New iPods and braving the OO
06 September 2007

"The new iPod Nano looks like a great buy. At just £99 for the 4GB version with built in video this is perhaps the most tempting of the new range"

Last night Apple announced a total revamp to their range of iPods. I've never owned one of these MP3 players before but the new range looks very exciting.

Of most note is the iPhone-like iPod-touch. At £200 this is a cheaper way to experience the glories of Apple's new touch screen technology. It includes a web browser and built in WiFi too so could act as a mini "quick browse" machine for when you're sat on the sofa at home. How this will compare with the iPhone pricing from O2 (if the rumours that they have won the contract are indeed true) remains to be seen.

The new iPod Nano looks like a great buy. At just £99 for the 4GB version with built in video this is perhaps the most tempting of the new range. For an extra 30 quid, though, you get double the storage capacity. This could remain Apple's biggest seller.

Delving into Objective C
I'm busy writing my first full blown Mac application at the moment. When I first started programming back in the 1980's I played around with early forms of BASIC as well as raw 8-bit machine code. In the late 1980's (for my A Level) I wrote a fully integrated word processor and database in Pascal. I even included a rather pointless feature that enabled you to open data saved from either application in it's sibling. Provided you followed some pretty simple rules you could edit the content of the file and then save it out again non-destructively. I got an A.

All of this was procedural and then event driven; object orientation is something I've successfully avoided during most of my programming life, especially as much of my work over the last decade has been web based. (The notable exception to this was an Open University Masters Degree level course in Java. I passed that too.) However, ever since deciding to switch to the Mac in 2004 I've been planning to write stand alone apps again. It's what I enjoy doing the most, truth be known. My last stand-alone application was under Windows and written in C# at work. At home it goes back to Windows 95 and (I'm sorry to say) Visual Basic 6. Yuk!

I bought a Mac programming book 2 years ago and have had several aborted attempts to get through it. It's not that I don't understand what's been said - it's been that I get so far and then get distracted with unimportant things like working for a living to pay bills. I've recently had 2 weeks off work and didn't go anywhere (Melanie and I have recently got a puppy so we took her for walks instead which was great fun). I managed to grab some time to have another go at the book. Although I've got lots of chapters to go; this time, I got much further, and probably more importantly I've been writing different practice apps which is a great way to learn more. I've already put one of these (a rather silly dog-age calculater) on this web site for free download and am busy writing a more useful "real" program at the moment.

I'm pleased to report that although I don't think I'll ever be truly a convert to object orientated techniques, I'm suffering it pretty well and enjoying writing code for OS X. The thing I'm working on at the moment needs me to do things that I simply couldn't do under Visual Studio on Windows. I'll be putting a beta copy of my new app (and actually saying what it is) in due course, so watch this space!

Nothing else to report this week. Just thought I'd write a quick update, but I've been pretty "heads down" what with playing with the dog and getting to grips with Objective-C. I know how to let my hair down!! (he he).