This weekend I was ‘called out’ by Michael B. “Wave” Johnson who has a list of credentials as long as your arm (not least that he works at Pixar and wil Shipley think he’s awesome) because I made a somewhat snippy comment about Apple’s engagement with developers. Michael helped me realise that every year I’ve been a Select Developer with Apple’s Developer Connection, I had had 3 Developer Technical Support incidents and I realised that I’ve never used them. I have now resolved to use one up this week.
Michael was right to call me out on this – I was being snippy. Apple provides plenty of samples code and tutorials – they just may not be all pitched at my level and I need to do a good bit more work before I can really complain about the level of support. The DTS engineers are not there to hold my hand but rather to give me a leg up. That’s an important semantic difference.
My frustration is mostly because the iPhone SDK is still in Beta and therefore covered under NDA. I’d love to pick the brains of a couple of iPhone savvy individuals and this is why I’m keen on helping out with XCake.
What is XCake?
XCake is a group that seems to have grown out of the Belfast Open Coffee Club. It happens that there are quite a few people in BOCC who are keen on developing software for the Mac, for the iPhone or just using a Mac to do it. These people also like cake. Sometimes with chocolate. Sometimes with icing. The name was coined by John Kennedy and we’re going to work to get a wiki up and running on that domain. The idea is to have somewhere where we can ask questions, get guidance and, most importantly, not break our NDAs. Watch this space.
I’m much happier being pro-active about resolving my issues.