Deviating Eye

It’s been four years since my last post.  In that time, nothing has helped my chronic daily migraines. They’ve even worsened a bit in severity, and I’m so sensitive to light, sound, smell and touch that nearly everything triggers the migraines or increases their severity.  I rarely can go outdoors, even at night, because any bright light, loud noise, or motion of the car can set it off.  Even worse, I can barely concentrate on any tasks, and even programming books are difficult to read now.

I’ve recently been (unpleasantly) surprised by a disturbing new symptom.  It feels as if the skin on my feet and legs has been splashed with acid — an extremely painful burning sensation.   It seems to be similar to diabetic neuropathy, but I’m not diabetic. This will require a thorough neurological workup and blood tests to rule out temporary causes and find out if there is nerve damage of some sort. 

By the way, for all of you who think that migraines are “just a headache”, here’s a list of some of my symptoms.  Most of these occur every day, with the exception of the speech and skin pain problems, which are less frequent.

It's been about three years since we launched this web site and it's looked pretty sparse outside of the blog posts.  Our graphics work has marched on with new color illustrations appearing in an updated edition of one of the textbooks we've illustrated.   Unfortunately, my software development has been sporadic and slow since a long-standing illness saps my productivity on many days (more on that in the next post).  Even so, I've gradually revamped two Mac educational programs and completed a totally new Mac application.  

At the same time, I’m slowly honing my iOS and Swift programming skills so I can port some of our educational software to the iPad and then create all-new iPad apps.  Once we both feel we’re ready to design and build a truly world-class Cocoa Touch-based app, we’ll submit it to the App Store.  And not a moment sooner.  

Why?  We're iPad enthusiasts ourselves.  Every day we're using our iPads for one task or another. We can't take photos of each other without an iPad blocking the view of our faces (OK, that's exaggerating a bit.  We don't take photos of each other).  We love the apps we've purchased for it.  We highly respect other iOS developers.  So we simply can't bring ourselves to add crap to the App Store.  If you wouldn't be proud of owning our apps, we won't be proud of developing them.  

This post is about something frustrating that many of us experience.  Invisibility.  Not the science fiction type (or even via a negative index of refraction by new metamaterials). I'm talking about the seeming invisibility we can experience in stores, doctor's offices, restaurants or just about anywhere involving customer service.  A few examples:

1. Passed over in a store line. We were standing in line in front of a customer service counter waiting politely for 10 minutes for the customer representative to finish serving the person in front of us. The representative then walked to another cash register to put something away.  Another customer immediately walked right up to her.  Instead of asking that customer to please wait in line, she started helping him and left us waiting again.

2. Blown off in a restaurant.  My brother made a reservation at a restaurant a few years ago. When we arrived, we were told to wait at the bar.  Over an hour passed after the reservation time while people walked in off the street and were immediately shown to tables. Nobody else seemed to need to wait at the bar.  My wife was in agony the entire time due to arthritis in her hip and knee (she had to stand since she couldn't use the barstools).  The hostess noticed but did nothing.

Cocoa programming books are indispensable to Mac and iOS programmer, but other programming books are just as important.  Let's look at some of our favorite books on  programming basics and object-oriented programming and design.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke and Don Reberts (Addison-Wesley).

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides (Addison-Wesley).

Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky (Addison-Wesley).

Prefactoring by Ken Pugh (O'Reilley).

Test-Driven Development by Example by Kent Beck (Addison-Wesley).

Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce (Addison-Wesley).

The Art of Unit Testing with Examples in .NET by Roy Osherove (Manning Publications).  Although the examples are in C#, the principles are still relevant to Cocoa programmers too.

Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell (O'Reilley). 

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin (Prentice-Hall).

Every Mac or iOS programmer needs to learn programming techniques specific to these platforms.  In our last post, we showed the Apple-specific blogs that we visit the most.  This time, we want to share the books that we've used the most to learn Cocoa programming. Next time, we'll share our favorite videos.

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd edition) by Aaron Hillegass and iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Joe Conway Aaron Hillegass (Addison-Wesley). The classic texts for learning Cocoa on the Mac and iOS, respectively.

Cocoa Programming: A Quick-Start Guide for Developers by Daniel H Steinberg (The Pragmatic Bookshelf). Nice intro to Cocoa.

Programming iOS 4: Fundamentals of iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Development by Matt Neuburg (O'Reilley). 

Cocoa Programming by Scott Anguish, Erik Buck and Donald Yacktman (Sams). Despite its age (published in 2002), it still contains gems.

Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running by Scott Stevenson (O'Reilley).

Cocoa Design Patterns by By Erik Buck and Don Yacktman (Addison-Wesley).

There are now 500,000 iPhone and iPad apps.  Yes, read that again.  500,000 apps.  That's an incredible and praiseworthy achievement for Apple, and more so for iOS developers.

But there is still a glaring problem.  In iOS marketing books, there's a lot of discussion on how to make your app and your company very visible.  Aside from winning a design award or being the Apple staff's favorite, there are obvious things that can be done outside of the App Store — advertise your app on your website so it can be found via Google searches, submit press releases to widely read websites and blogs, market through the web and social media, etc.  But why is making an iOS app visible so important?  Reread the first sentence of this blog.

The very thing that makes the App Store a success is also its biggest shortcoming.  There are so many apps that it's very difficult to make yours stand out among the hordes of other apps.  The App Store has broad categories such as Productivity and Entertainment, and apps can be listed under more than one category.  How then can a novice user find out that your amazing, incredible, Nobel Prize-worthy app exists, and what it does, through the App Store?  For a general search, the app's name or developer's name can be included in the search. Searches for a word can produce a list of hundreds of apps, but some novice users may only look at the items that appear in the search text box's attached pop-up menu. The full list of search results may be hundreds of apps. Searches for synonyms of the search term can produce a different number of apps. These related searches may find apps in common or completely different apps. Not all will be relevant — search for the word "bird," and not surprisingly many of the apps will be variants of "Angry Birds".