Somehow I forgot to mention this earlier, but I have received an Honours Scholarship from the Apple University Consortium! Woo!

Additionally, I’m going to be presenting at /dev/world/2008, the annual AUC developer’s conference, which is going to be absolutely fantastic.

Now I’m going to feel even more guilty about spending most of my time sitting in a chair, playing Deus Ex in my mind.

“Heads up, JC. Your brother Paul is on his way to meet you at the dock.”

Google recently unveiled Google Street View for Hobart, my home town. Also, I’m visible in it!

Want to learn REALbasic? Want a most-expenses-paid trip to Melbourne or Sydney? Come to the AUC’s first REALbasic Workshop! Paris and I will be conducting a three-day course covering developing with this rather excellent tool from the ground up. Send in your applications today! You’ll receive a copy of REALbasic, a copy of Beginning REALbasic: From Novice To Professional, accommodation and airfare rebates, and a whole lot of learnin’. Hope to see you there!

Our local newspaper, The Mercury, recently ran an article on us! We got an email from a reporter in the morning, and we were being interviewed and photographed that afternoon! Woo! Paris has more detail on the article. Good times for Secret Lab!

William Cook, from the University of Texas at Austin, has a draft of his paper “AppleScript“, which discusses the history of the language and some of the decisions that went into its design.

Something that particularly interested me was their use of usability testing the language:

3. Given the handler:

on doit from x to y with z
  return (x ∗ y) + z
end doit

What does the following statement evaluate to?

doit with 3 from 8 to 5

1. 29
2. 43
3. error
4. other:

Please state which of the following AppleScript statements you prefer.

1. • put "a", {"b", "c"} into x
   • put {"a", {"b", "c"}} into x
2. • window named "fred"
   • window "fred"
3. • window 1
   • window #1
4. • word 34
   • word #34
5. • "apple" < "betty"
   • "apple" comes before "betty"

This incredibly simple questionnaire guided the language designers in their task to create a language suitable for casual programmers. Why don’t we do similar things with ‘proper’ languages?

Culture, Secret Lab’s first game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, is now available for purchase in the iTunes App Store! I’m incredibly proud of this little game, and I encourage everyone to go have a look! We’ll be releasing a version for the Mac OS X desktop in the next few days, for the grand price of zero dollars. Soon, you’ll have no excuses left not to get yourself a little Culture.

Last exam was today, which is nice. Lots of work to do over these next few weeks!

But for now, I’m playing Deus Ex. Why? Because there is no other game where you’ll end up in a conversation with a bartender, and be presented with these options:

• Give me a drink.
• I’m looking for Max Chen.
• The separation of powers acknowledges the petty ambitions of individuals; that’s its strength.

There is a simply terrific analysis of all of the books and notes you can find in the game, written by Stephan Lavavej. It’s fantastic reading, but only after you’ve finished the game. Maybe one day I’ll go over the chunkier conversations and annotate them myself.

I just put up the second article in my series “Do More, With Less”, about domain specific languages and how they relate to the end user. Go have a look, and tell me what you think!

Hello, and welcome to the new site! I figured it was time to get something a bit more modern happening here.

My most recent happenings have been dispatching comrades to WWDC, where they shall learn the secret craft of the Mac. More locally, I’ve written a brief article (the first of many!) on domain-specific languages and how they might relate to desktop users.

Enjoy your stay!