Wednesday 22 September 2010

One to one meetings

This is a brilliant element for software team managers. While I was working for Realtime Worlds, we used to do these with my manager David Lofthouse. These meetings provide a lot of friendliness and comfort between the manager and managees.

Every week (or every other week) at the same time, 15 min-ish. Most of the time, there was not much to talk about, except the occasional "recently I have been having isolated tasks, I would like to work more together with people" and David would assign me tasks accordingly where possible. Read about 1:1 meetings from Michael Lopp:
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/09/22/the_update_the_vent_and_the_disaster.html

Thursday 9 September 2010

Snake game with Canvas

Just made a little snake game using sensational Canvas control intruduced with html5:

http://www.gorkempacaci.name.tr/snake-canvas/

* Thanks to Weeble and Ozgur Akgun for bug reports.

Wednesday 16 June 2010

Phyton's range method in C# (or .net)

I don't frequently write phyton, nor am an expert on it. But I had a crush on Phyton's 'range' function and was looking for a subtitute on C#, especially after all these new functional programming elements.

Apparently, there was one identical implementation: Enumerable.Range! It's come with C# 3.0.

See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1271378/is-there-an-equivalent-of-pythons-range12-in-c

Saturday 15 May 2010

Adobe vs Apple deal

Reading:
1. Steve Jobs' arguments about why they don't support Flash on iPhone and iPad: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

2. Adobe's passive-agressive response: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/files/AdobeAppleAd.pdf

3. Adobe's CEO answering on the topic: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/tab/liveblog/


I agree with the CEO guy on that the technological issues are not enough of an issue to ban flash development for iPhone. As far as I know, iPhone doesn't support Java neither:

Jobs: "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain." (source)

It doesn't take a Java fan to say it is very unfair to Java. Java's still serving us very well in many levels. (Altough Java programmers getting paid more IS a sign that it is dieing, Java is not only a programming language (*).)

Apple does have the tendancy to provoke a closed community with a sense of eliteness, and it has so far worked good for them. If they (and with 'they', I mean both customers and producers of iPad and iPhone) are fine with less applications then there is not much to say. Indeed, Jobs' manifest may be targeting only the Apple customers who demand Flash, telling them not having Flash is just another way to separate them from the crowd.

They must be making huge moneys from the app store, and freely available flash applications on the web would not help much. I wonder how many of those applications on the store would be obsolete if only iPhone supported flash?

I also am long disturbed with the Flash monopoly on rich internet applications and hoping to see what people will do with HTML5. But that's another topic.

--

Thinking Adobe had bought Macromedia only a few years ago, and Macromedia's Flash is now Adobe's most discussed product, It surely was a good buy.