“Preview” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.
This was the rather surprising error message that I’ve been getting when I try to open a PDF from the Finder since I upgraded to OS X Yosemite. It’s bad enough when you get an error message, but one suggesting that you delete a frequently used app is inconvenient to say the least!
When I read Rand’s recent post on QA I was pretty much entirely in agreement. A good QA team is a real asset to any project, especially large ones. However, a bad QA team can be a huge liability and cause problems for everyone.
Bad testers don’t understand the product they’re working on. They follow test scripts they don’t understand, write short, inaccurate bug reports and make no attempt to appreciate the context of any error.
Ever since upgrading from OS X 10.9 to Yosemite (10.10) I’ve been getting the above error message periodically. As far as I know I have no software that needs Java to run.
When I asked on Twitter, the most common suggestion was that it was the Adobe updater. But I don’t have PhotoShop or anything else likely installed.
Maybe I have some duff feeds in my RSS reader. Maybe I have a few poor choices of people that I follow on Twitter. But I see links along these lines all the time:
How do you do something in Swift?
The answer is, almost always, exactly the same way you’d do it in Objective-C!
You want to do pull-to-refresh? Same.
You want to play with location services? Same.
You want to display one of the new UIAlertControllers? That’s the same, too.
Graham Lee’s “Why is programming so hard?” made me think about how I started programming and whether I’d be coding now if I was twelve.
When I began, I had a Sinclair Spectrum. Back then, home computers booted into a programming language (BASIC typically) and to do anything you needed to know at least one command. To be fair, even then many people didn’t get beyond J, Symbol Shift-P, Symbol Shift-P (‘LOAD “”‘, the command used to load a program from tape).
Over the years I’ve been asked to do a lot of programming aptitude tests. I’ve had to do some in the last couple of months and I’m deliberately writing this now before I get the results back of the most recent one so you won’t think that this post is just sour grapes…
I’m not going to get into the details of the tests because it doesn’t really matter what they are or who administered them for the purposes of this post.
I’m seeing a surprising amount of vitriol aimed at Swift, Apple’s new programming language for iOS and Mac development. I understand that there can be reasoned debate around the features (or lack thereof), syntax and even the necessity of it but there can be little doubt about the outcome: if you want to consider yourself an iOS developer, it’s a language that you will need to learn.
The only variable I can think of is when you learn it.
My first project out of university was a disaster.
The client was unhappy, technically it was a mess, no one knew what it was supposed to do despite the volume of requirements and functional specification documents and the quality of what was there was terrible. People were working hard but it wasn’t really going anywhere.
All of this, I should note, was happening before I joined. I didn’t realise how bad it really was at the time. The Real World was so different and new from university that I was blinded the problems and just did what I thought was best.
I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking. In about 2005 I bought an iSight, Apple’s relatively short-lived external webcam. It was a beautiful device. Sleek, easy to use and functional.
At least, I think it was functional.
For a device that cost me well over £100 I didn’t really think it through. No one else I knew at the time had a Mac with iChat. Or a webcam.
Before I finally gave in and sold it on eBay I did use it a few times with my then girlfriend (now wife). And it was really nice; like the future. Having grown up with old, slow computers the idea of playing video on them is still slightly magical to me. To have a computer simultaneously record, compress, transmit, receive, decode and display high resolution videos still strikes me as pretty amazing.
The flood of new so-called smart watches continues. Some people seem to love theirs, others remain to be convinced.
Count me in with the unconvinced, though only because the current ones seem to be poorly conceived.
Portability is critical to modern device usefulness, and there are only two classes that matter anymore: always with you, and not… Smartphones dominate always with you.
I think this gets to the heart of why the current range of devices — both those for sale and also those just announced at CES — just are not very compelling.