Sushant AnandTechnical

Steve Jobs on object-oriented software

Sushant Anand — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:08:14 +0000

Would you explain, in simple terms, exactly what object-oriented software is?
Objects are like people. They’re living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we’re doing right here.

Here’s an example: If I’m your laundry object, you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, “Can you get my clothes laundered, please.” I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, “Here are your clean clothes.”

You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can’t even hail a taxi. You can’t pay for one, you don’t have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn’t have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That’s what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level.

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Web developers rejoice

Sushant Anand — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:26:13 +0000

I’ve just come across one of the best new products for mobile development: Appcelerator’s Titanium – create, test and distribute native mobile apps using html, javascript and css. Not only does Titanium really lower the bar for mobile application development for web developers, it compiles them natively for the iPhone and Android. You essentially write one application that can be deployed across multiple platforms. I’ve only played with it for a few hours, watched some videos and read their Apis and it is extremely impressive. The UI is very intuitive and besides learning their javascript framework there is no additional work required. Even though it is good practice you don’t need to separate the html, javascript and css since the code is compiled for the appropriate platform. The result – it looks and behaves just like any other native app.

For a while i’ve been wanting to develop an application or two for the iPhone. It was pretty much the reason i bought my first macbook that i’m now typing on. But, learning objective-c and the XCode IDE were always deterrents to my moving forward with development. I’ve been concentrating on improving my user experience skills and wanted to work more on front end technologies than i have in the past. That’s one reason why learning objective-c has been lower down on my priority list and i haven’t come up with another pointless app for the 100k strong app store.

With Titanium though, the bar has once again been lowered for anyone (web devs) to contribute to a bloated app store. The projects i work on have a high demand on front end development, so developing using web technologies to build a native app is a god send for me.

If you’re a web developer who has resisted creating native mobile apps head over to Appcelerator right now and give Titanium a try. Watch the intro video and see just how cool this is:

Zero To App Module 0: What Can You Do? from Appcelerator Video Channel on Vimeo.

Oh, and did i mention it is free?

Appcelerator’s CEO/founder is Jeff Haynie – @jhaynie. Be sure to follow him and get updates on a very polished product.

Which Twitter client do i use?

jQuery intellisense in Visual Studio 2008

Sushant Anand — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:26:45 +0000

If you are using JQuery, you probably won’t be getting any intellisense from Visual Studio 2008. But as part of ASP.NET MVC Microsoft started shipping JQuery. In order to make the Intellisense work follow these steps:

1. Install the SP1 patch for your Visual Studio 2008. You can download the patch for free from here.

2. Download the install the patch that recognizes the -vsdoc.js intellisense files from here.

3. Download the vsdoc.js files from here and place it with your other jquery-x.x.js files.

4. Make sure the file name for the vsdoc file is -vsdoc. Eg: jquery-1.3.2-vsdoc.js.

5. To refresh the Intellisense from within our IDE you can use CTRL+SHIFT+J.

Good luck.

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