Now I’m seeing tweets that prove it. The problem is that people got the impression that they’d be coding wizards at the end of the courses, and that’s not true. These sites are definitely a great way to see what coding is all about and to learn about some fundamentals so that when you do start building something, you have a good idea about where to start/what you’re looking at.

The only way to learn something properly is the hard way. The only way out is through.

The method that’s worked best for me, and that I recommend to anyone starting out, is to try to build something that you want to see made as your first project. You might fail, but you might also succeed. Either way, you’ll be learning in the real world, which is full of pitfalls, incompatibilities, and challenges, unlike parroting code back into a web browser.

I’ve been writing code since I was in 3rd grade. Basically, once I discovered programming, code became my LEGO blocks, and I’ve been building all sorts of (hopefully) useful apps ever since.

My first Ruby on Rails app was the first version of Hngry (which has now evolved to be an iPhone app with a Rails backend), back in 2006, and it took me crazy places. From that one app, I got job offers, flown to New York for meetings about it… it was crazy. I’ve released other apps to a whimper in the market. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t! Since then I’ve released numerous Rails, PHP, and iOS apps: http://shiftedfrequency.net and http://madewithsense.com hold links to most of them.

I didn’t do it alone, though. I was helped by kind people who had nothing to gain from helping me other than the good feeling of helping someone else. I had nothing to offer them.

I’d like to say thank you to a few of them:

Madeline Benjamin (primary/elementary school computer teacher, introduced me to the Apple IIe, IIGS, IIc and the Macintosh)

Ron Dupuis (high school computer science teacher, he pushed me further than anyone had before, and by the time I was a senior I was actually teaching the web development class at school)

Jeremy Cowart (now photographer to the stars, but then he was the co-founder of a web design/development company, he introduced me to…

Jeremy Pinnix, his coding counterpart at Pixelgrazer, who was very helpful in getting me pointed in the right direction as far as learning Ruby/Rails was concerned).

Erik Benson/Buster McLeod/Buster Benson (now at Habit Labs, when I “met” him he was over at The Robot Co-op, where he was a co-founder. His name has changed over the years, but he hasn’t seemed to, and that’s a good thing. Over an extended period, he patiently answered a ton of what were probably the simplest questions to him about Ruby/Rails, but that helped me greatly along the way.)

But I digress. I’ve mentioned these people above because I feel like the best way to learn to code comes down to this:

1. Have an idea.
2. Find out what you’ll have to learn to build it.
3. Ask people who have done it before what books they’d recommend. (For Rails devs, I’d recommend the latest version of Agile Web Development With Rails. I built the first version of Hngry while working through the first edition of that book.. I even got the co-author of the book and creator of Rails, DHH  to sign it when I met him at RubyConf, which was pretty awesome because that was definitely the book that taught me Rails.
4. Work through the book(s) while you build your idea.
5. Ask questions from someone who has done it before. They’ve been through it before and a lot of them are willing to help you out if you respect their time and ask direct questions. Don’t abuse the privilege, ask them when you’re really stuck, don’t understand a concept, and you’ve done the research.

I’d like to close with this: If you have a Ruby or iOS question and you’re at Step 5 above, hit me up on Twitter. I’m glad to help if I can. The people above helped me, and I try to help others in the same way.

One issue in particular that was talked about at length by Marco Arment on Build and Analyze recently was the fact that the Nest tends to learn the wrong things sometimes if you do the same thing a couple of times in a row. I think that maybe it’s just because the Nest doesn’t have enough information. It knows time of day, what temperature you normally set at on that day at around that time, but what if the day is unseasonably hot or cold?

It seems like they could include a wireless thermometer that could find out the temperature outside and use that as a variable in their calculations: for instance, if the Nest knew that you normally set the heat to “on” and the thermostat to 74 when it’s below 70 degrees outside, but that you set the AC to “on” and the thermostat to 70 when it’s above 70 degrees outside, that would be a lot more useful. They might even be able to pull the current weather conditions from a weather API, because the Nest already has WiFi.

I know, I know, I’m armchair product designing here, but I’d love to hear about something like that in an update to the Nest, and find out how that works.

I understand that these things have to cater to the lowest denominator, intelligence-wise, but I think there should be an option to skip all of that if you’re a technical user. Just give me a checklist and ask if I’ve already done everything on the list, then let’s skip to fixing the problem, pretty please?

Talk about putting your money where your mouth is.

There will never be another Steve Jobs, and that saddens me to no end.

With their new laptop series, not only did HP rip off the unibody MacBook Pro, they’re apparently also attempting to copy the way that Apple presents its products, and hilariously, even the people. Here are a few comparison screenshots to illustrate my point:

Apple

HP

Apple

HP

Apple

HP
Even the funny faces got copied!
Apple

HP

I’ve also helpfully transcribed the entire video.  Painful language and grammar is unchanged.

So for ENVY, uh what’s really nice is we’re now in what I’d call the second generation of design.

The first models didn’t succeed because we didn’t copy Apple close enough, I guess, so we took another shot at it!

Well I think there was three uh main goals with design when we started the new product line for ENVY, uh the first goal was to create a super-clean, high end design, and we did that in the geometry that we chose. If you look at the geometry the geometry is rooted in very clean, simple shapes.

Just like Apple’s! Apple is still marketing their stuff as “simple”, right? Also, how many times did that guy just say geometry in a row?

The second one was a level of honesty that was really uh a key goal, the materials that we used, um were really true to um this this core attribute of honesty, we wanted the aluminum that was there in the design to come through. The last one was really key as we brought Beats Audio into the the ENVY landscape. we wanted to uh take it beyond the first generation of ENVY products, we wanted to visualize the audio, we wanted to go beyond just the uh the the uh the the sense or the the audible sound of of Beats with ENVY.

Honestly, we just looked at the materials that Apple uses, and made it look like that. People like the word “honestly”, right? That’ll make em trust us!

What is this guy even saying?

You’ll notice on the product that we integrated a volume wheel that has what I call interaction gravity. And that interaction gravity is what pulls people into the product to interact with it.

Did he seriously just make up a new buzz-phrase and then use the root word in it to define it? Wow.

And it sits in in a very dominant spot on the on the keyboard uh and it allows the user a finite control of audio.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Your selling point is that you have introduced a dial from a 90′s era Walkman into a new laptop and that it has limited control? I think you meant fine, or even fine-grained. Finite makes no sense. Secondly, I’ve had a rotary volume control on a stereo before. Get a grain of dust in there and see how well that works. Hope you like scratchy volume adjustment!

It’s it feels a lot like a um like a high end stereo knob and that’s something that we prototyped time and time again throughout this process so that we got that sense of quality. The audio piece is a huge part of this story um the ENVY products, 15 and 17 have probably the best audio in the entire industry.

I love the certainty here.

Um the key thing about the the ENVY category is it’s always about this level of luxury but a balance of performance. ENVY is about the beauty in the details. It has a very clean and simple design but it has that next layer of design when you start to engage it. When you open it up it’s a little like Christmas in that there’s um quite a few things inside the product that really draw your attention. Things like uh color accents that tie us into the Beats Audio and that little touch of of color just adds that signature iconic feel to the product. Once you get past the initial look and feel of the product, which is gorgeous, um there is uh a deeper level of design that is part of the discovery process.

We took a different approach in designing the keyboard. once is it had to have the great functionality so the ergonomics, the human factors of the keyboard are just perfect, but beyond just the pure function we wanted to have a little level of surprise. if you look at the rest of the industry, backlit keyboards tend to be powered by 4 LEDs.

What we did with this product was very unique. We took an LED per key. and these LEDs per key allow us 2 things. One is um it it allows us to illuminate the keyboard in in a beautiful, um perfect way but beyond that we are also able to take that technology and give it a human nature, what I mean by that is that when you approach the notebook, the LEDs actually cascade across the keys, meaning that when you approach, it actually welcomes you.

I’ve personally taken apart one of the Apple backlit keyboards before. There are light pipes across the entire bottom of the keyboard which look a lot like fiber-optics, and they spread out the light fairly evenly, much like a LED backlit display does. I bet the Apple version saves on battery comparatively too, because it’s 4 LEDs vs what, 88 on the ENVY at least? Thanks for bringing true innovation to the industry, HP. Less is more.

The touchpad is another example of where we’ve incorporated an advanced technology and this involves a much higher resolution uh sensor technology in the touchpad uh than we’ve ever done before.

Synaptics, who makes our trackpads, put multi-touch in the new ones, so I guess we have that now. I just found out what multi-touch is yesterday.

It can sense more fingers, so as we look to uh users doing more gestures with that level of interface, we see the need for it and we’ve incorporated it in the design, so again between the keyboard and the touchpad, the usability on the new ENVYs is just outstanding

We’ve seen people using multi-touch on MacBooks for awhile, so we did it as well.

The key thing you have to think about is the computer has moved from just um a a a piece of technology to now the center of our lifestyle, um we’ve put a lot of features into the product both I’d say obvious and some hidden, so that there’s always I think a level of discovery um from things like color accents to second functions on certain areas of the design so that um it it grows with you.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the first part of this before. Oh yeah it was Steve Jobs in 2001!

It’s one that certainly HP is most proud of in that um it’s the best that HP has to offer.

We’re flat out telling you that the best thing we make is something that we copied wholesale from another company, please buy ours instead! It has red accents, man!)

ENVY is probably the most appropriate name I could imagine for HP’s product line.

I can think of a few others, give me a call!

It’s a product that quickens the pulse.

Well, it does make some people’s blood boil.

It’s a product that creates envy.

Envy of what exactly?

So to sum up, this video highlights the following ground-breaking features:

1. A laptop that basically looks like a MacBook Pro, and which is made out of the same material.

2. A 1990′s era volume wheel that sticks out of the side of the computer and has “interaction gravity” so you can… interact with it.

3. Red highlights.

4. A multi-touch trackpad, which Macs have had for years

5. A backlit keyboard that has an LED under each key, which I’m sure is great for battery life.

You aren’t going to beat Apple by copying their designs. You aren’t going to beat Apple by playing a game they’ve already set the rules of. You aren’t going to beat Apple by making product videos that attempt to copy their style but which highlight things that don’t need to be highlighted (They spent almost an entire minute of a 5 minute video talking about a volume knob, for goodness sake! They would have done better if they hadn’t even made this video.) Change the game. Do something different. Don’t try to convince people that your copy is better than the real thing. Give us a break.

In other words: Exit41, you succccccccccckkkkkkkk.

The day after Christmas, my family wanted to go out and watch a movie. Everyone agreed on Mission Impossible 4. Some of us were more excited to see it than others (I am pretty much against everything that has Tom Cruise in it these days), but I was pleasantly surprised. It was a very watchable movie and I forgot for awhile that Tom Cruise is Tom “Crazy as Hell” Cruise. It was Brad Bird’s (director of Pixar’s The Incredibles, Ratatouille, The Iron Giant and others) first turn behind the wheel of one of these movies, and he did a great job, managing to throw in more than a few A113 references and make a movie that seemed at least somewhat grounded in reality, unlike MI:2.

JJ Abrams couldn’t direct this time, but he did manage to get some veteran Alias writers to write this script, and I’m sure that helped a bit too. He was listed as a producer though, which is probably why I noticed at least one reference to 47 in the movie.

The thing that stuck out to me more than anything else though, was the use of real-world gadgetry. In spy films and even just general tech-based films in the past, they would contain some sort of fake technology that looked futuristic but which was completely fake, especially to anyone who uses gadgets every day. That wasn’t the case here. In MI:4, they’re running around with MacBook Airs, iPhones, and iPads, and they’re using the real interfaces on these devices to flip through blueprints, make phone calls, listen to secret messages and project video (I’m sure that bit with the moving hallway would be a bit of a drain on an iPad2′s 1Ghz processor, but even that tech (where a video image tracks your eyes in real time and adjusts your view in 3D) is within the realm of possibility now). Crazy.

The future is now.