One of the most recent updates to the iPhone, and more specifically the operating system that is packaged with the iPhone, iOS, brought one of the most fantastic and phenomenal updates ever: an update to Maps. Maps has been used as an application that provides an easy way to find routes, and (obviously) maps about certain areas, businesses in the local vicinity, and also leaving pins on favorited locations, or pins where you have explored, and for many other reasons. However, although Maps has always been a great way to travel with, it has always been redundant to travel with, also. When you used Maps a while ago, you had to route your map, and then manually click each next button as you reached each turn or freeway exit, and the like. So, if you had to turn left on a certain street, you had to tell your phone you had done so, so it would give you the next directions. As a result, it could become very dangerous to always have your phone out, looking at it, while you are on a high-speed freeway. But, the newest update solved that, and brought a great amount of new features.

Using Maps GPS

Using Maps is as easy as it gets. Most of the time, when you are using Maps, you are using it to search for a location, and finding a way to get there. To start off, let’s search for the nearest mall, and routes to get there. Simply search a nearby mall you know about, or search the general word “mall” by tapping on the top text box, and typing in mall, and searching. Pins will drop down on the screen, and locating the mall by zooming into certain streets and locations will help you find the mall you want. Once you find the mall you desire to go to, click on the blue arrow, and scroll down, and tap on the button that says “Directions To Here.”

As a result of tapping on that particular button, a new window should show up asking where your starting location is. On default, this location is your current location; if it is anything else, simply type in the starting location into the top address bar, such as your house. Once you are ready to go, tap on route, and you should be ready to go. Well, not exactly. One of the best features that has been implemented in the new system is suggested routes, and alternative routes. If you don’t like to drive on certain streets, or roads, the system provides you with different methods to get to your destination, which may avoid a road you don’t feel like driving on that certain day, or time, or you simply don’t want to take the freeway. It’s all okay, as Maps provides you with many different routes to take. Once you find the route you want (by tapping on the certain route’s outline), click start, and you should be ready to go. Make sure you turn up your volume so you can hear the directions!

Maps for Alternative Transportation

One of the most recent additions to the iPhone is the Photo Editor, directly in the iPhone. Added in the update that came from Apple over the summer, this new photo editor brings efficiency, and simplicity to photo editing, right in your phone. If you have a photo that you just took a moment ago of you with your friends, and you want to edit some features before posting it on a social networking site, it becomes simpler with this new addition, right in the Photos Application.

Open up the Photos application, and tap on a picture you would like to edit. Once your picture comes up, tap in the top right on the button named “Edit.” A user interface that deals with editing will show up, and you are ready to rock and roll. First off, many times we take pictures at weird angles, we take them sideways, upside down, to the right, to the left, and our phone doesn’t recognize them. In the bottom left, you will see an arrow that is pointing counter clockwise; this is the button that you want to press if you want to flip your picture around to the correct orientation. Keep in mind that this flips counter clockwise, and it doesn’t matter if you pass the orientation that you wanted. Just keep flipping!

Next up is the simple enhance tool. Sometimes colors get drowned out if we don’t have the right lighting in our pictures, and makes the photo look dull, and dreary. You don’t want your colors to look dull and dreary while you are celebrating your trip to New York and seeing Times Square! Tapping on the button that looks similar to a magic wand, your picture will begin to look brighter and fuller. With the tap of a button, the iPhone detects what points in the picture is, as we said earlier, “dull, and dreary” and enhances those colors to their predicted colors, if the light was in the correct intensity. However, if you are dissatisfied with the outcome of the enhance tool, if your picture is not handled well by the phone, you are able to tap on the wand again, and remove your auto enhance.

In the rare case of red eye in your picture, the new photo editor has a solution. Moreover, a one-tap solution. With a simple tap on the red eye correction tool, between the crop tool, and the auto-enhance tool, you bring up a screen where you are now able to tap anywhere on your photo where red eye exists, and remove it. As simple as that. Remember when you had to do crazy dragging, selection, and odd stunts to remove red eye? Not any more.

Creating an enum in Python prior to Python 3.4 was accomplished as follows:

def enum(**enums)::
      return type('Enum',(),enums)

then use as:

Animals=enum(Dog=1,Cat=2)

and accessed as:

Animals.Dog

The new version can be created as follows:

from enum import Enum

class Animal(Enum):
    Dog=1
    Cat=2

Learning SQL development can seem like an overwhelming task at first. However, mastering just a few key points will help ease your way through 80 percent of the day-to-day challenges when writing stored procedures and solving common problems. Here are three important SQL development factors to keep in mind:

Outer Joins
One of the most crucial things to understand in SQL server are joins. Joins are a way to retrieve data from two or more tables based on logical relationships between them. Joins dictate how Microsoft SQL Server ought to use data from one table to select the rows in another table.

In my experience inner joins are intuitive while outer joins can present additional hours of grief by overlooking associations in the other table(s). The outer join is the key to answering questions about what the database does not have. For example, if you need to make a query to display all the students who are without report-cards, you’ll need a left join to get all students coupled with a “where clause” to return the ones who have nulls for their report card table columns in the results.

Many talented Java script programmers have muddled through the SQL Server by deficient coding around the inner join. As a result, their queries can take five hours to run, whereas, properly written left joins, can take only two seconds to run.

Aggregation
Grouping results comes up in SQL a lot more than you might think. Knowing how to write a query when answering questions such as, “What’s the average grade for each teacher’s student list?” is invaluable. This kind of question cannot be answered with a single table or solely by joins.  You’ll often find you need to use joins in conjunction with group by statements. Always write the raw query first and then look at the results. Next, you have to figure out the best way to group them, rewrite your select clause and add a group by clause in the end.

Digging Through Data
I find this is the most lacking skill in many programmers. In fact, many otherwise-talented programmers holding Master’s Degrees fail to get jobs because they couldn’t analyze rows of data objectively during interviews. It’s just something that’s not taught but is crucial to get under you belt. Why? Eventually, some query is not going to perform as you may expect. And, the only way to find discrepancies is to look at rows of data, identify what join isn’t finding a match or where bad data is throwing things into chaos. Get familiar with how joins actually work, even if you have to manually walk through the logic of a large stored procedure’s tree of joins. It’s boring and time-consuming but absolutely necessary.

Take the time to master the core skills that will make you a successful SQL Programmer and avoid queries that run for five hours!