Recently in Books Category

First up, Craig Hockenberry (he of Iconfactory fame) has released a book about iPhone OS development. At this point you're probably saying "Another book about developing for the iPhone? Really we don't have enough?"  The thing is that apart from the constant updating of the OS Apple does which always makes new books and new editions interesting, Hockenberry takes you through the whole development/submission/approval process to getting your app into Apples App Store. Of course there's lots of Xcode/Cocoa goodness as well but so far it's reading more like the business of app development - which is a win for me and I'm sure many other.

The best way to get it, IMHO, is via the O'Reilly's bundle which gets you the hard copy and the e-book. Just watch out for O'Reilly's discount mechanisms otherwise you could end up pay more than you need or want to.

I’m a lucky person yesterday I got a look at a beautiful set of photo’s of some classic cars, as a fan of photography and shows like Top Gear I guess I was a fairly easy pick for this book.

If you’re a fan of photography and cars may I suggest for your viewing “Curves of Steel”

That’s all.

Like millions of other people around the world I plugged in my iPhone toady and noticed that several apps were updated, and like millions of other I clicked on the “Update All” button. Amongst these was Stanza probably one of the better eBook readers for the iPhone, at least for pure ePub reading; I’m told the Kindle app is too bad either but I like my book DRM free - who knows what I’ll be reading on next year or next month for that matter.

As a creature of habit I read the update notes as the apps are downloading and syncing to my iPhone - unfortunately today’s update for Stanza was to remove a feature at the request of dear old Apple… which I read after it had downloaded and synced to my iPhone.

Yes after a long wait Delicious Library 2 has Arrived! You can get it here.

[From DELICIOUS BLOG]

Hey it's all happening this week! Apparently the latest and greatest version of Aaron Hillegass great book is out. That's right Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X's 3rd Edition is out and its about as up-to-date as you can get for a physical printed reference like this one.

I recently had occasion to revisit "Misspent Youth " by Peter. F. Hamilton. Why? Well because certain characters reappear in Peter Hamilton's new book "The Dreaming Void" and because I appear to have a mind like a sieve when it comes to fictional characters. Either that or I read it so long ago it's gone out of my short term storage...

If you're a fan of the Commonwealth Series then I can highly recommend this new book which picks up 1500 years after Judas Unchained. I should mention that I'm only about half way through TDV so I may not like it by the end - but I consider that to be highly unlikely at this point.

As you can imagine a lot happens in the 1500 years so Peter Hamilton has kindly provided a timeline to fill in the gap. So, rush out and grab your copy or follow this link to "The Dreaming Void" and make me a few cents richer - either way if you've read the previous Commonwealth books you'll want to read this one.

Books Referenced:

I'm one of those people that used to bring laptops to meetings and ended up weening myself off the process because I was missing important parts of the meeting. Unfortunately it wasn't a conscious action on my behalf, because if it had been I would have instituted a lap ban a long time ago, I probably would've killed off a weekly production meeting as well... Anyway this post, by Michael Lopp is worth reading for anyone that goes to meetings... and that is nearly all of us at some point or another.

Here's the start of it to wet your appetite...

I recently spoke at Yahoo! about the book, and, for this presentation, I adapted the Agenda Detection and Meeting Creatures chapters into a piece about how I assess agendas and people in the first 10 minutes of any meeting.

Early on in the presentation, I asked the audience, "What are the things you are supposed to do to make a successful meeting?" First hand: "Make sure everyone closes their laptop." Yes. Full agreement from me. If you're sitting in my meeting and your laptop is open, I promise, I swear -- you are giving me half of your attention. Maybe less.

The Yahoos couldn't drop the topic. In Q&A, the laptop question came up. In the post-presentation mingle it came up again. Everyone wanted to know if there was a situation where it was OK to whip out the laptop.

My answer, over and over again, is "No."

Now, this is religion and not reality because it's likely I'll bring my laptop to a couple of meetings this week, but I am ultimately fucking up by doing this. Here's why.