Let’s say you have some markup, like so:

<div id="someContainer">
    <span>Some text</span>
</div><!-- someContainer -->

It’s relatively common for people to put a closing comment to help match up closing tags. I personally don’t care for it because it adds bytes to your HTML and a decent IDE should make it clear which opening and closing tags are paired together. Nevertheless, a lot of people do it, including some people I work with.

Where you can get into trouble is if you decide you want to comment out that markup, like this:

<!--
<div id="someContainer">
    <span>Some text</span>
</div><!-- someContainer -->

Both my Eclipse IDE and the Chrome and Safari (WebKit-based) browsers had absolutely no problem with this. But Firefox thinks that a comment open tag has been left open, and it produces mangled HTML as a result!

If you are seeing weird behavior in Firefox, check your HTML comments!

Here’s everything you need to get started:

The Lectures

• Standard Definition
• High Definition (Recommended, especially when Paul is showing code examples during lectures)

Xcode

Xcode is Apple’s comprehensive App development tool suite, including tools to write code, graphically build your app’s user interfaces, debug, and measure performance. It’s free if you’re already an Apple Developer, but if you’re not, you can buy it for $4.99 on the Mac App Store. (Note: it is a huge download, more than 4GB. Go do something else while it’s downloading!)

Syllabus and Homework

The course materials can be found here.

One final note: these materials were produced before iOS5 and Xcode 4. However, the updated lectures for these newer versions should be posted in early November, 2011 (soon!) That said, I’ve taken some of the classes already, and I haven’t had any issues even though I’m using the newer version of Xcode.

Recommended Prerequisites

You’ll be best prepared to dive right into iOS development if you have prior experience with:

• Object-oriented programming, in any language (i.e. Java, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby)
• Event-driven programming

<form id="signupForm" method="POST"><code>
<input id="email" name="email" type="email" />
<input id="passwd" name="passwd" type="password" />
<input id="confirm" name="confirm" type="password" />
</form>

And then you go to test out your form in Chrome. You type in a bogus email address to test your server-side input validation.

And when you hit enter to submit the form, you see this:

Where did this come from!?! Chrome apparently tries to do its own form validation. Which is great I guess, but not when you want to do your own custom validation.

Luckily, this is easily disabled using the “novalidate” attribute in the <form> element, like so:

<form id="signupForm" method="POST" novalidate>

One of the biggest worries–and wastes of time–for new entrepreneurs is “what if someone else steals my idea?” They get very secretive, make people sign NDAs, and start talking to patent lawyers. As if you have the capital to litigate an infringer! What you really should be doing is going out and talking to customers and telling people your idea. You need to validate it in the marketplace!

Big companies couldn’t care less about what patents you hold, especially if you haven’t executed and produced the widget or service your patent describes. In the world we live in, it is usually wiser to act on attractive business opportunities if you have the means to execute on them than to worry about potential infringement. Android is a perfect example of this. Google entered the smartphone market and became a leader in two years. Now there’s a war being waged over smartphone patents, but Android marketshare continues to grow.

President Obama is about to sign a patent reform bill into law that will make it even harder for entrepreneurs to innovate and create jobs. The America Invents Act switches US patent law from a “first to invent” to a “first to file” system. This means that prior art no longer can invalidate a patent–unless it can be proven that the idea was directly stolen from the original inventor. This change will go into effect 18 months after enactment.

This change in the patent system, while more in line with the rest of the world, will simply cause an avalanche of patent filings by major corporations and patent trolls. Big companies who can afford full-time patent lawyers now have an even larger advantage over small entrepreneurs who often times cannot even afford the cost or time of filing a decent provisional patent.

Serious patent reform is necessary if America is to continue in it’s place as the world’s leader in economic power. We need to encourage innovation, and this patent “reform” bill does just the opposite. It places more power in the hands of large corporations, and consequentially places innovative start-ups at an even greater disadvantage.

This bill will make it harder for entrepreneurs to do what they do–innovate, and create jobs. Research by the Kauffman Foundation shows that new companies add 3 million jobs annually, while older companies lose 1 million. With unemployment at 9.1%, we really cannot afford to pass laws that give advantages to companies that, on balance, lose jobs each year.

On the other hand, this song is probably one of the more complicated songs I’ve attempted. For one, there’s a lot of syncopation in the funky half-fingerpicked, half-strummed technique that he uses in a lot of his songs. It also is faster than most of the other songs I’ve attempted, which really pushes the limits of my singing abilities.

Hope you like it.

30 Day Challenge – John Mayer – Why Georgia by Kevin Stanton

Since I’m participating in an all-nighter charity event all weekend, The Nerdery: Overnight Website Challenge, I’ll have to catch up on my recordings on Monday.

30 Day Challenge – Pearl Jam – Elderly Woman Behind A Counter In A Small Town by Kevin Stanton

30 Day Challenge – Ryan Adams – Wonderwall by Kevin Stanton

Personally, I think this is one of the best I’ve done so far. It’s a slow song and doesn’t really have a wide vocal range to it, so it demands a lot less from me than most of the other songs I’ve done.

As in all my recordings for the #30DayChallenge, this was done in one take.

From Entrepreneurs talk back: Straight-up feedback and advice for VCs and angels:

A first-time entrepreneur who has raised nearly $5 million for her start-up writes, “My biggest concern for the health of the start-up economy is the avoidance of any kind of original thinking by VC’s. It just isn’t rational to fund the fourth, fifth or seventeenth copycat business. I love what Floodgate’s Mike Maples and Ann Miuro-Ko say about their preference for funding non-conforming ideas because they usually turn out to be the biggest ones. They say if an company is a hot deal it is rarely a home run because it’s not original enough. The real ’10+ baggers’ are the investments no one would touch — the ones they had to defend the first few years.”

I believe that true entrepreneurs can believe in their idea to a fault, and it’s really hard to tell blind optimism from revolutionary insight. Still, the next Google isn’t going to be an un-original idea. It’s going to get laughed at a bunch of times before it finds its path to greatness.

30 Day Challenge – Ray LaMontagne – Trouble by Kevin Stanton