In the past few days I have followed what people have been posting online, and on Twitter, about the now announced 2016 edition of WWDC with great interest. Of course there are lots of people that are excited and super jazzed about the chance of getting to go to dub dub. But there also seems to be a bit of backlash against the cost of hotels in San Francisco during the event, and people questioning if going is the right choice for them. While the cost is an issue, its not a new barrier for many people. And the question of what value WWDC offers in todays changing app ecosystem, and the changing market indie developers are playing in, is what I think is really at the heart of many peoples move away from dub dub. Read More

Using 3rd party APIs, SDKs, dependencies (what a program like CocoaPods lets you manage), or Backend Services (BaaS), is something every developer does. It may be something as simple and common place as a Facebook API, a dependency to help you parse JSON, or something more specialized like a BaaS that manages a cloud database, or a mapping SDK that allows you to track movements in real-time. In some cases their use is necessary, but it can also be very easy to fall into the trap of using and relying on them too much since they can cut down the initial amount of development time significantly.

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It has been a little quiet on my site recently but this is due to a great deal going on elsewhere. There has been the continued work on Serendipity Way which, as I will cover in a post tomorrow, has encountered an issue that has meant doubling down on work to make sure it still meets an April release date.

There is also the upcoming NSNorth conference and getting ready for my talk there! I have a number of articles that are just about ready to be posted once I get the time to do a final proof read and edit on them. And there are a number of proposals I am putting together for the summer and fall conference season.

All to say that the posts will be a little slow over the next few weeks but I am looking forward to publishing on a regular basis again in May, and looking forward to spring weather finally arriving!

Today I am finally getting back to feeling like myself. I have been sick for a week and most of those days I spent in utter misery as every form of hurt made its way through my body. But this morning I managed to wake up early, drenched in sweat mind you, but still well rested, and once I am done having a relaxing cup of coffee it will finally be back to work for me.

The next month is going to be incredibly busy. I have a deadline to meet so that my newest app, Serendipity Way, can be released by the middle of April and being sick has cost me some valuable time on that. I will be heading to NSNorth at the end of April as well and have a talk to refine and practice. And there will be lots of promotion for Serendipity Way and the start of another new app once April has come to a close.

So it may be several weeks before another post goes up. But there is a lot of interesting things to come in the next couple of months so don’t stray too far.

Today, 21 March 2016, Apple had a relatively quick 1 hour town hall event. It was notable for two reasons. The first being that it was clearly not about the products, and second, the products will get way more attention in the media then they should.

Apple kicked off the Event with Tim Cook giving the US government another high holy fuck you in their [then] case against Apple. Then Apple showed us solar powered Yaks, robots that get a little rough and freaky with the iPhones, and showed off Health tools to cure every disease everywhere. These are all admirable things, but logging nearly half the running time gives me little doubt that Apple’s prime objective was about ramping up its PR effort to even greater heights. And fair enough, they can do whatever they want and from their perspective it all makes sense.

And then Apple talked about 3 products. Some watch bands, a new 4 inch iPhone and a new 9.7 inch iPad Pro. They look nifty and gee whiz neato, but are they worthy of a keynote event? No, not at all. These are essentially quiet release items and their unimportance really underscores that the second half hour was just filler to get the first half hour of PR out into the media.

[Of course this is now all irrelevant as late this afternoon the FBI dropped their case, so Apple’s done alright today.]

Now at the end of the day I don’t really care that this was a boring event. Apple doesn’t have to make every keynote a blockbuster and that I yawned a few times during it only affects me in the end.

But something else did bother me, and though its a bit of a deviation, and maybe it is just a result of being sick and my brain is filtering bullshit much different then usual, but the the reaction by Tech/Apple “journalists” really made me see that most should not be called journalists. They are advertisers, writing free marketing for Apple in the hope they create juicy link bate to their site, and in the worst cases just fan boys and fan girls pretending to be journalists.

Now, maybe it has always been this way and I have just never noticed. Its probably this way for most Tech companies. More then likely that is probably the case. But watching peoples use of exclamation points, throwing out the words game changer and breakthrough, the stories about cute robots, tiny phones, and neon watch bands. It was the most blatant and misplaced cheerleading I’ve seen (with the possible exception of the FBI case which is entirely different in many ways and a totally separate topic) . Sometimes Apple comes out with something really special that pushes the limits, like iPod or even the iPhone 4, which was a remarkable, evolutionary device, to name some examples that come to my mind. But todays items were the least special products I can remember in quite some time.

I am not annoyed by it. I won’t lose any sleep over it. But it does give me pause and will definitely have me rethinking how much weight and credit I give to many of these people and publications “reporting” from Cupertino today, and where I draw some of my inspiration from.