But after four years, it’s time for another change.

Starting on February 1, 2012, I will be joining Real Software, the makers of Real Studio, as their Developer Evangelist. As the Developer Evangelist, I will be responsible for many things that relate to educating prospective and existing customers about the best ways to get the most out of Real Studio. Some of my specific responsibilities include:

• Documentation
• Tutorial and Training videos
• Webinars and Webcasts
• Podcasts
• Example Projects, Tutorials and Reference Applications
• Blogging
• Social web coverage

I am incredibly excited to be joining the Real Software team, who are a great bunch of folks. I first discovered Real Studio (RealBasic) back in 2001 after I had recently switched to Mac OS X. I was impressed with its object-oriented capabilities, database support and general approachability.

I’ve been a software developer for a long time (almost 20 years) and I’ve used many development environments in my career, including Advanced Revelation, PowerBuilder, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Visual Basic and others I’m sure I’m forgetting. Real Studio is easily my favorite; it is powerful, yet simple to use and downright fun.

I’d like to add, that even with this big change, LogicalVue Software will still be around. The apps that are in the Mac App Store (all made with Real Studio, I’m proud to say) will remain available and will continue to get updates, as will the software available here at LogicalVue.com and at RBDevZone.com.

I will even continue with Real Studio consulting, although only with my existing clients. I will not be taking on any new clients for the foreseeable future.

After all, in order to be the best Developer Evangelist I can be, I also need to remain a user of Real Studio.

To my fellow Real Studio developers: I would love to hear about how you use Real Studio. Consulting? Internal products? For fun? Something else? Tell me what you like, what you don’t like, what could be better. Tell me how I can help enable you to make better use of Real Studio. Tell me how you got started in programming. Whatever you want to say, I’d love to hear from you!

Send me a note at my new email address: paul@realsoftware.com

Steve Jobs only got 56 years on this earth, but boy did he make use of his time. Anyone would be lucky to have just one of his successes.

Every computer in use today is based on the original vision of the Macintosh.

Every Mac in use today uses the operating system created by Steve Jobs’ team at Next.

The music industry was changed, for the better, by Steve’s vision of the iPod and iTunes.

Every phone is now based on the original iPhone concept. Every tablet is based on the iPad.

And I haven’t even mentioned the joy that Pixar brought into people’s lives with their stellar animated films.

When you look back at all the things that Steve Jobs did, it is easy to think that they are all obvious now. But they were certainly not obvious at the time; each of them was a tremendous risk. Companies were making computers before the Mac, music players before the iPod, phones before the iPhone and tablets before the iPad. But no one innovated. It was always Apple, led by Steve, that took the first step into the future and created products that people could love.

He definitely changed the world and is already missed.

I wonder, what was he thinking of next?

R.I.P.

But first, why does SQLVue not support this obviously useful feature? Well, the reason SQLVue does not support this yet is because SQLite itself does not support it. Unlike most databases, the ALTER TABLE command in SQLite is a bit restrictive. It only allows you to add new columns and to rename a table. You cannot use ALTER TABLE to change an existing column in any way.

There is a workaround, of course, but it is very manual. Let’s look at an example.

CREATE TABLE Contact (ID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, Name TEXT, Address TEXT, ZIP TEXT);

Now let’s assume we want to change the ZIP column name to ZipCode and the type to INTEGER.

1. Create an all-new table that matches your original table, but with the changed columns. We’ll call it ContactCopy:
   

   CREATE TABLE ContactCopy (ID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, Name TEXT, Address TEXT, ZipCode INTEGER)

2. Now we can copy the original data to the new table:
   

   INSERT INTO ContactCopy (ID, Name, Address, ZipCode) SELECT ID, Name, Address, ZIP FROM Contact;

3. Review the data in ContactCopy to make sure it looks correct.
4. Rename the original table:
   

   ALTER TABLE Contact RENAME TO ContactOrig;

5. Rename the new table:
   

   ALTER TABLE ContactCopy RENAMTE TO Contact;

6. If all looks good, you can also delete the original table:
   

   DROP TABLE ContactOrig;

As you can see this is pretty tedious. A future version of SQLVue will automate all this for you.

App Store Link

New features include:

New features for SQLVue 4.1 include:
* All-new table designer: create and alter tables without using SQL
* Easily create Views from SQL statements
* Export database table structure as SQL commands to include in your apps
* Ensure the quality of your SQLite databases with the Database Integrity Check and Index Analyzer
* Create sample databases using the Chinook database, populated with significant sample data
* And much more!

Earlier this year, I replaced my 3-year old MacBook Pro with a Mac Pro and a MacBook Air. I seriously considered getting a 27″ iMac i7 and did not seriously consider getting another MacBook Pro. I’ll try to explain why.

More for Less

First, I want to stress that getting refurbished equipment is the way to go. With Apple refurbished hardware, you can save hundreds of dollars on equipment that is otherwise indistinguishable from new stuff. And you still get a 1-year warrant and are AppleCare eligible, if you’re into extended warranties.

And sometimes, I get a better configuration than what I ordered. My MacBook Pro came with a 7200rpm drive instead of the 5400rpm. And an iMac that I ordered in 2006 came with an upgraded video card and a larger hard drive.

iMac

While researching, new equipment, I first knew that any new Mac would have to have an SSD. I had been using a simple ExpressCard SSD in my MacBook Pro and even though it was slower than a real SSD, it made the MBP much faster. I could not go back.

Looking at the iMac, only the 27″ model could be fitted with an SSD. If you went the built-to-order route, Apple would let you add an SSD as a replacement for the HD or you could opt to add the SSD as a second drive. SSDs are not large enough for them to be the only drive on my primary Mac, so only the second drive configuration was an option. Unfortunately, Apple wanted a lot of money for this ($700, I believe, although it is less now). Another option was to instead go through the OWC iMac SSD Turnkey upgrade and have them stuff an SSD in there. This also was not cheap, but it did offer a faster SSD.

It was also important to me to have four cores and I also really wanted the benefit hyperthreading offered by the Core i7. I don’t do a lot of serious multithreaded work, but I do run a lot of different apps at the same time and I wanted it to be as future-proof as possible. The more cores, the better!

In the end, an iMac i7 with an SSD upgrade was coming in around $3,000 or so (including a RAM upgrade from OWC). Unfortunately, refurbished machines in this configuration were rarely available.

Mac Pro

I quickly tossed aside the MacBook Pro because there were no quad-core models (remember, this was in late 2010, before Sandy Bridge).

I also looked at getting a Mac Pro. I had a PowerMac G4 back in the day and I got almost 4 years out of it due to its expandability. I was considering a refurbished 2.8Ghz Xeon (2009 model, 3GB RAM, 640GB HD, GT120 graphics) when MacMall put up a special closeout deal at the end of 2010 for new 2009 model 2.93 Mac Pros. This is the single CPU model, but also came with a 1TB drive, 6GB of RAM, the upgraded ATI graphics card and a 2nd optical drive (all improvements on the 2.8). And it was only $2149! This was less than Apple was charging for a refurbished 2.8 and $700 less than they were charging for a refurbished 2.93!

Since I already owned a 23″ Cinema display, I didn’t really need the 27″ display in the iMac. The Mac Pro also was faster than the iMac, more expandable and cheaper. So my decision was made and I became the proud owner of my first Mac Pro. I also immediately ordered a 120GB SSD from OWC to use as the boot drive.

I then also ordered a refurbished 11″ MacBook Air ($850) from Apple. Since this is only used when I need to go mobile (which is not all that often), I don’t find myself limited by the 2GB RAM or the 64GB of storage.

So instead of paying $3,000 for just an iMac, I instead paid $3,200 for both a Mac Pro and a MacBook Air.

For the extra $200, I have two computers, better expandability, better portability and better performance!

And to top it off, I was able to turn around and sell my 3-year old MacBook Pro (which cost me $1700 refurbished) for $1050 on Craigslist. It’s important to keep in mind the high resale value of most Macs when thinking about upgrading.

I really like having two separate Macs. Even though I had a MacBook Pro before, I really hated going mobile with it. Since it was always connected to a ton of things on my desktop, unhooking and ejecting it all was annoying, especially if I had a bunch of stuff open. And the battery life was pretty bad (2 hours or so). With the Air I get 6 hours with no trouble.

So now I can just grab the Air and go. It’s light, small and reasonably quick. With Dropbox, everything that I need stays automatically synced between the two Macs.

I did add a couple other gadgets as well. Switching from a laptop to a desktop meant that I no longer had built-in battery backup. So I also purchased an APC battery backup ($80), but I would have needed this for an iMac as well.

I already had a 17″ LCD to use as a 2nd monitor with the Mac Pro, but I decided to upgrade to a 21.5″ HD LCD. These things are dirt cheap (I paid only $120 for an AOC; the 17″ LCD cost me $800 in 2002!)

Thoughts on the Mac Pro

This is my first Mac Pro and was quite shocked at how big and heavy it is. It was a piece of cake to set up, the hardest thing being lifting it out of the box!

The first thing I did after setting it up was to remove the 2nd optical drive and install the OWC SSD in its place. I then moved all my external hard drives into the Mac Pro and repartitioned and set up software RAID 0 to improve performance. Backups are done using Dropbox, MobileMe and Time Machine.

I remain impressed with how quiet the Mac Pro is. Even when all cores are running while ripping a DVD image with Handbrake, you can barely hear it. The fans on my old MacBook Pro would be deafening, spinning at 6,000 rpm when using Handbrake! Most of the time, iStat Menus barely shows the cores being used at all; this thing has plenty of reserve power for me.

I haven’t had a need to upgrade the RAM yet. So far, 6GB is enough for development and running VMware Fusion. I may toss a 4GB DIMM in there at some point to get it up to 10GB and I can eventually take it to 32GB with 8GB DIMMs, but those are still a bit pricey.

Sandy Bridge

Of course, since I upgraded, Apple has released the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros and iMacs. Theses new models are fast, with CPU speed equivalent to the Mac Pro in many cases. The new top of the line iMac with i7, SSD and upgraded RAM will still be about $3,000 (and currently has a 4-6 week wait), although I think it might benchmark faster than my Mac Pro. But after just a few months with my Mac Pro, I’m happy with the choice. And to be honest, little of the work I do is CPU-bound. SSDs have a bigger effect on compile times than CPU speed increases. With a Mac Pro, it will be much easier to take advantage of upcoming SSD improvements, something that I could not do with an iMac (at least until external Thunderbolt SSD cases appear, but external hard drives are a hassle).

Considering the the Mac Pros were updated only last summer and their low volume, I think Apple will wait until the Xeon Sandy Bridge chips are available in early 2012 before we see any Mac Pro upgrades.

This is very exciting!

And as of right now, SQLVue is #93 in the “Top Paid” list of all apps in the Mac App Store (it’s #87 in the “Top Grossing” list).

Obviously, I’m quite pleased with this and am eager to see what the actual sales numbers will be. I’ll know tomorrow when iTunes Connect gets updated with today’s sales.

I’m already working on the first update to SQLVue and also hope to release a “lite” version for the App Store. It’s also possible I may also create a Windows version (which won’t be that difficult since I use Real Studio). If only there was also a Windows App Store to simplify distribution!

SQLVue is a new, elegant IDE for SQLite developers. You can purchase it through the Mac App Store at a special introductory price of $9.99 through April 15th.

The Summit is two full days jam-packed with 16 sessions to help you get the most out of REAL Studio.

I hope to see you there!

http://www.rbdevzone.com/2010/11/state-of-cocoa/

Mac App Store and REAL Studio

http://www.rbdevzone.com/2010/11/mac-app-store-and-real-studio/

I’m happy to report that my ExpressCard SSD is still going strong. I use it as my boot drive, it contains all my apps and it is my main development drive.

People have told me that the SSD would start to slow down over time, but so far I am not witnessing any slowdown. When I first installed the SSD, I benchmarked it using Xbench. I just re-ran the disk tests now to see if anything has changed. Here are the results:

Disk Test: 77.24 (Jan); 79.34 (Sep)

Sequential: 100.23 (Jan); 99.26 (Sep)

Random: 62.83 (Jan); 66.08 (Sep)

Everything seems to be largely the same. Based on my SSD research, I try to keep the drive at about 50% capacity, although I see I’m a little over right now so I need to do some pruning.

As far as heat concerns, I do have to report that the card does run hot. As I mentioned back in January, the top left of my MacBook Pro remains very hot to touch when the SSD is installed. However, the internal temps (as measures by iStat Menus) are the same as with a regular HD. For reference, my MacBook Pro is on a stand and is well ventilated.

After 8 months, this SSD has easily been the best performance improvement I’ve done to my MacBook Pro. In fact, I find the regular HD so slow that this SSD is preventing me from upgrading to a newer Mac. I’ve been spoiled, so now I want an SSD in whatever new Mac I get, but I’m not happy with my current options. The new 15″ MacBook Pro does not have an ExpressCard slot and only has room for a single HD (without 3rd party optical drive replacements). I think I prefer having a small SSD as the boot volume and a larger HD for storing music, movies, documents, etc. The new iMacs do have an option to have add an SSD as a 2nd drive, but I don’t really want to get one of the expensive Apple drives and apparently it’s not really practical to add the SSD yourself.

I’d love to get a larger ExpressCard SSD, but I haven’t found one larger than 48GB yet.

The newer hybrid drives are looking like they might also be a good compromise, however.