeans developers (which sounds like a great job, if you can get it). It’s an interesting website, definitely worth a look.

If you would like to watch the video, as it appears on the NetBeans.tv site, click the image below: