DeanOnSoftware.com

After a long wait on iBuypower to build the Thermaltake Level 10 PC, it finally arrived last week. A few initial pics to follow. My initial impressions:

1. This thing is heavy. I go to the Gym and lift weights twice a week. Forget it. I’m never going to be able to move again. I found my self dragging it into place.
2. It took way to long for them to build. They claim they had all the parts from the get go.
3. Because it had to be freighted iBuyPower was a little confused as to who they shipped it with. Annoying after the long wait. I had to place multiple calls.
4. A Duie Pyle (trucking company that sounds like a pile of crap?)) was final deliverer. But there was another company in between. I think Fedex or UPS could of handled this and would it would have been fine. I don’t get why I had to pay extra to have some thug mishandle the box anyway.
5. Even though it weighs a ton, the doors on it seem a little cheap or thin.
6. It has two locks. One for motherboard door and other to get back panel off. But PSU and DVD doors are not locked. Seems silly kind of.
7. Little gap between DVD door and cover panels. Looks a little off when you look at it from front.
8. iBuyPower felt the need to slap their ugly sticker on my pristine virgin. I think this date with them and I could be a one and done. Thank you. Also, they never sent the free LCD monitor they promised. Yet another phone call?
9. Inside layout is very nice.
10. I verified the unit works, but have a long job ahead of me moving everything over. So more to do on checking out new system. Details here: http://deanonsoftware.com/?p=99

Some pics:

Happy New Year from us here at Kapsoft and DeanOnSoftware. All the best.

The start of the year should bring in new exciting things. Forget resolutions. I’m just too old for them. I’m just trying to live life in the fullest way.

So when my old trusted Flower PC lost its RAID controller I started looking at possible replacements. Flower is over 5 years old and I think that’s a really good life span for a PC. Especially one for a Software Engineer or someone involved in software development. I spec’ed Flower and had a local company build it. It really served me well, but when something goes I learned from the past that the end must be near for the old girl. She’s just being nice giving me a warning shot. The old girl:

So what to get now?

I’ve yet to go to multiple screens so there needs to be an upgrade there for sure. Flower is very noisy, so I’d like to cut back on that if possible. I can hear Flower from a long way away. She likes to yak.  Programmers need something very close to a gaming PC – at least I think so. Fast, tons of memory, fast drives, and maybe upgradeable. I find in the past I never monkeyed with the PC’s after purchase, but I’m keeping an eye possibly being able to change this PC with future tech improvements.

After surfing the Web endlessly I finally configured a few systems possible systems at both ibuypower.com and pugetsystems.com. I have never purchased anything yet from either, but from all reports they look like great PC builders. PugetSystems seems to have the silent PC thing down very well and offer a best of breed parts list that’s very good. iBuyPower specializes in gaming PC’s.

So what did I order? Well I’m in to having really cutting edge PC cases. (This wouldn’t be that interesting if I didn’t). A few months ago this case was released by Themaltake. The Level 10 Case:

Extravagant maybe. This case should be fun to look it and be totally future proof. The nice part is that ibuypower has an exclusive on this case and they are building it for me as I write. It is a very big case and the pictures probably do not give one the real story how big and heavy this thing (Monster) really is. BMW has some hand in the design – so maybe this will satiate my desire for a car of that namesake. iBuyPower will not ship this via UPS or FedEx. They say its too heavy and they are worried about damage. They will only ship by a Freight company. A little bit of a bummer since that costs more also.

Before I list the components let me say I had to comprimise on a few things. I didn’t get the highest end ATI video card available, but 5770 is a good one for sure and will support multiple screens via EyeAffinity. I did get a really beefy 850 Watt PSU that should let me change to any video cards in the future. The Corsair PSU is pretty good on the silent part too. iBuyPower doesn’t tell you what hard drive they use. I wish they did. Caviar Black would be my choice. The motherboard has USB 3.0 and SATA 3. It is also ready for the next generation of Intel Processors. I did not get a Blueray reader/writer. I will add that in near future. I will add more ram also in the future and bring it up to 12 meg. Maybe I’ll add a Creative sound card soon also. Windows 7 Ultimate is the OS, but maybe a Linux partition in near future.

Here are the components I specified for the insides of the beast. Enjoy and I will have an unboxing and complete review upon delivery:

Case Thermaltake Level 10 Gaming Tower Case – Black Processor Intel® Core™ i7 920 Processor (4x 2.66GHz/8MB L3 Cache) Processor Cooling CoolerMaster V8 CPU Cooling Fan System Memory 6 GB [2 GB X3] DDR3-1333 Triple Memory Module – Corsair or Major Brand ** Free Upgrade to DDR3-1600 ** Video Card ATI Radeon HD 5770 – 1GB – Single Card Motherboard ASUS P6X58D Premium — Intel X58 Chipset CrossFire and SLI Supported w/ 7.1 Sound, GbLan, S-ATA III, USB 3.0, PCI-E MB Power Supply 850 Watt — Corsair CMPSU-850TX Power Supply – SLI Ready Primary Hard Drive 1 TB HARD DRIVE — 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s – Single Drive Optical Drive 22X Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive – Black Sound Card 3D Premium Surround Sound Onboard Network Card Onboard LAN Network (Gb or 10/100) Operating System

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

I will work on an FAQ for Stencil in the near future. The iPhone Stencil was designed to be used with a mechanical pencil – since some of the cuts and turns are very tight. Remember all the widgets are kept true to 1.5x scale. I use a Zebra #2.

Pens and sharpies don’t fit in some of the small holes. Thanks to Tedd Fox for bringing this to my attention.

You go through the design process of a product with blinders on sometimes. But with the iPhone Stencil (see MobileSketchBook.com in case you are hearing about this for first time) I employed a great iPhone Programmer David Hinson to review the template. My thanks to him for doing that. And of course my great designer Dimitri Pagonis for his art work.

I want to do a very quick little rear view mirror analysis on why I think this stencil trumps the existing metal stencil that preceded ours. The short list:

• you can see through to the paper with our stencil. Huge. It’s really hard to design when you can’t see what you are doing.
• ours is 1.5x size. Matches our new Sketch Book from Apress. And easy to get a pencil into tight holes – try that will the metal 1.25x scale stencil.
• ours bends. It’s durable. It’s a working item and not a museum piece.  Bend that metal sucker by half the amount you can bend ours. History.

That’s enough for now. Have a nice weekend.

So ends another journey of our super hero (that’s me in case you didn’t know). Like the movie “The Graduate” it was really only one word for me: Plastics. Yes, I thought the world (that’s you iPhone design freaks out there in case you didn’t know) needed a plastic template (or Stencil) in order to draw your fab UI’s on. And hopefully you will be doing it on the new Apress iPhone Application Sketch Book.

My journey took me into the unknown world of plastics. It is a confusing maze of 1000’s of materials and processes. I needed to find a cost effective way to produce my iPhone Stencil. It did take a little while to sort out but after keeping after it for a couple of weeks I found the solution or should I say company that could do this. I’ll keep that to myself for now. I know all you plastic copy cats are out there and ready to pounce. (Like the paper copy cats we all know and love).

So the iPhone Stencil is the perfect bed mate to the new Apress published iPhone Application Sketch Book. See them and buy them from the brand new MobileSketchBook.com Website. I wanted to create a Design Stencil that was easy to use. Not just pretty. Not steel. Kind of like the old ones we used in school at one time or another. All the UIKit stuff is in there – if we missed anything I could easily put it in a future revision. I hope you love it as much as I loved doing it.

The new Apress Book is also improved. Not just the fruity cover. It’s now 1.5x scale (150% of actual size iPhone). Pages have been increased by 25 – that’s 50 more templates. And the pages have been perforated for easy tear out. And the iPhone Stencil is the same scale. (I left a way to draw 1x scale iPhone on Stencil. For old times sake.)

Thanks to Clay Andres from Apress for finding me Dr. Rory Lewis of the Computer Science Dept. of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. I’m sending enough iPhone Application Sketch Books for the entire class (over 30). Dr Lewis is unique in that he teaches an iPhone Programming class.

As you recall I made the offer to supply free Sketch Books to worthy US Schools teaching iPhone design and programming. Not many takers. Too few programs! As Rory stated to me in an email: “Oh yes, very few schools do iPhones because its, to them, objective-c which is a nightmare to teach.”

I myself come from a C/C++/C# background and I do find objective-c hard to look at sometimes.

BTW. This is the last day the iPhone Application Sketch Book will be for sale by Kapsoft on Amazon. Thanks to everyone who help me. Too many to mention. A great process to work through which I enjoyed from start to finish. But its not dead yet Jim! The Apress version has a new exciting 1.5x scale. So bigger is better (darn!). The new cover is out there ready to go in all its fruitness.

And stay tuned. I’m coming out with a new sister product to the Sketch Book that I hope you will love. It was another labor of summer/fall love. MobileSketchBook.com will be totally resdesigned (i.e. it won’t suck anymore since Pagonis is doing it for me).

Until next time.

For those that love the iPhone Application Sketch Book, I’m deep into the development of a new product that I’m sure (hope) you will love. I was playing it safe when I used Amazon to fulfill my Sketch Book. They have a slick bullet proof system that did not fail me. All that will be going way with the Sketch Book when Apress takes over the publishing (in a few days).  Great service does come at a cost however. Amazon takes almost $5 out of a $15 sale.

So with the new product I decided to sell and fulfill it myself. How hard could that be? Right? So I started to look around at Shopping Cart Software. And I must say by this point my head is spinning and I’m pretty much right where I started out. There are hundreds of vendors. Hundreds of options. So I decided to treat this project like I might any other software project. I’m under a tight deadline of having something up early November. Demitri Pagonis will be redoing our MobileSketchBook.com Website to incorporate the new Apress Sketch Book and the new “secret” product. So that part is covered. I need a great checkout system for my product.

Here are some requirements:

1. Take in credit card payments of major cards
2. Simple one page checkout with no requirement to signup as a member
3. Calculate shipping for USPS (my only shipping method I will offer)
4. Store orders in an order database
5. Store shipping information in Endicia XML format so the shipping process can be automated
6. Create logs of everything with automated backup
7. Be secure – check credit address validation and validate numbers
8. Store customer information in a CRM system – possibly Salesforce.com
9. Be able to restore quickly (a plan?) in case of disaster
10. Not cost an arm and a leg (might want to make some money off new product)

Holy cow. Even I’m having a hard time keeping it all straight. I’m putting up another Voices That Matter iPhone Conference ticket. This time via a simple Twitter contest. A $699 value. Ends Oct 11th. Random selection by yours truly.

 

I will give away tons of free Voices That Matter iPhone Conference ticket by this simple Twitter Contest. Here is all you need to do:

1. Follow me @kapsoft on Twitter
2. Tweet the following  “@kapsoft I want a free Voices That Matter iPhone Conference ticket courtesy of http://www.mobilesketchbook.com

 

Don’t forget we still have these two freebies going on at the same time: Another ticket to Voice That Matter via Amazon purchase of Sketch Book. And I’m giving away free Sketch Books daily. Whew. I’m out of my mind.

I’m willing to donate a limited number of free iPhone Application Sketch Books to schools. Especially Computer Science, Design, and Electrical Engineering Departments in the USA. I’ll even consider High Schools.

I’m interested in promoting Mobile Application and Hardware Design in our schools in the United States. I feel this is a growth area and we need more interest from our young people. We don’t have enough courses like the CS 193P Stanford iPhone Programming course. We need more!

So drop me a line and tell me why you think your school should receive the Sketch Books. Then I will select some compelling ones and I’ll even pay the shipping costs. I’ll monitor my email and twitter only for this:

kaplan+kapsoft+.com

and follow me and DM me at Twitter:   @kapsoft

I will give away tons of free iPhone Application Sketch Books by this simple Twitter Contest. Here is all you need to do:

1. Follow me @kapsoft on Twitter
2. Tweet the following  “@kapsoft I want a free iPhone Application Sketch Book. http://bit.ly/dOjmZ ”

I will DM you for your address. The selections will be random. Enjoy.