|
|
|
|
Hi!
|
...and thank you for visiting my site! I am Lorenzo and I am an Italian student.
In the weekends I live in San Pier d'Isonzo, a little town near Trieste, while during the week I study at the University of Trieste. I'm taking a degree in computer science engineering.
I'm interested in development and in the Apple world, games, sports, and I like hanging around with my friends, and maybe going to disco or something like that.
I used to have LAN parties every week but now I decided to have a break and study a "little more" than what I did last year.
Apart from developing on my Mac I occasionally do websites on demand, so if you need one contact me.
I hope you'll enjoy my software and I ask you to send your feedback about my products. And maybe even if there are some errors in the site, I'm still an Italian and my English isn't perfect.
|
|
My story
|
My interest for this world started long ago when I used to play games like DooM on my bro's 386 PC running Windows 3.1. Then, later, I think 5 or more years later, I got a new PC (my parents didn't buy me a new one till then because they cared about my education) and started developing improbable projects that never materialized using Visual Studio and C#.
But the true revolution occurred when I bought my first Mac, a Mac Pro which I'm writing on even now, after months of tries of running Tiger on my AMD64 PC (omg how many Euros I've spent on that PC...).
The Mac Pro was completely different from what I was used before... it was a Mac, another world... I used Mac OS only during my junior high school years on some first and second gen. iMacs and on a PowerMac, but they were still all running OS9, so I didn't give'em lot of attention, but when I discovered Tiger I changed idea, and I won't return to the PC, if not for working and education purposes.
After some setting weeks I installed the developer tools and started to write some lines of code. To say the truth, I couldn't build anything because I had never seen Objective-C before so I give up, until I got the idea, and the need, to develop a mac application similar to the windows dotakeys. I used to play Warcraft III - DotA a lot and an application like that was essential.
After reading some blogs and sites around the web I found the best way to learn Cocoa was by reading Aaron Hillegass' book. I bought it and after reading less than a half I began writing. Then all came by itself... even if in the end I was obliged to use the Carbon framework (which is C based), and leave Cocoa only for the UI, i finished the first "working" release in some months (consider that that one was my last high school year so I haven't got so much time to develop).
|
|
In the photo I'm near Moscone West, Minna st., what a strange name for a street, and what a headache finding it (it continues in different blocks while being blocked by some double blocks or something like that...).
|
|
The WWDC experience
|
My development continued then through the year, and finally in June of the last year I had the chance to participate at the WWDC '08 in San Francisco. That was the best holiday I've ever had, because it was different! No beaches, no mountains, but a lot of people... and then there was the fact that I was for the first time in my life in America... I met many people at the WWDC, even Aaron Hillegass! But the best thing was to meet so many young developers like me and build my network of developers. The conference had sessions in the mornings and the afternoons. But the day was't only that... in the evening there were many good parties and events, like the Apple Design Awards... It was an exciting and unforgettable week, definitely.
At the end of that summer, with the availability of the iPhone in Italy, I started writing TrainTable and it took me like 2 weeks to have a stable release, the rest of the time was all used to refine it.
|
|
My opinions
|
I don't know why so many people like to say bad things about the iPhone... for me it's fantastic and from a developer's perspective I think it's the best platform to develop on... In fact during the years I tried to develop on my previous phones using J2ME or Symbian but there weren't good examples or documentation so it was very difficult.
The iPhone SDK, instead, is fantastic... you have about the same number of APIs that you have with Cocoa... it's like developing for Mac OS, but your app runs on a mobile phone.
I don't spend time replying to those people on the forums, but now that I'm writing my page I'd like to say... I've had a lot of mobiles during the last years, all of them high-grade Nokias, and I paid them a lot. Well, the iPhone may not have the camera of my N80 or E90, or may not have the ability to forward sms, but it has a fantastic OS with a fantastic SDK to develop with, a great browser and e-mail client, and is built in a very well manner (my Nokias were creaking after some months of life, and I take care of my things...). So for me it's the best mobile phone in the world, when I need to take a photo seriously, I use my DSLR.
|
|
|
|
