RSS MAD

Flash Lite or J2ME?

Almost a year ago, I posted a comparison between Flash Lite and J2ME.

As you probably now, the Flash Lite 2 update for Flash Professional 8 has just been released through Macromedia Labs, and it’s time to rewrite that post.

FlashLite player 2 is available

I'm sure you have read in the aggregators, but I won't do any harm to read about it once again.

FlashLite 2 player is available through the la Adobe online store, and it costs 8 € (ex. VAT).

There is no official documentation yet, and it is not possible to start developing specific content, but at least we can start testing our old FlashLite 1.1 apps against the new player ;)

You can read more about the announcement at Flash Devices.

Enjoy your new toy...

Business & marketing for the Mac Developer

The Apple Developer Connection website has added a new section that provides, among other useful tips, a collection of Business & Marketing Frequently Asked Questions, information about specific markets (like education, science & technology...).

I think it's worth a read if you are a Mac developer.

Business & Marketing for the Mac Developer

How to write unmaintenable code

And old link, that I lost, and that I found again yesterday. I love the opening quote: " Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence"

A funny read: how to write unmaintenable code

[Cocoa] Memory management and exceptions

In languages like Java and actionscript, the "runtime" manages memory, using what is called a garbage collector, that reclaims the memory occupied by an object once it determines that object is no longer accessible. In Objective-C, the programmer must release the resources that he or she has previously allocated to be used by the program.

Memory management is not difficult by itself, because the developer must follow only a few rules, but it is the source of many memory leaks, specially when the program behaves in an unexpected way.

So, what happens when we need to throw exceptions?. How can we be sure that we are not producing memory leaks?. Chris Hanson writes about it in Cocoa memory management & exceptions

Tomorrow in the papers

design-nation is in the papers. In the October's issue of MacWorld Spain, there is an articles written by me, the First Contact with Macromedia Studio 8.

Even with that article, the magazine is full of interesting contents, like a report about the .Mac services, an in-depth article about iMovieHD or a comparison between all the Macs.

If you can read Spanish, you should buy it...

Design patterns poster

I am sure you have heard about the Head First series and about the Head First Design Patterns book, because it is probably the best introductory book to understand design patterns.

Last week I was browsing amazon when I found this item: Head First Design Patterns Poster.

As its name says, it is a poster (a big one, in fact) that contains a graph (taken from the original book), not an UML diagram but a graph that explains the pattern and also the page number of the pattern in both the Gang of four and Head First Design Patterns.

It visually summarizes 18 patterns, and it is attached to the wall in front of my computer right now...

(By the way, all the links in this post will NOT earn me a comission).

And the pattern was...

Strategy. That was the name of the pattern in yesterday's post.

An example of the guess-its-name pattern

UPDATED: This is the Strategy Pattern. So, the title of the post could be "An example of the strategy pattern in actionscript"

Professor Coupling has been enjoying his well deserved hollidays after conquering the world (yes, since the last time we knew about him he seems to have succeeded with his evil plan).

But ruling the world is quite boring. Professor Coupling misses the old times, when nobody understood him, when he could hate all the world's leaders because they ignored him... Now he has to deal with a lot of paperwork everyday, and he misses when he could hang around with his troops, telling jokes, and drinking beer.

So, he has decided that, to combat this mortal boredom, he wants to see a millitary parade everyday. A different parade everyday, formed by a different selection from his troops. One day he will ask his Marshal to form a parade with the cows from the company B, another day he will want a parade formed by all the sheeps whose name contains an "a"... Evil geniuses...

[Cocoa] Some links

In the last weeks there have been some interesting posts about Cocoa. In Theobroma Cacao, Scott Stevenson has posted two articles about key-value coding:

• Key-Value Coding (KVC) and Generic Programming
• NSArray and KVC

In Mac Geekery, codepoet has posted two tutorials about Core Data:

• Core Data as a Cheap Database
• Multiple Entities in a Core Data Database

[Cocoa] Introduction to memory management

Informit published an article a few days ago about memory management in Cocoa, called A Java Programmer's Introduction to Objective-C: Memory Management.

The article focuses on the differences between Java and Cocoa regarding memory management, and it can be useful as an introduction to the most important, powerful and complex aspect of Objective-C, which is the lack of a garbage collector.

A Java Programmer's Introduction to Objective-C: Memory Management

[J2ME] Netbeans Mobility Pack 5.0 beta

Yesterday was a busy day at NetBeans. Not only they have released NetBeans 5.0 beta, but also Mobility Pack 5.0 beta

At first glance, there are some new features that will make our life a bit easier: JSR 172 ( webservices ) support, improved UI designer, and improved support for emulators.

More information and downloads here: Java ME MIDP Development for NetBeans IDE 5.0

[J2ME] Some articles of interest

Sony-Ericsson's Developer World has published the third article in a series about 3D programming. This is new article is about programming particle systems

Here are the links to the three articles:

• 3D programming tutorial for mobile devices using M3G
• 3D programming tutotial part two: Light 3D theory and orientation
• 3d programming tutorial part three: particle systems and immediate mode rendering

Sun Developer Network has published the second article in a series about ecryption in MIDP

• MIDP Application Scrutiry 4: Encryption in MIDP

An interesting post about floats

Ridiculous_fish has published a very interesting post about floating point numbers. Although it is oriented to explain how things work in the Cocoa world, it brings a lot of useful information about floats.

I think it is really worth to check it out.

Float