While reading on mashable yesterday i came across this article about how Erykah Badu was trying to remove a lot of the middle man work while trying to get a sample cleared for her album.  As you can see in the article, she was able to, and got the sample cleared relatively easy.

Seeing that im a huge hiphop fan,  I know about the troubles and trials of getting sample clearances for songs.  For those who dont know, a producer of a song that samples any older music (that is copyrighted) has to get clearance to use that sample.  More detailed information can be found here.  It usually deals with going through a lot of lawyers and middle-men just to get something done.

However, thanks to twitter, Ms. Badu was able to ask for help on twitter, and through her following, she got in touch with Paul McCartney and got the sample cleared! Ive heard quite a few songs before sample clearance, and then, after not getting it cleared, the unfortunate remake of the same song.

Thats quite an interesting statement.  How many followers on twitter do you really consider a friend? Or facebook for that matter? Now if you hang out with people at a party, pass them by at a tech meetup, or happen to find them through a random retweet, you automatically get added on facebook, twitter, and they want a reference on linkedin.

On the other hand, maybe this is a positive progression into a more peaceful society? We’re all friends here, you and I.

what do you think? do you consider everyone you add on your networks your “Friend”?

So while ive been working on this, ive been running into a few issues, mainly getting the relations set up correct in the data models, but its been working very smoothly.  While re-working this, i thought to myself, i need to use the repository pattern in this.  As core data is still a bit new, there is still a little bit of textual writing while querying, and instead of having strings for this all over the place in various classes, ill just have them all in one class.

Here’s some info on the repository pattern (using .NET as an example) here.

In most of our recent projects, weve been using the repository pattern with our Linq-To-SQL classes, and its been very helpful in keeping code clean, with all of the querying in one spot.

Im currently working on an example project in XCode that shows how to implement the repository pattern, while using protocols as well for some cool safecatches.

Look for that towards monday or tuesday.

Pros: Less Code, Very Little Handwritten SQL (Predicates still need it)

Cons:Any numeric value and Bools are saved as NSNumber.

All in all its a fun adventure so far, ill keep you up to date!

If you use google for your scheduling, this is definitely great for you, and if not, you can at least have a calendar that has the most important sports dates for you!

http://calendar.google.com

Hope the long holiday is treating you well.

Quick post about my current favorite app, sportacular for the iphone.

Sportacular has been on my phone for a while anyways for regular score checking whenever im on the go. However, with push notifications theyve definitely added a bit of awesome to the app.

Via some very simple settings, you can have sportacular notify you if the score changes, when a period ends, when the game starts and when the game ends.

While this isnt the first app that ive used push notifications on, its the one that im most thankful for.

The best part? its free.

So if youre a sports fan and have been looking for a good app that notifies you, pick this up!

In almost any app you’ll find on the app store, there will be some kind of button that takes you somewhere outside of said app. I have no qualms with that, however i do have a problem with not informing the user that said button WILL be doing that. How many times have you (if you’re an iphone user) clicked a button, only to find out that its closed the application and moved on to its designated task?

I completely understand the necessity and want to have an app do some sort of activitiy outside of itself, I don’t understand, however why so many apps dont mention this to the user, either explicitly or implictly. If you are going to a website, use the safari image on the button, or just have the text imply that clicking the button will take you out of the app.

I guess on the other side to it, the developer could say “well the user should know clicking that link would take them out”, but i think that’s an unfair assumption.

Have you had any frustrations with this? If so let me know!

here’s the finale we launched. fast forward to :25 to get to the business.

Anti-aircraft fireworks from james hall on Vimeo.

My background in programming started off in high school in which i started off using an express version of Microsoft Frontpage where i made a hip hop key styling battle forum. (quite ridiculous i know, but hey, you gotta start somewhere!). I knew from the get go that i enjoyed creating websites and the puzzles that came with having to figure out the language to get exactly what i wanted to display.

In college, i got my hands on Flash and Dreamweaver, and began to make more animated and stylistic sites, for artists like Cage, High and Mighty, and MHz. While I couldnt do the greatest graphics in the world, the sites did their job, and pretty well if you ask me. All of my excitement and joy of programming led me to taking a programming class in college; it ended up being in C++ and while others seemed to despise it, i flourished. In my next semester, i had to take another programming class, this time in Java. I didnt like it as much as the C++ class but I got through with no problems.

During this class I got the opportunity to become an intern for a project that my college was doing in partnership with NCR corporation, which was mainly written in C/C++. I worked on that project for 4 years, and while i had my hardships with it, i always loved it. Void pointers, header files, structs, I loved it. After that project I moved on to a few different companies, all working in the .NET platform. While I love the .NET platform, I always feel like im just creating very static solutions, with no artistic feel, which really isn’t a bad thing all the time, I just always like to see something more living from what i work on (let’s face is CMSs are pretty standard).

About a month ago, my job asked me if I would be interested in possibly working on iPhone applications. Knowing that its based primarily in objective-c, I knew it wouldn’t be a hard language to pick up. After working on it for about 3-weeks now, I can whole-heartedly say that im in love with it.

It feels like the perfect blend of what I love, hardcore close-to-the-memory programming, with an artistic output of the code. I’ve been worried that maybe im just in the honeymoon phase of this, but i really dont think I am. With the rise of the demand for mobile applications, I can do nothing but smile knowing that I’ll probably be able to be working with the iphone more and more.

I’ll be keeping this blog up to date with frustrations and findings I have while I go through this new journey of mine.

Heres a few things I’ve learned already:

1. Don’t trust the simulator.
2. TabBarControllers are view hogs. (Portrait vs Landscape)
3. XCode uses a weird symbol for the option key (it may be all mac apps, i dunno, still a mac noob!)
4. XCode’s debugging suite is a joke compared to Visual Studios.

Anyways, if you’re an iphone dev and want to drop some tips, good sites, whatever, please feel free to do so!