We are in Seattle this weekend, staying in a hotel downtown, so of course I had to go check out Pike Place Market. I can do without the craft bazzar lower floors, but the market stalls are great. Not so perfectly turned out as the manicured Ferry Building but many great things. Sadly we couldn’t get a hotel with a kitchen so I had to pass on a lot of stuff, but there was salami. Creminelli is a small sausage and salami company in Utah and they just opened this little shop at Pike Place a couple months ago. Saturday was absurdly hot in Seattle but fortunately salami is designed to keep. I’m debating heading back down the hill before we leave to pick up some more.
I’m here with a couple hundred other iPhone people, even more devices and an unlimited supply of beer. Yes, we have been promised beer. I have even been promised vegan pizza. Adobe’s office here is very nice, we are in the atrium/cafe area that has both a cafeteria and coffee bar setup. The NDA situation has been skirted by having a quarantine zone for discussing non-public topics. The overall effect for me is something of “WWDC Lite,” there’s a lot of “Didn’t I see you at WWDC?” going on.
I’m working with two other people on an application to share address book contacts by passing them through a back-end server. It’s not especially elegant or complex but it’s an interesting problem and not too technically challenging. We are all at about the same level as far as Cocoa and iPhone programming goes, which is to say we all write code in other languages but are feeling seriously out of our element. I’ve gotten as far as requesting a document from a URL and after dinner I’m going to start parsing it.
Downloaded and compiled the source for the WordPress for IPhone application. Running it in the simulator. We’ll see if this post works!
Next weekend is iPhoneDevCamp, hosted at the Adobe offices on Townsend. It should be really cool, certain other issues notwithstanding. If you are as annoyed as I am about that, you will also enjoy this.
Someone actually stopped me this morning to say that I was “an inspiration” for walking all the time. Apparently he’s seen me every day for a long time and was impressed that I’ve kept it up. Wild. I guess I can hope it will inspire him to not drive to work every day, stopping at Starbucks on the way. (I walk past four Starbucks outlets every day, which by itself is a little disturbing.)
Normally the people I run into as I get close to Caltrain (this is before 7 am mind you) are either bleary-eyed Adobe employees or whacked-out homeless.
blah blah blah
So apparently Apple is giving MobileMe subscribers an I’m-Sorry present for putting up with the launch mess, a 30 day extension. I haven’t seen an email myself yet, but people have reported getting a message saying as much. This knowledge base article confirms it.
I’m supposed to be eligible, as I signed up before the 15th.
I got some paper spam the other day, an advertisement for a fancy hotel chain showing an assortment of people in what is presumed to be a hotel lobby. It immediately struck me as familiar, and although it took me a few minutes to recall the details of the original piece I recognized the source immediately. Raphael’s The School of Athens. This work, a fresco, is by far the best known from the Room of the Segnatura, commissioned by Julius II for his private library at the Vatican.
Here’s the original, from wikipedia:
And here’s the one from the advertisement:
There are so many things here that mimic the original, from Diogenes sitting on the steps to the tile pattern on the floor. Is the dark-haired woman with the violin case to the left representing Hypatia? Euclid and his pupils appear to be replaced by a pair who look to be perusing a map of for all we know is Hollywood Homes of the Stars. Who knows. I would hope this would suggest that somewhere there is an advertising agency that employs those with an actual knowledge of classical antiquity and Renaissance art. Of course, they did leave out Plato and Aristotle.
I’ve gotten the home laptops set up and talking to MobileMe, as well as the phone. Aside from sometimes slow web stuff, the biggest problem I’ve had was in getting my address book correct. I tried to import a bunch of vcards from the web interface, expecting it to prompt me to resolve duplicates like AddressBook does. Wrong.
I had to sync the mess back to a laptop and fix all the dups by hand from the actual application. (I think the only remaining oops is where I accidentally merged cards for two people with the same name. Will clean that up Monday by getting fresh copies from the office.)
There is a bit of weirdness in that the mail application, when I set up my me.com account, insists there is a mac.com account. I don’t have a mac.com address, so when I tried to send a message with the incorrect smtp settings it balked. I see there is a new MobileMe software update waiting for me, so presumably that will fix a couple of things. (Like how System Preferences doesn’t actually seem to know about MobileMe yet, although it still works as .mac.)
http://www.google.com/search?q=mobileme+fail
The general consensus online is Epic FAIL.
