Kevin Hoffman

As I spend more time with the CTP I will be posting more detailed, in-depth walkthroughs of the technologies as well as code samples (hopefully I'll get approved for my Azure hosting account soon *hint* *nudge* *wink*!!). For now, I'm just going to do a high-level breeze-by of the main aspects of Azure. Windows Azure Put simply - Windows Azure is a technology that will allow developers to build applications in the cloud. The GUI for the application is in the cloud, the back-end processes that are running are running in the cloud, and the central data store for the application is in the cloud. The great part about this is that you can run it all locally, test it, play with it and vet it. Then you can upgrade it so it's running locally but using cloud storage. When you're finally set that your app is ready for primetime, you can push the app to the cloud and continue u... (more)

iPhone Keyboard and How to Use It?

The other day I was chatting with a friend and he was taking notes about some things using his iPhone. I commented on how unbelievably fast it seemed he was able to type using the keyboard. Up until recently, I've been "OK" at using the keyboard but I never really considered the iPhone as a device on which I could take notes - I have been so abused by smartphone keyboards (virtual and physical) that I just assume that the typing experience is going to suck. This is saying something, considering my last SmartPhone was a PPC 6700, which has a full, backlit, slide-out keyboard that... (more)

iPhone News: Leopard Shipping October 26th

Kevin Hoffman's Blog The word on the rumor mill is that Mac OS X Leopard will be shipping on October 26th. While this is good news for some people, this is freaking great news for me. Why? Because after the 26th I will finally be able to do blog posts that contain information on Leopard, I'll be able to post code samples in Objective-C 2.0 and distribute the source code to them. So, in just around 10 days, I expect the floodgates to open and all the Cocoa blogs and sites will start dumping tons and tons of ridiculously cool Objective-C 2.0/Xcode 3.0 samples. The only problem for... (more)

Leopard Code Sample: A Bound NSCollectionView

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible for laying out a collection of subviews. You can either manually create the subview collection, or you can set the content array of the NSCollectionView. This is a really powerful option because if you can set the content array, you can also bind it. For this demo, I've bound the content array of th... (more)

iPhone Developer's Journal - AppleInsider Reveals Details of My WWDC Presentation

Here is the complete article in case you haven't yet seen it. There are a couple of interesting things going on here that I want to discuss. First is the issue of NDA breaking. I've been asked about this a LOT, especially with regard to iPhone development. It seems that though pretty much everyone on the planet thinks the iPhone SDK NDA is unreasonable and that Apple should lift it and blah blah. Here's my thoughts on NDAs in general: An NDA is something that you volunteer for, it is willful act, you must choose to agree to the terms of the NDA. No one is forcing you to do it, ... (more)