The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2009) will be held at the University of Essex from Tuesday 28th to Thursday 30th July 2009.
This is generally a great chance to catch up with what’s going on in the Higher Education web world. Oh and there’s great food and lots of booze too, not that I’m swayed by such things of course…
iPhone development isn’t really all that much fun, but the end results can be very cool. Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche have written a really nice introduction which makes the whole process seem just about manageable. Almost cool and quirky even.
Importantly, it successfully captures the key to the iPhone’s success as a development platform: anyone with sufficient determination (yes, you!) can get through the unnecessary and bizarre horrors of Objective-C and the iPhone SDK, and can produce something that people might pay some money for. It’s something you can almost impress people with at parties. Almost.
Of course the book has an online forum and downloadable source code – de rigeur for coding books these days, but good to see nonetheless. In summary, if you want to try your hand at some simple iPhone apps, you really will need this book.
Drupal prides itself on its community aspect. And so it should as a truly open source system. One of the good things to come out of this is the principle that dissenting voices should be given a platform. Hopefully what they say gets taken on board too. A talk titled ‘Why I hate Drupal’ at the recent DrupalCon in DC is a great example of this principle.
‘Why I hate Drupal’ was given by James Walker, one of the Lullabot team, and general Drupal insider and guru. It’s important to point out that this isn’t just some bile-filled sour-grapes rant. It’s a considered, insightful and eloquent discussion of some of the problems and issues with Drupal as it grows in popularity, and enters a new, more mature phase of its life.
Here’s a link to a video taken of the talk. It’s an hour long, so you may have to book out some time to watch it. It’s worth it though.