Mac OS X key bindings

I'm trying to make my Xcode environment a bit more friendly and thus I'm investigating key bindings. A good article that summarizes how to change key bindings system-wide.

http://www.erasetotheleft.com/post/mac-os-x-key-bindings/

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work with Xcode. My original investigation started here.

iPhone presentation

What a great turn out for the iPhone presentation last night. Thanks to everyone that came out. I've updated the Google Groups page for the presentation with links to blogs and other interesting information pertaining to iPhone platform development.

http://groups.google.com/group/jamsessions/web/10-04-07-iphone-os-the-next-killer-platform

A huge thanks goes out to my co-presenter, Bob McCune. The SenateJam demo was a big hit.

Preparing for DevJam Jam Session iPhone presentation

I've been spending some time working on an iPhone development presentation that Bob McCune and I will co-present at DevJam's Jam Session this coming Wednesday. I was looking at job trends at indeed.com--iPhone is #3 on the list of top job trends. Here's the graph:

iPhone Job Trends

iPhone jobs

Wow! Talk about growth. Looking forward to the presentation.

First reactions to Xcode 3.1.3

Code Sense seems to be much better. Acts intelligently and pressing Return on the suggestion selects the suggestion. It's been a while since I've been in Xcode, but I remember the Code Sense being somewhat odd. That doesn't seem to be the case now. BTW, I'm using Xcode from the iPhone SDK released last week.

Programming vibration on the iPhone

Erica Sadun has a timely blog posting about how to get your iPhone to vibrate from within your iPhone applications. I've been working on an educational app for the iPhone and wanted to use vibration for user feedback. And now I know how to.

Interface Builder: Remember to hook up the view to the ViewController's FileOwner view outlet

I don't know if I like or despise Interface Builder.  Most of the time it's an effective tool to building UI for the Mac and the iPhone.  Every so often, I'm completely confounded by it's tediousness.  Case in point: The ViewController's File Owner has an outlet for the view.  If you have one single view in your XIB, you still need to make a connection between the File Owner's view and the View object in the XIB file.  I spent significant time today trying to figure out why a multi-view iPhone example that I was working on kept throwing exceptions after I started adding the subviews to the codebase.  To me, Interface Builder seems a bit opaque; you never really know if everything is wired together properly.  I'm sure experience will help alleviate this type of issue cropping up in the future, but from my very limited exposure to the Xcode/Interface Builder tooling, it seems like the tooling could use a revamp to make things much more user friendly.  I believe the precursor to Eclipse, Visual Age for Java|Smalltalk had a similar UI wiring scheme, but with a much easier view of all the existing wirings.  Something similar would be helpful in Interface Builder.  

UPDATE on February 3, 2009: Bill Dudney has seen this phenomenon in his trainings and blogs about it here, with screenshots.