iPhone Programming Course Over

11 days with 1 day off in between. 4 days in ANSI C (fantastic fun, learn do a lab, learn do a lab). Then 2 days in Objective C. Then 1 day off (Washington DC baby!). Then 5 days on the trot of iPhone programming starting not with the graphical Interface Builder but doing everything by hand. For me, this was THE way of learning and building real understanding and strength.

iPhone Launch Party

It was the end of a long long week. The FSA (Financial Services Authority) had been in to regulate us, nothing to do with our bowels or the Food Standards Agency but it was gruelling. The only light at the end of the tunnel was the thought of a long communist era queue outside a shop at the freezing start of November. Worse still, the shop was in Larne. For those who have never heard of Larne, the place where I was married, in the eastern shores of Northern Ireland, it is said that there are only two good things in Larne:

1. The boat to Scotland.
2. The road out.

Well I just want to repudiate that statement right now, because there is a third item I?d like to add… another good thing in Larne:

3. The remaining 19 iPhones in the shop after I was there on launch night.

Nowhere else in the country at 5:30pm was the launch party looking like this:

The shutters were down, I waited for a while eager to have craic with my fellow enthusiasts. An elderly gentlemen approached, tried the door… I muscled in on his attempt to bunk the queue but he hadn?t even heard of the iPhone. I spat on him and threw him to the dogs.

5:45pm – My friend arrived for moral support, anticipation grew as the crowd of the 2 of us (only 1 buying) watched the shutters slowly lift:

It was a slow strip tease, we were shivering with … well, the cold. I phoned two friends also in queues around the country – Lisburn had 15 and promotional girls, Worthing had 40 and banter. Larne had nothing, nothing except the prize.

6:00pm – Two other guys arrived. Phew – I wasn?t the only idiot in the Eastern part of Antrim! (But they were in looking for a Sony Ericcson).

(Max O?Malley, visibly excited)

Sure enough at 6:02 they put us (I mean, me) out of our/my misery. The three retail assistants who had prepared all afternoon since 3pm for this monumental occasion had to open their shop until 10pm to serve, just me. I felt blessed. I tried to pretend I didn?t know very much about the iPhone and tried not to correct the manager. I didn?t want to come across like a geek. None of us that queued that night felt we deserved the mocking of the crowd, we hardly could believe ourselves that we were doing it.

After crossing the shop assistant?s palm with considerable money and various attempts to get the credit card system to work (Carphone Warehouse servers couldn?t cope with the UK?s iPhone loving crowd) I walked out of the shop into the cold Larne air with my precious.

I love her and I will tell more of her next time.

Filemaker and Leopard – Bad News

Bad news for any current Filemaker users excited about the release of Leopard. Filemaker have announced on their website that they do “not recommend the use of Filemaker 9 products on computers running the Leopard OS”, I presume until they can test its running and issue any compatibility updates. In addition, earlier versions (I currently am a very happy business and personal user of version 8 ) are also not recommended until compatibility testing is complete.

This is not going to be a rant. On balance, any operating system needs to be tested and it is no mean feat to ensure that all previous code and functionality will swim easily in the new water. We decided to purchase new iMacs quite recently towards gradually moving all our machines to Macs (we are currently 2 out of 5 Macs to PCs). A hard drive failure and backup problem on one of the PCs prompted the earlier than Leopard release purchase. With this announcement I’m glad we did buy early. My surprise, with others in all this is that Filemaker isn’t ready. Filemaker as I understand it is an owned subsidiary of Apple! If others can have their software tested and ready for Leopard why not family members? I phoned customer services UK and they told me they were waiting to test Filemaker with the release of Leopard. Now, obviously Filemaker developers haven’t been waiting until now to get ready, they would have had the developer’s releases of Leopard all along and what they are waiting for is final confirmation of its compatibility. They will have known general problems up to now and hopefully talked to Apple engineers to begin resolving any problems and even getting excited about making Filemaker rock even more with new Leopard only features. So I find it very strange that they are not ready. Very strange.

I would expect that further announcements will be made as to which of the previous versions will be made compatible for Leopard. Anything less than a full preparation of versions 8, 8.5 and 9 would be damaging to customer relations. As a small financial sector business user of Filemaker v. 8 we store all our client personal and financial information on Filemaker, it has become our data hub, helps us see the entire business process and is invaluable to our business. We can’t follow the upgrade path to Leopard just yet because Filemaker have ran into some difficulties. Did somebody at Filemaker fall asleep? Maybe they are just being cautious but plenty of us just expect things to go smoothly and have been ordering Leopard updates and new computers with no thought of our main data hubs falling around our ears. An unfortunate lesson and I’m glad I got the news early.