Kevin Hoffman

Kevin Hoffman's Blog When I first started learning Cocoa I ran across a design pattern that I had seen implemented a few times before but I had yet to see it labelled with a name. This pattern is called the Delegate design pattern. Coming from C#, I found this initially confusing because in C# the concept of a delegate is slightly different than the concept of a delegate in the Cocoa world. In C#, a delegate is essentially a function pointer, and when someone in Cocoa refers to a delegate, they are referring to an entire instance of a class to which work is delegated. To see how this pattern works, I needed an example. So, the example I used was a control that is bound to an array of items. So, let's say you have a control that you want to render a list of customers. There are two really obvious approaches to this problem: data binding and the Delegate design patte... (more)

Is the Silverlight Adoption Rate Artificially Inflated?

First, a brief history of Silverlight to date: 1. Silverlight 1.0 comes out. It's essentially XAML that you can manipulate with JavaScript. The developer community issued a massive collective "meh" in response. In other words, nobody writing code actually gave much of crap. Sure, there was some people who loved it, but everybody else was like.."XAML.. but no CLR support. No data binding. No controls. No networking. WTF is this crap?" 2. Silverlight 1.1 comes out. Now we have XAML and CLR backing to manipulate the XAML and do "real" programming. Still no controls, still no databin... (more)

Yet Another Half-App From Google

Kevin Hoffman's Blog The last time I took a look at the list of products Google had to offer, my eyes glazed over and I just kept moving. The list of stuff they've got cooking was two scrolling pages long. The odd part was that the only things I ever use from Google are search and gmail, I've rarely ever touched any of the other stuff. So when I saw today that they've got a Powerpoint clone to add to their suite of online office applications, I took a look at some analysis of the features. In short, it works just like all of the other Google applications - take the features used... (more)

Will Google's Android Sink or Swim?

Kevin Hoffman's Blog I've been poking around at some of the documentation for Google's Android project. I've seen a couple of the code samples, read through a lot of the SDK documentation and I've even checked out a couple of YouTube videos, including this one: I also highly recommend that you check out the 3 architecture videos that you can find on YouTube. One of the engineers on the Android project takes us on a detailed walkthrough of the architecture of the platform, how applications work, and even shows us how memory, processes, activities, and state are managed. So her... (more)

Using My HDTV as a Second Monitor

Kevin Hoffman’s Blog During my last trip to Best Buy, on a whim I picked up a DVI-to-HDMI connector (male DVI, female HDTV). This little doohickey plugs into the side of my Macbook Pro and then I plug the HDMI cable into that. I run the other end of the HDMI cable into the HDTV and I get something that is pretty awesome. I'm sure all of you techheads and mediaphiles have been doing this for years but I'm generally a little behind the times. I was expecting to get the same experience I get when I plug in a projector, where the projector and the main monitor become synchron... (more)