Jeff

CocoaHeads is an international Cocoa/Objective-C development club that I have been interested in joining for a while. I was surprised to find that there was no representation of the club in the Central Florida area, especially since user groups tend to thrive here (ORUG, OPUG, ONETUG, OPHP, etc).

After some encouraging words from the founder of the Orlando Python Users Group (and a Twitter-based kick in the ass), I have decided to start an Orlando chapter of CocoaHeads. I’ll setup a Google group and website shortly, as well as a Twitter account for the group.

As I am a Cocoa/Objective-C newbie myself, the Orlando CocoaHeads will welcome developers of all levels of familiarity with the Mac development tools!

UPDATE: Google group and website now exist!

Ok, so Pete got back to me with his volley, albeit incomplete.

For never touching Objective-C or Cocoa in his life, he took on a rather ambitious volley: turning my simple “speaking magic eight ball” into a speaking RSS feed reader.

He found Apple’s Publication Subscription framework, and went to town trying to get it to work. I took a quick look at the code, and it seems I’ll have to do some reading in the documentation before I can fix it.

Hopefully this doesn’t spell the end for our Code Tennis match..

Check out the code on github.

A few days ago I came up with an idea for collaborative/competitive programming after seeing a match of Layer Tennis.

I’m sure you can see where this is going… yes, Code Tennis!  A quick google showed me that some other people had this idea before me, and setup a nice looking website, although no one is using it.

Code Tennis has some cool features: Twitter notification of volleys, bitchin’ graphics, and a timeline of commits/volleys.  I just hope that it all works as expected since it doesn’t look like the creators have had any external testing yet.

I’m playing my friend Pete (his site). So far the only ground rule is that the app has to be a Mac desktop app (NOT document based) written in Objective-C.

First Volley before click

My first volley (above) is a Magic 8 Ball that uses the OS X speech synthesizer to “say” the 8-Ball’s response.  I can’t wait to see what Pete does with it!

First volley after click

About 2 weeks ago, I ordered 4 pairs of glasses from Zenni Optical after getting my updated prescription and pupil distance from an optometrist.

New glasses!

I am completely satisfied with my purchase.  You simply can’t beat getting 4 pairs of glasses with anti-glare coating for $124 shipped! (Ok you can, but still – this is a great deal).

I opted to get 3 conservative pairs, and one “odd” pair (the under-the-lens-frame design).

The frames are all of good quality, and came with nondescript white hard cases.  I will definitely consider Zenni Optical for my next glasses purchase!