Mathieu Tozer's Dev Blog

Waking refreshed at 7 am, I took the window opportunity for exercise. The treadmills downstairs were all in use and the only working one was out of order, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I ended up jogging right out of the building onto the streets, down 2nd St, Past Market St, then up a steep San Francisco hill all the way to the top, where I got near 360 degree views of the city and bay. The bay bridge was silhouetted against the glaring water with the morning sun, and looking south I could just see the Golden Gate bridge (my first glimpse) and Alcatraz in the distance.

Yesterday was a conference day, and the highlights were lunch, and the break between the session! Let me explain - I chose a random table at lunch, and after a while I said hello to everyone and found that one guy worked at Apple. On what team? I ask, "The Finder team" he tells me. So I proceed to tell him about my finder issue, which everyone has been saying is reallllly strange.

He poked around in the terminal, examining the setup and even the dock preferences, but he actually couldn't find the problem, right there at lunch. But it was neat to have the finder guy explaining it to me, even if the problem itself was out of his ability to fix immediately.

Even greater was when I went to the OS X lab to ask about my smart list problem, and finding a guys name under 'Core Data' on the white board I explained what I was doing and he told me that in fact he was just doing smart lists in core data that morning, and flipped open his laptop and there it was right on his screen. It actually was similar to my solution. I showed him my code and he said it all looked fine.

It was really great to know that something I had been going it alone with was turning out to be in the right direction.

I also got tips on how to solve the rest of the problem, so now I can flesh it out without worrying if it's the wrong thing to do.

This week I was attending WWDC.
- Worked heavily on grouping system, when I had free time, and the system progressed steadily.
- Had Apple Core data and Cocoa engineers review my system and give advice, and also help find bugs.
- Learnt about many other Apple technologies that apply to Words and other software I plan to develop.