I haven’t had a chance to continue my reading since my last post, but I’m determined to finish it by the end of June. After that, I’m going to have to find more resources on Cocoa, although it looks like the iPhone developers site has pretty much everything I’ll need. I also still have to watch all of the iTunes Stanford lectures I downloaded about iPhone development. If all goes well, I should be on my way to creating my first app in July.

After a long time coding in AS3, you’d think I would have known this by now. But no, I’m too lazy to look it up.

I’m coding a new Flash activity (it’s so dinky that I shouldn’t really call it that) where I’ve got a movieclip that I would like users to click. I usually have dynamic text sitting on top of clickable items, but the text field always obscures the movieclip underneath so that the hand cursor does not appear even if I have buttonMode set to true. I’ve never bothered to work this out since this is usually not a big problem. Not good for the user of course.

So I finally looked it up and found a couple of useful discussions around this (http://blog.ickydime.com/2008/04/mouseenabled-vs-mousechildren.html and http://www.actionscript.org/forums/archive/index.php3/t-140973.html).

Turns out the solution is dead simple. Just set the movieclip’s mouseChildren property to false. Damn, I feel stupid now.

I am an intensely curious person, with a strong, bordering-on-obsessive need to learn as much as I can on any topic that piques my interest. It’s actually not enough for me to just get a surface-level look at something, unless I decide it’s boring or of no use to me. It’s an all-or-nothing kind of thing. Annoying, really. I’m aware of this and I can’t help myself, and the only thing that stops me from trying to soak up everything is the limited time that I have in my day to attend to, oh, LIVING.

I have a feeling I’m not alone, and in fact it’s probably a very common affliction. So, what can I do about this?

Lately I’ve started working on a presentation for my team about how we can extend our reach into the internal and external communities with the education we currently produce, and encourage the use of social learning tools that are currently available in the environment. Seems like learning 2.0 is a big buzz word for progressive companies these days, and it’s only going to get bigger. As employees who need to actually WORK and PRODUCE during our 8 hours at the office each day, how do we keep up with learning? More importantly, how can we retain and apply this new knowledge?

It all boils down to time and efficiency. I should list out all of the tools I’ve used in the past for learning, to help me get a better sense of the big picture. Maybe I can learn a little about my own fact-finding, knowledge-seeking habits.

If the rumor that the next generation iPhone is coming out July 17^th is true, then this is going to be a tough time for me. Do I wait two (if not more) painful long months without an iPhone to test out? And does that even apply to the Canadian market? I have no experience with the iPhone market so I really don’t know how things go. But if I bought one now, it would really kill me to know that I would be missing out on the next gen model by *that* much.

Gotta love Twitter users for their links. So “28% of smartphone users have spent $5 to $50 on a mobile application”. That’s pretty good. Well, for me anyways – I’m here to play and see how far I get, so anyone willing to pay for an app that I create in the future sounds good to me. It’ll be fun too to continually build and improve on a product based on user feedback.

http://www.dmnews.com/The-best-iPhone-apps-combine-utility-simplicity/article/136839/

Equally interesting – I stumbled upon some smartphone market share stats at http://lowendmac.com/inews/09inews/0327.html#1. I guess it’s not a bad idea to play around in the iPhone arena first, with that much potential exposure to users.

Here’s an interesting side by side comparison of the various smartphone features: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343439,00.asp

And now, for something completely different: the coolest chair ever:

I was reading just now about information visualization when I came upon a link to Wordle. It’s pretty darn cool! I used my blog and my del.icio.us account to create some “word art”, and it turned out really well, especially when I played around using the randomizing feature.

I can’t resist including this: a video interview with Leonard Nimoy

I think I won’t get over the Star Trek fever until I see the movie tomorrow night, so I’m just going to let loose and enjoy it for now.

Pretty funny stuff for you geeks out there: Instruction Manuals for the USS Enterprise

Again, in the excitement and anticipation of the new Star Trek movie, I shamelessly bring you an old clip that is sure to please. Haha…

http://dewitte.vox.com/library/post/star-trek---the-lost-episodes---love-trek.html