Caffeinated Cocoa

Wow, you all must be so sick of hearing from me. I was really trying to wait another week, until the one year anniversary of my last post before writing this, but I just could not resist.

And thus(ly) I begin a chronological blog-journey of what’s happened in my ongoing quest for awesomeness:

• Epic entrance into the world that is iPhone with the release of People 1.0, a white pages application. One of the first 500 applications available on day one of the app store
• People won the Best iPhone App in the the WhitePages.com API contest, and I got a sweet MacBook Pro out of it.
• Did pretty much nothing for the rest of the summer. Just hung out with friends and feared my most certain impeding doom to come in mid August
• Started my freshman year at MIT. Confirmed my suspicions that I can never be a mechanical engineer, in a single week, before classes even started.
• Started classes. Woot exciting GIRs: 18.02, 8.01, 3.091, and 21M.011
• Learned what GIRs are (classes all MIT students are required to take) and what those strange numbers mean (Multivar Calc, Physics (Mechanics), Solid State Chem, and Into to Western Music, respectively)
• Unibody MacBook Pros, grrrr…….
• Discovered that MIT is not impossible and that people in this horrid society stress way too much
• Ahhh problem sets! What ever shall I do‽‽‽ (those are interrobangs for those less cultured than I).
• Learned to love the amazing efficiency achieved by referring to everything with numbers. I need only say, “I’m off to 18.02 in 10-250″, and everyone will know exactly what I mean and will wish me luck in getting a seat close to the front of the giant lecture hall such that I might get a good view of Prof. Auroux’s dreamy eyes.
• Finals… </pass no record>
• Came back for IAP and competed in the 6.270 competition (autonomous lego robots). I had tons of fun and pulled my first work all nighter. We got like 5th place or something. Check out our super cute robot: http://web.mit.edu/adaml/www/6.270/
• Second semester: 18.03 (diff eq), 8.02 (e&m), 6.01 (awesome but extremely vague “Intro to Computer Science and Electrical Engineering”), STS.003 (rise oF MOdern SCIENCE!!). Hard, but pretty awesome
• Declared Course 6-1. I’m a CS major. hurrays!
• Approaching finals….. disliking all those people who stress out too much, getting stressed out and thusly hating myself.
• Summer!!! (for 2 weeks). Relaxed, hung out, and started and finished People 2.0.
• My life officially begins; I start twittering. Please follow me. It will make me feel super cool and important. http://www.twitter.com/adamleonard.

Then, I started my internship at Apple. It’s been incredibly awesome and fun. Sorry, I can’t say anything about it, but I’m working on some really cool stuff. It super sucksies that I have to wait like 3 more years before I can start working at Apple (or somewhere as awesome as Apple) full time.

But yes, what inspired me to write today was to announce that finally(!) People 2.0 is available on the app store. It’s got some cool new stuff and is compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, so try it out!

I apologize for ignoring my other apps (PhotoBook and Google Importer). I really do still love them dearly, but understand that I work on these apps in my spare time, for free, just for fun, when I have a cool idea or something. Since said time is quite valuable, I find myself not working on them for months, or even decades (well, not decades).

And to all youz developerz out therez. Photobook is open source, so if you want to add a feature or fix a bug, please do so!

A super special, completely rewritten and ambitious, vaporware edition of Google Importer is also fairly far along, but I really have no idea when I will conjure up enough interest and time to finish it… I greatly apologize to those who have been persistently asking for it. Again, if there are any developers out there who want to work on it, just shoot me an email.

And finally, I will leave you with a detailed outline of my ambitious goals for the rest of my life:

• Purchase 17″ Unibody MacBook Pro with employee discount

Hurray, I’m not dead!
Yes, that’s right. Despite an impossibly long period of total invisibility on the interwebz, I am still here.
Basically, I have been busy with school, and all my programming stuff has been pushed down to a pretty low priority.
(By the way, free iPhones, computers, etc., might very well prevent this from happening again :)).

So, you might have noticed that I chose a new theme for this blog. It is called Abstracta, and was designed by Rob Goodlatte. I love it. Very pretty and clean.

Ok, so update time:

• I am officially a member of the MIT class of 2012! I’ll be off to Boston in the fall to meet lots of people smarter than me as I learn that I HTFP
• Almost as exciting, I have not gotten anything done on Web Importer or PhotoBook. You’ll see so many updates this summer, I swear! I have like totally nothing to do until the end of August.
• But I have done a little work on Adium. Look for live contact list searching in the next release (1.3)

And now… story time!

So, a couple of weeks ago, I finished all my AP tests (which, if you don’t know, are classes+tests high school students take in particular subject areas that are supposed to be “college level.” I took AP English Lit, AP Calculus BC, and AP Physics C). After those tests, we have very little work left to do for the last 5ish weeks of school, so my physics teacher gave us a Sudoku (probably to keep us quiet). I have never done a Sudoku before, and needless to say, I could not get the 5 star one she gave us. Frustrated, I sort of forgot about it.

Then, last weekend was Prom. All the girls, and I suppose some of the guys, felt the need to go through the predictable ritual of spending hundreds on hair and plastering themselves in makeup. I was quite bored, and instead of doing something normal like going outside or seeing a movie or something, I decided to revisit that Sudoku. Now, instead of doing something a typical antisocial sudoku player would do, like spending another hour trying to solve it, or something a self-conscious antisocial sudoku player would do, like going online and cheating to find the solution, I decided to be a self-conscious, antisocial, geeky sudoku player and write my own Sudoku solver.

Luckily, I had recently seen this xkcd comic, so I felt a bit better about myself.

And just before I left for fun pictures and such, I had a working Cocoa sudoku solver that solved the puzzle in about a quarter of a second.

I added some finishing touches this week, so I thought I might as well put it up here and release the code.

Don’t expect anything amazing or original. This just uses what is basically a brute force algorithm to solve the puzzle. And, even that algorithm is written very poorly and is quite ugly. If you are looking for a useful Sudoku solver, just search Google. There are tons of really good human logic sudoku solvers available.

But mine, of course, is better.

If you are learning Cocoa, this project demonstrates these topics:

• Interface Builder and standard controls
• Using an NSMatrix to lay out a grid of NSCells (81 Sudoku boxes)
• Using NSNumberFormatters (to ensure that only the integers 1-9 can be entered into a box)
• Basic threading with NSThread (the solving algorithm runs in the background in its own thread)

	Download the pre-built application
	Download the Source Code (BSD License)

After Daniel Jalkut’s endorsement of Barack Obama and its appearance on the front page of the New York Times, I thought I would follow up with my own opinion. On behalf of everyone at Caffeinated Cocoa (i.e., me) I strongly believe Barack Obama is the best candidate for president.

Obama can bring about real change in this country. He is not talking only about policy change (which I’m sure Hillary could do quite well). He will also change how politics works in Washington. No other candidate has, in recent memory, talked about change like he does.

Even Steve Jobs secretly supports Obama. Seriously, he decided to hide clues all around Apple products. For example, try typing this into Terminal:

echo -e '\0126\0117\0124\0105\n\0117\0102\0101\0115\0101'

(the numbers correspond to the serial of the yet unreleased Apple Tablet I am typing/tapping this on.)

I guess every bit helps….

I’ll be waiting for a call from Obama inviting me to travel on the campaign trail with him and Kennedy…..

So, I released PhotoBook 1.1 today. 

That’s right, I finally got some time away from school, college apps, and friends (ha) to code! This release has a few major new features, a bunch of little changes of additions, and a whole lot of bug fixes. Most notably, you can now open almost any Facebook photo or album URL in PhotoBook, and I redesigned the photo viewing window to add easier to use slideshow controls. 

The vast majority of changes in this release were based on suggestions from users like you. So, keep sending me your ideas to support  at caffeinatedcocoa dot com. 

I know a lot of people have been asking about Google Importer for Leopard. I have started working on it, but unfortunately it requires a complete rewrite and Apple didn’t add in a nice API to make it easy. You should be learning more about the project soon. 

By the way, I got an iPod Touch and it is incredible. I can’t wait until February when Apple opens it up to developers. I’m hoping that means all developers, including starving (pre-)college students.  If so, I think PhotoBook Mobile or whatever would be really cool. Let me know what you think.