Monday, January 14, 2008

Pre Macworld stuff

Haven't done an Apple post in a while, just a couple of pregame things I want to get down...

  • I would not have projected that the remaining three music companies would go DRM free on all other services just to spite Apple. It's probably their smartest business move in a while, at least for some definition of smart, but it's not exactly consumer friendly. It does make the Amazon store pretty compelling though.

  • For what it's worth, I find the Amazon store pretty good for downloading entire albums, but kind of a pain for just grabbing a bunch of unrelated tracks (the iTunes feature of being able to complete the set at the discounted album price is an advantage).

  • Tomorrow's keynote: A new iTunes with rental movies seems to be a forgone conclusion. I would probably use this service, assuming the price and terms were convenient, which I'm kind of skeptical about.

  • iPhone SDK is a probable announcement, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was delayed a bit -- I think the original claim was for February.

  • The other hot rumor is some kind of subnotebook or tablet or whatnot. Any of the proposed specs sound cool and I suspect they'll sell a skillion of them.

More tomorrow, when there's actual news.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Publication And Other Updates

First off, several pathfinder blog posts to catch up on...

In Rails book news, I'm now proofreading the final PDF versions of the chapters, which is the first time I get to see the pages in the actual final book layout. Which is pretty cool. I'm correcting them for obvious typos, a couple of things that have changed in the last month since I last proofed the chapters, and code layout issues. Should be back to the publisher by Jan. 18th, and they claim to have the book in their warehouse by about Feb. 12th.

You can still buy your copy in advance -- that's an affiliate link, in case you care.

In other books, I just got the wxPython statement for the quarter ending Sep, 2007. About 400 net sales, which was about what I predicted, bring it to a total of around 7200.

I also just got a Jython statement, same quarter, with 160 net sales on it, literally the highest it's been in years (a couple of quarters ago, the net sales were 2). I wonder if the fact that the Jython project has started moving forward again had something to do with that. Anyway, this makes it almost plausible that I might actually get a royalty on that book at some time ever.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Versions: Another promotion from the comments

Somebody anonymous asks:

As most of the currently available books cover Rails 1.2, are you providing the code in the books also as Rails 1.2?

The sample example in the book is Rails 2.0, which was Edge Rails when I started, and I just validated all the tests against 2.0.2 last week when I turned in the finished code samples. Where there's a significant change between 1.2 and 2.0, I tried to note it in the text, but I would want to claim that I got all of them.

That said, most of the techniques in the book are applicable to 1.2 applications, although some tweaking may be needed.

There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it boils down to a) differentiating from books that are already on the shelf and b) giving the book as long a life span as possible. Maintaining two separate versions of the sample application was not feasible given the time constraints.

Ruby version, for what it's worth, is 1.8.6 -- I felt that 1.9 was too experimental to be working with during most of the writing.