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Apple To Launch Liquidmetal Products?

Apple seems to be close to announcing new products based on brand new materials.

This June Jonathan Ive himself dropped hints about new product materials when he said ...

"I would love to talk about future stuff - there are materials we haven't worked in before. I've been working on this stuff for a few years now. Tim is fundamentally involved in pushing into these new areas and into these new materials."

Back in June 2012 I wrote an magazine article about liquidmetal material science, Atakan Peker, the Liquidmetal Technologies company and Apple's interest in this technology.

Two years later, almost to the day, it seems this might finally be the year Apple brings Liquidmetal into its product line.

Whatever Jonathan Ive is cooking up in his super-secret Apple design studio, chances are we'll find out soon.

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Raspberry Pi Page

My new Raspberry Pi Page is designed specifically for Pi enthusiasts.

The page has links to all my Pi-centric tutorials, articles plus posts offering tips, tricks and advice.

Enjoy.

Apple's Swift Language - The Wrong Direction

So, Apple has a brand new coding language to supplant it's ageing Objective-C.

Swift certainly is a much needed replacement and it solves numerous flexibility and performance roadblocks faced by Objective-C developers.

Yet it's a move in the wrong direction. Times have changed.

These days developers wish to make their own decisions about languages and tools. They favour standard-based technology that's platform-independent. And they like to get involved by suggesting new features or even writing their own enhancements.

Swift is another proprietary language attempting to lock developers into a platform. One that is unlikely to attract the open source coding community. And one that's more likely to alienate some current members of the Objective-C tribe.

A much better solution would be take a popular language and add it the Xcode toolbox. Maybe something similar to Microsoft's TypeScript language for instance.

Nevertheless, there was a encouraging note in the WWDC keynote announcements. The new Interactive Playground in Xcode 6 shows plenty of promise. Great tools do turn developer's heads - often much more easily than a new language.

Interactive Playground's features still might not make a huge difference in attracting new iOS and OS X developers. But I'd expect similar features to appear in Microsoft, Google and many open source community offerings soon.

For example, there may be refinements to the similar, and already well received, IPython Notebook initiative.

Read more analysis posts about Apple.