I don't remember if this was the case ten years ago — I'm not sure there even was a default Credits file — but I'm quite sure it was my own idea to thank my Mom in AppKiDo's About box:

It bears repeating: Thanks, Mom! I love you!

I guessed, or maybe saw somewhere, that Okamoto manages John Geleynse. Today I was thinking about Developer Relations again and came across Geleynse's LinkedIn page, where he describes his dual role as both Director of Technology Evangelism and User Experience Evangelist at Apple.

Geleynse's mission, as I understand it, is to help developers be Apple developers in the strongest possible sense of the term. He and his team help us learn and use Apple technology, and he helps us design user experiences that are up to Apple's standards.

I see he's not responsible for the sort of plumbing issues that are most often complained about, like Radar, like app reviews and rejections, or like the recent fiasco with WWDC tickets being revoked. But he might be someone to bug (assuming he's approachable) about the uncertainty around sandboxing.

I saw Geleynse helping someone at a Tech Talk years ago, and he seemed interesting. I wonder if he'll give a talk or have some sort of presence at WWDC other than hosting the Apple Design Awards.

Director, Technology Evangelism
Apple Inc.
Public Company; 10,001+ employees; AAPL; Consumer Electronics industry
December 2002 – Present (9 years 6 months)
Responsible for directing a team of technology Evangelists who:

• Provide the technical guidance and insight needed by 3rd parties to build elegant, attractive, innovative, connected, integrated, and great software solutions for iPad, iPhone, and Mac
• Promote advanced iOS and OS X technologies and software development techniques to the 3rd party ISV and software development community
• Work with Apple’s engineering and interface design teams to efficiently address technology adoption issues faced by 3rd party software developers
• Track 3rd party developer technology needs and communicate them cross-functionally within Apple
• Define and manage the technical content for the annual Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) and annual Tech Talks
• Manage and host the annual Apple Design Awards

User Experience Evangelist
Apple Inc.
Public Company; 10,001+ employees; AAPL; Consumer Electronics industry
November 1999 – Present (12 years 7 months)
The user experience for Mac OS X applications encompasses the visual appearance, interactive behavior, and assistive capabilities of software.

Primary responsibilites include:

• Working one on one with 3rd party software development team to ensure that products they're building deliver a truly Mac OS X user experience
• Improving the user interfaces of 3rd party software products via design audit/review meetings in which every application window, dialog, palette, toolbar, and icon is reviewied for Aqua compliance and the overall usability and interaction design is analyzed and re-designed
• Defining the lions-share contents of each revision of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• Working closely with Apple OS Engineering to ensure Aqua adoption issues faced by 3rd party developers are addressed.

Dash, by Bogdan Popescu, is a brilliant developer utility that removes friction from two key areas of programming: looking up documentation and reusing code snippets. I haven't played with the snippets manager, and I've only played with the doc browser for a few minutes, but already I notice some excellent things:

• It's fast to open and dismiss with a hotkey.
• It performs fast live-searching as you type into the search field.
• It includes a ton of docsets for a variety of languages and platforms, not just Cocoa and iOS. See the screenshot above for a complete list.
• You can add your own docsets. The Kapeli web site helpfully points you to instructions for creating them.
• It shows an Ingredients-like table of contents listing methods, properties, etc. for the class you're looking at.
• It has options to search Google and StackOverflow, all while staying within the app.
• It handles URLs of the form "dash://foo". If you click on such a URL, the Dash window will open and perform a search for "foo". This can be useful for things like emailing URLs as pointers to documentation, and putting links in one's own notes. Who knows, maybe someday there will be a web site called "Let Me Dash That For You" (although lmdtfy.com is already taken).

In Xcode, URLs are clickable when they appear in comments. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with dash:// URLs. I've filed a Radar requesting the ability to specify more URL schemes for Xcode to recognize. In the meantime, if one wanted clickable links badly enough, I suppose one could run a local HTTP server that converts localhost URLs to Dash URLs. Maybe Dash could have such a server built in? Would it be worth it?

More suggestions:

• Add a Service that performs a search, much like a dash:// URL, but using the currently selected text in my frontmost application (which might be Dash itself).

  [UPDATE: @kapelimac informs me that Dash has had a "Lookup in Dash" Service for quite a while. My fault for not spotting it.]

• Auto-detect method names. When I come across a method call like [obj doThis:xxx withThis:yyy] I'd like to be able to double-click one of the brackets to select the whole expression, and invoke the above-mentioned Service to perform a search. I'd like Dash to recognize that what I mean to search for is "doThis:withThis:". For extra credit, be able to detect a method name in any string that contains a colon. Or if that's too hard, any string that begins with a square bracket.

• Add a social element such as Scott Anguish suggested a while back. This might not be a direction Bogdan wants to invest in, but it would be an interesting experiment. Of course, that's easy to say when I'm not the one doing the investing.

  [UPDATE: More from @kapelimac: "And another note: Dash has had Wiki pages for each method/class, but no one used them, so I removed them. And: "I plan on adding Disqus threads to all documentation pages, but I'm still waiting on a reply from @disqushelp if they allow it."]

I see from Dash's Twitter feed that Bogdan is quite actively working on the app, and in fact plans to start charging for it with the next release. I encourage you to check it out now while it is free, and to consider buying when Bogdan sets a price on it.

SpeakerDeck seems great not only for sharing but for discovering interesting presentations. Henceforth, unless I find something about SpeakerDeck that changes my mind, the CocoaHeadsNYC slides will be at <http://speakerdeck.com/u/cocoaheadsnyc>. The only drawback I can think of is that too many embedded slideshows might bog down the load time of the CocoaHeadsNYC home page. If that turns out to be the case I'm sure I can tweak WordPress to show fewer articles per page.

Well, maybe "silent" is not the word. PC users and hobbyists have long bragged about how much less they pay than Mac users for equivalent or greater horsepower. Yet, by this very argument, PC customers benefit far more from harsh labor conditions than Apple customers. And over the years many more Windows computers have been sold than Apple computers (another point of pride for the PC crowd). Which community has the greater guilt?

In the decades that Windows has dominated the desktop, why haven't PC customers used their power to force manufacturers to improve conditions? We never hear a PC hobbyist say, "I'm conflicted. I love the killer system I built for under $200, but I'm ashamed of exploiting people who have no right to unionize." We never hear noble offers to pay more for PC components, even as we are told the exact amount iPad owners should volunteer to pay so that Chinese workers can live a little better.

What's more important: humane working conditions, or saving twenty bucks on a graphics card that will let you play the latest game at 50 frames a second instead of 40? How many Xbox workers have to threaten suicide before somebody delivers a petition to Microsoft?

I'm being deliberately inflammatory here. I don't think there's a simple "me good, you bad" answer for either side. My point is that it's easy to point a finger if you never examine your own actions.

By the way, a really interesting book on migrant factory workers in China is "Factory Girls", by Leslie T. Chang.

If you have streaming Netflix, you can see for yourself right now. Perhaps you can check whether I'm mistaken. The episode is called "The Cage", and the moment I'm talking about is at 2:29. It looks like Spock swipes his finger in the air from left to right, causing the screen to change from a view of space to a map of some planets. He then says "Records show the Talos group has never been explored."

I learned from Wikipedia that although this episode was completed in 1965, it wasn't broadcast until 1988. Even with the 23-year delay, I wonder if it was the first example on TV of a spatial gesture-based UI, long predating "Minority Report" and the Kinect. Maybe not; I haven't watched all that much science fiction.

I'd like to see someone try to use this as a prior art argument in a patent lawsuit, as was done with the tablets in "2001: A Space Odyssey".

One of the first things they teach programmers about comments is, "Don't merely repeat in the comment what the line of code literally does." A laughable example such as the following is usually given.

x = y * y;  // Set x to the square of y.

In general I abide by this rule, but there is one exception: when I need a comment to turn a line of code into a section of code.

I use inline comments to break a block into logical sections. Taken by themselves, the comments tell a story. For example, here's a method that creates a cake, the way some people would write it:

- (xxx *)cake
{
    // Bake in oven.
    xxxxx;
    xxxxx;
    xxxxx;
 
    // Add icing.
    xxxxx;
    xxxxx;
 
    return xxxxx;
}

The above code doesn't look right to me, because it looks like the "return xxxxx;" is part of the "Add icing" step when it's not. To rectify this I add a dumb comment that puts "return xxxxx;" into its own section:

- (xxx *)cake
{
    // Bake in oven.
    xxxxx;
    xxxxx;
    xxxxx;
 
    // Add icing.
    xxxxx;
    xxxxx;
 
    // Return the result.
    return xxxxx;
}

I do something similar with methods that run through a gauntlet of reasons for possibly returning early. If they survive the gauntlet, I add a dumb "If we got this far…" comment.

- (BOOL)shouldEatIceCream
{
    // Is the ice cream poisoned?
    if (xxxxx)
    {
        return NO;
    }
 
    // Is it my birthday?
    if (xxxxx)
    {
        return YES;
    }
 
    // If we got this far, we shouldn't eat the ice cream.
    return NO;
}

I try to think of something more intelligent to say in these comments, but often I don't.

I think O'Reilly's arguing on the right side for the wrong reasons. People most certainly can and should protest a business if they feel it is doing something wrong.

The real issue is not whether it's wrong to protest a "business decision". The real issue is whether being gay has anything to do with morality in the first place. The people who are calling for Ellen to be fired believe it does, and the real answer is that that is wrong, not that business decisions are somehow exempt from protest.

He might be playing a little misdirection game here. Notice how he compares this to calls for him to be fired. (For me, Glenn Beck and Pat Buchanan came to mind.) He claims those are also wrong. I think he wants to be able to shoot down any attacks on him by saying "Hey, I defended the liberal side when it came to a gay person. Aren't you being just as bad as OneMillionMoms?"

I'll give O'Reilly more credit the day he stops calling homosexuality a "lifestyle", which is code for "It has moral implications."

I did enjoy his mocking the OneMillionMoms for declining to appear on the show. And the fact remains that he is defending Ellen Degeneres, for which she's rightly thanked him.

See also "Ellen Addresses Her JCPenney Critics".

[EDIT: Switched the second and third paragraphs.]

AppKiDo is a documentation browser for the Cocoa APIs. As such, it needs information about all sorts of API symbols: class names, protocol names, method names, function names, typedefs, and constants. This information is scraped from two places: Objective-C header files and special bundles called docsets.

A docset contains a bunch of HTML files (the documentation) along with a "docset index" — a SQLite database file named docSet.dsidx. One thing the docset index does is it maps each API symbol to two file paths:

• The header file where the symbol is declared.
• The HTML file where the symbol is documented.

The way AppKiDo is designed, it needs to know what framework every symbol belongs to. NSString and its methods belong to the Foundation framework, NSView and its methods belong to the AppKit framework, and so on. I've been getting this framework information by querying two tables in the docset index:

• ZHEADER, which contains paths to header files, along with the name of the framework each header file belongs to. NSString.h belongs to the Foundation framework, NSView.h belongs to the AppKit framework, and so on.
• ZTOKENMETAINFORMATION, which contains information about each API symbol, including a foreign key to ZHEADER.

(By the way, the docset index is actually a Core Data database. Normally one shouldn't access Core Data's underlying tables directly, but AppKiDo's access is read-only so there's no risk of corrupting the database, and SQL queries were simpler to implement than reverse-engineering the managed object model. Also, the docset index is relatively static, although that's a topic for another discussion.)

Now here's the thing. For some symbols, ZTOKENMETAINFORMATION is missing the foreign key to ZHEADER. This means you can't tell purely by querying the database which header file those symbols are declared in or which framework they belong to.

As far as I can tell, this is simply a bug in the docset. I suspect if I studied up on how docsets get created (which I should really do someday) I'd have some idea why the bug is there. In any case, it's there, and when I get a chance to write it up in more detail I'll submit a Radar.

If you have Xcode 4, and if Apple hasn't fixed the docset by the time you read this, you can see an example of this. In an iOS project, type "NSFetchedResultsControllerDelegate" and Option-click on it. You'll see that the Quick Help popup is missing the "Declared In" line that appears for most other symbols.

Compare this to the Quick Help popup for NSString:

Because AppKiDo (or, for iOS docs, AppKiDo-for-iPhone) can't tell what framework the affected symbols belong to, it never loads the documentation for those symbols.

My workaround was to add a second query that assumes the path to a symbol's HTML file contains the name of its framework. This is not always true, but it's true often enough for AppKiDo to figure out that NSFetchedResultsControllerDelegate belongs to Core Data.

Doing the second query means AppKiDo takes a bit longer to start up, which you may or may not be able to tell given how long startup is already. You probably wouldn't notice except that the query contains a LIKE clause, which makes it relatively slow.

For more gory details, you can see the relevant commit on GitHub.

So now you know.

With the death and canonization of Steve Jobs and the emergence of the Jobs biography as a kind of sacred text for managers, the ranks of bosses who see Bad Steve's nastier traits as something to imitate is liable to swell.

Of the many, many documented things Jobs did while bringing Apple to where it is today, are there really managers out there picking the worst parts of his personality and deciding that's what to emulate? Or for that matter using Isaacson's bio as a "sacred text"? I haven't seen or heard of this management trend, but I haven't been around a lot of managers lately.

It's been pointed out that most of Apple's historic turnaround, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, happened while Jobs was sick. So I guess managers who want to emulate him should try to get cancer. You know, like those jazz musicians who thought if they shot heroin they'd play like Charlie Parker.

Speaking of drugs, Jobs supposedly said that Bill Gates would have been better off if he'd tried LSD in his youth. Why aren't managers following that advice? Or are they?

It's certainly possible there is a correlation between unpleasant personality traits and people who rise to the top in business. Let's just say such a correlation is not entirely implausible. That does not mean that by going out of your way to hurt people's feelings you will become a more successful manager or executive.

Here's Guy Kawasaki on the things he learned from Steve Jobs:

Notice that "be a jerk" is not on the list, which Guy has also written up in various places including Google+.

By the way, Guy gave an excellent version of this talk at MacTech Conference. MacTech will be making it available for free — soon, I hope.