1:41 PM
Unknown
Makes you think twice before abandoning the iPhone, even with the hassles and review process problems, doesn't ...
Monday, August 31, 2009
Click-to-Flash
Just thought this was an apropos time to mention Wolf Rentzsch's wonderful Click-to-Flash, which disables the Flash plug-in from working in your browser unless you specifically authorize it. It's a wonderful tool that any Mac user should have installed (except you Flash developers, of cours...
Flash Post Mortem
Okay, this is going to be my last word on Flash for a while. As fun as this has been, beyond this, I think that things will begin to get counterproductive and I have a lot of stuff I have to get done in the next few weeks.I do appreciate everyone who took time to point out their perceived flaws in my argument, and to everyone who provided links and information about the Flash Platform with regards to the mobile web. Nothing I saw changed my mind about the future of Flash as a web development tool, but I feel better informed about Adobe's desperate attempts to hold onto the position they've carved out for themselves on the pre-mobile web.Even if my predictions are completely wrong and Flash manages to survive as a dominant web development tool, it won't change my conviction that it's simply...
Nested Arrays
I'm staying the heck away from talking about Flash for a while. ☺In my quest for a good solution for handling table-based detail editing panes, I've been experimenting with using nested arrays to drive the table structure. A nested array is nothing more than an array of arrays (and I'm talking about NSArray instances here). The main or outer array contains one instance of NSArray for each section, and each subarray contains one object for each row in the section it represents. It takes multiple nested arrays to hold the structure of a table, with one nested array holding the labels, another holding the keys, and another holding the class of the controller class that can be used to edit that item. They're paired nested arrays, I guess.This solution isn't quite as turnkey as the property-list...
Friday, August 28, 2009
Just a Few More Vacation Thoughts
Wow. I really didn't expect this kind of response. I see that my original Flash rant is up to 29 comments. I'm a little scared to read the ones I haven't read when I finally get back from vacation. I really seem to have pissed off a lot of people. That honestly was never my intention.To some extent, I regret the "Flash Sucks" part of the discussion. Not because it's necessarily untrue, though: It's my honest opinion of Flash on Mac OS X - it's leaky, crash-prone and, well... sucks. But, I regret it because that statement has detracted from the real discussion that's been going on underneath it all. It seems to me that many Flash proponents are trying to write me off as "just another run-of-the-mill Flash Hater" predicting the demise of Flash "yet again". The same old story, nothing to see...
Posted in: Rant
Thursday, August 27, 2009
You Guys Rock
A lot of you disagree with me on my Flash assessment and your comments have been great. Unfortunately, I really do need to get back to my vacation. Do please feel free to keep knocking down my arguments in the comments, though.I want to leave with this definition that I tweeted a minute ago, because this is the crux of my point in the last point. I'm really not hoping Flash dies, but I do fear for the hammer developers in the Flash world because there's at least some chance of the platform becoming obsolete. We can argue all night about how great those chances are, but given the current environment, the chance is at very least greater than zero.A "hammer developer" is a developer who has only ever learned one language and development framework. With only one tool in their box, every problem...
Posted in: Rant
Flash is Dead! Long Live Flash!
I am on vacation. I did not intend to do a blog post while on vacation, but I feel like I need more than 140 characters to explain my recent twitter rants. We're having a quiet night after several days in the Disney parks, so it's a good opportunity to expand on these recent tweets, since the twitter versions, limited to 140 characters, are evoking a lot of anger.The SparkWhile at Disney World's Magic Kingdom, I wanted to look something up on Disney's website. Navigating to one of the Disney.com web pages using my iPhone resulted in an error page. That's right, I thought to myself, Disney uses Flash for almost everything, don't they.I'm not thrilled about a company doing that, but that's absolutely not the thing that set me off. It was the...
Posted in: Rant
Friday, August 21, 2009
To Autorotate or Not to Autorotate
Toby Joe Boudreaux has a great post today about one shortcoming of autorotation on the iPhone, which is when you try to use an application that supports autorotation laying down. In that scenario, the phone often doesn't do what you expect it to do and it can be a pain. Toby Joe shows how to allow your users to turn off autorotation from within your a...
iPhone Sketch Book Mini-Review
Well, only one day after finding out about the iPhone Sketch Book, one showed up in the mail. Very nice. The stencil I ordered a week and a half ago still hasn't shown up, so Kapsoft, the creators of the iPhone Sketch Book are already getting brownie points by being prompt.The sketch book itself is quite nice. The cover design is professional looking, although the pink eraser and #2 pencil seemed out of place to me. Personally, those objects tend to make me think of elementary school as opposed to professional design. I probably would have opted for a mechanical pencil myself, but that's a tiny quibble if ever there was one. I know many people do, in fact, use #2 pencils and rubber erasers to do their designs.The binding is a wire coil binding,...
Another Pimp My Code
Wil Shipley has another installment up in his Pimp my Code series of blog postings. Wil's blog is on my very short "must read" list, so I'm heading off to read this one. You should to.Yes, I know that on a few subject areas (unit testing, use of the oxford semicolon) Wil argues against the widely accepted view, but Wil's been coding Objective-C almost as long as anybody, so it's always worth reading what he has to say, even if people occasionally disagree with some of ...
Posted in: Other blogs
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Property-List Driven Detail Editing Pane
A while back, I discussed using a property list to drive a table-based detail editing pane. I had intended to use this code in a sample project in More iPhone Development. I still feel strongly that this is a good approach, and when I have some time, plan to work on it more. However, from a pedagogical standpoint, it wasn't working for me. All of the code I needed to demonstrate was getting moved to generic classes and the main point was getting lost in a confusing mess of classes.Therefore, since it's not going to be used in the book, I'm releasing the code for people to look at and use (no restrictions or requirements). Please note, however, that this is NOT production quality code, so caveat emptor. If you want to use this in a real application, expect to sink some time into extending and...
Interesting...
Here's an interesting post on how to get an iPhone-like interface in your WinMo application. It seems like a lot of work to get the functionality you'd get for "free" if you created an iPhone application. My first thought was that I didn't think it was a good sign for the Windows Mobile community that an article like this even exists. It felt like SDK-envy to me.But then I thought about it some more. As somebody who spent years programming for my non-preferred platform, I really do applaud an effort to work around the limitations of a platform in order to create something that's better, even if it takes a lot more work. I also applaud the willingness to borrow good things from other platforms, as long as the goal isn't to be "as good" as the other platform. Shooting for "as good" never results...
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Nice iPhone Application Idea.
I don't often post about specific non-developer iPhone applications, but this is just too neat not to mention. Very nice, and a great price to bo...
Posted in: iPhone Apps
iPhone Sketch Book
I just found out about the iPhone Application Sketch Book, a product aimed firmly at iPhone developers.It looks like I may get a chance to review one of these, so probably when I get back from vacation I'll post my impressions of the actual product.It's going to get bonus points if the template matches in size the iPhone Stencil Kit I ordered last week.(yes, I like doing designs using analog tools, sue ...
Blocks on iPhone
I really do no need to start writing, but just one more thing that came out of last Thursday's meetup. We talked a little about when some of the cool Snow Leopard features like Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch might be coming to the iPhone.Again, I'm purely speculating, but I think we will see blocks sooner rather than later, maybe in iPhone SDK 3.5. Grand Central Dispatch is harder to predict. Although there is some value in it now, since the iPhone has two processors - a CPU and a GPU - the real power of GCD comes with even more processing cores, and I have no idea if or when we'll get a multi-core iPhone.But, blocks? Blocks on the iPhone would be cool, and you know what? You don't have to wait.Sure, by using this, you don't get block support in the Foundation and UIKit classes, but you...
On iPhone Competitors
At the New York City iPhone Meetup last week, Steve Kochan and I were tasked with talking about the future of the iPhone and the iPhone SDK. I'm not sure either of us were particularly qualified to speak on that. I'm not being modest; I'm not sure anybody outside of One Infinite Loop is qualified to speak about that, and anybody who is qualified is almost certainly not allowed to speak about it. But everybody's got ideas of where things should go and where they might go, so we talked for a little while about some of the things we might see in a hypothetical iPhone SDK 4 or in the next generation of iPhone OS devices.First of all, I hope nobody took anything I said as gospel. Although I do know a small handful of people inside Apple, none of them are close enough friends that they'd be willing...
Workshop Done
I am back home, at my desk for the first time since last Thursday.The workshop went pretty well. Being the first time I had taught a class of that length, it was a bit stressful. It ended up being even more stressful than I had anticipated. A combination of a really, really bright group of students, and the fact that we provided the exercises in digital rather than printed form, meant that exercises that should have taken an hour, often took fifteen minutes. Because they were smart students, they absorbed material quickly, and because the instructions were provided digitally, they were able to copy and paste the code portions of the instructions, which is not only faster than having to type in the code, but it also has a considerably lower possibility for making mistakes. Frankly, we learn...
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Boot Camp Imminent
Well, it's not just under 48 hours until I teach my first workshop. I'm a little harried right now. I'm comfortable teaching and speaking in front of groups, but I've never taught anything of this scope before, so I underestimated the prep time involved. I haven't slept much this week, and the situation doesn't look like it'll get much better before Friday.If you e-mail me, IM, or tweet me in the next few days, please don't be offended if you don't get a response. I will try to catch up after the weekend and will be responding only to urgent e-mails in the meantime. I'm going to be mostly shutting out the world in an effort to get everything done and make sure that I'm satisfied with the workshop materials.Despite the stress, I'm actually very happy with what I've gotten done so far. I think...
Monday, August 10, 2009
OpenGL ES Update
I know there's probably one or two people out there who would like to see another entry in the OpenGL ES from the Ground Up series. The good news is, I started one a while back, right after WWDC. It's a fairly extensive introduction to OpenGL ES 2.0 and shaders.The bad news is, I have no idea when I'll have time to finish it. I'm behind on writing the next book, plus I'm frantically trying to get ready for the iPhone Boot Camp NYC this weekend (boy, that snuck up on me). I will finish it at some point, thou...
My Last Word on Dot Notation
The dot notation discussion has taken far more of my time lately than it was wise for me to spend. I've said pretty much all that I need to say on the topic at this point. I don't care if you use it, just don't tell me I'm wrong for doing so. Just for the record, I was horribly opposed to Objective-C's dot notation when it first came on the scene. i had programmed in both C++ and Java over the years, but I much preferred Objective-C, and I saw dot notation as being a step backwards and a really bad idea for a number of reasons.For the book, Dave and I decided we were going to follow Apple's lead when it came to coding style and coding conventions, so I bit the bullet and started using properties for the book exercises. Now that I've used them regularly for about a year and a half, I have completely...
Sunday, August 9, 2009
How to Use Dot Notation and Properties
Since we're talking so much about dot notation, I though I should link to a fabulously awesome blog post by Chris Hanson that tells how you should use dot notation and properti...
Dot Notation Redux: Google's Style Guide
Before I get into this post, let me make a few things absolutely clear. I do not want my intentions misunderstood. When coding for yourself, do what feels right to you. If you don't like dot notation, don't use it, and don't feel like you should apologize for not using it.When coding for a client or employer who has a coding style guide or other published coding conventions, use those, even if they disagree with your personal opinion of the "right" way to code. In a group programming environment, consistency is extremely valuable.My goal here is not to tell you that you must or should use dot notation, it is only to refute the idea that dot notation shouldn't have been added to the language and that it inherently makes code harder to read.My illustrious writing partner, Dave Mark tweeted today...
Friday, August 7, 2009
The Dot Notation Controversy
Sorry! It was Joe Conway, not Aaron who wrote the post. I've corrected the article below. The salient points are unchanged, but my apologies for mis-attributingI knew that some developers didn't particularly care for Objective-C 2.0's dot notation, but I didn't realize how strongly some of them felt about it. Joe Conway of the Big Nerd Ranch has a very strongly worded post about the horrors of dot notation.I have a lot of respect for Joe and the Big Nerd Ranch, and reading his post, I understand his complaints. He has identified some situations where dot notation can lead to confusion. In practice, however, I don't personally find the use of properties confusing in the slightest and think telling people to never, ever, ever use them is misguided imposition of a personal preference rather...
Translations and Xcode
Chris Hanson has a really handy post today. In the localization chapter of Beginning iPhone Development, we mentioned that Apple recommended using the ISO two letter language code for your localizations, but that Xcode used the older style language codes for your development base language. Chris shows how to work around this inconsisten...
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Multi-Row Delete in 3.0
The networkpx Project Blog has an interesting post on doing multi-row delete under SDK 3.0. It's a good post, even if they do credit the excellent Cocoa with Love blog for "introducing" a technique that I demonstrated three months earlier.Anyway, the ability to do multi-row delete is now built-into UITableView starting with SDK 3.0, meaning you can now implement multi-row delete it with just few lines of code. Yay.Or, perhaps not. Unfortunately, using this functionality requires you to return an undocumented UITableViewCellEditingStyle value from tableView:editingStyleForRowAtIndexPath: in order to turn this feature on. To fully utilize the functionality, you have to use and override other undocumented, private methods.Technically, doing that in an application submitted to the App Store violates...
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
NinjaWords
John Gruber says pretty much all that needs to be said on this. Not a sign that things are heading in the right direction, I"m afra...
Monday, August 3, 2009
A Mac App Store
Back before WWDC, one of my long-shot predictions was the creation of a Mac App Store following the same business model as the iPhone App Store. It didn't come true, and now with the various issues surrounding the App Store, I've changed my mind that it would be a good idea. I've come to the conclusion that I like not having Apple as the gatekeeper for what Apps can do.But, it's nearly impossible to argue that the App Store isn't convenient. It has its issues, but its a great idea, which is why the App Store is flourishing despite all the negative press.Now, a third-party called Bodega is extending the idea to Mac applications, and it's a snazzy little application.In some ways, Bodega outdoes Apple's iTunes Store. The interface is clean and...
Me, the Hypocrite Apparently
Today, I saw somebody tweeting about signing a petition to get DRM off of the Kindle. I tweeted that the best way to "vote" on something like that is with your dollars. If you buy a Kindle and then sign a petition about the DRM on it, you haven't really given Amazon much motivation to stop using DRM. Since you bought it, you obviously didn't care enough about DRM to not purchase it, so if Amazon doesn't stop using DRM… well, they've already got your money and probably will continue getting your money in the future. At least from the point of view of an MBA, such a petition is essentially meaningless; it has about as much significance as the mewling of kittens. Money talks more loudly than petitions.Now, I consider what I tweeted to be a truism. I wasn't particularly intending to take a stand...
iSimulate
One of the difficult aspects of making an iPhone program is marketing it. One thing that helps is a professional quality video of the program in action. This is especially true for games. However, since the iPhone Simulator doesn't have access to the accelerometer, camera, or the full capabilities of the multi-touch screen, it can be difficult to get a professional looking video.iSimulate (App Store Link) is a great option for developers. It's a standalone program that runs on your iPhone that will send the inputs from the iPhone to the simulator. This means you can run a program in your simulator and control it by touching or tilting your actual phone. This allows you to use a screen capture program to capture flawless video, even if your program uses features not available on the simulator.Right...
Sunday, August 2, 2009
This Concerns Me Greatly
Yes, I'm a little behind. I've been gone for a week, so this is probably not news to any of you, but this really upsets me, so I'm writing about it. I try to give Apple the benefit of the doubt when they make decisions that seem unfair or arbitrary, fully cognizant of the fact that I'm not privy to all the factors that went into the decision.But, this... Well..., if this is true, it would seem to indicate that maybe I've been wrong in giving Apple the benefit of the doubt. That maybe those who have let out a hue and cry over every little Apple decision they didn't like had a more accurate picture of the situation.If it's true that Apple won't even give more than a boilerplate reason for pulling an application that had been on the App Store for four months and won't tell the developers what...
