9:58 PM
Unknown
If you've got an App in the App Store, or are planning to sell an app there, it might be a good idea to learn from somebody else's mista...
Posted in: App StoreSaturday, October 31, 2009
SmartPhone Comparison
I found this comparison of the current generation of smart phones to be interesting. Droid is shaping up to be a heck of a phone. I don't think it's going to pull a lot of people away from the iPhone, but I think it will do well and will probably be the biggest boost for the Android platform to date.Are there really 10,000 applications on the Android Market now? I'm somewhat surprised that it's that high. I think even if that number's true (Googling finds me a lot of people regurgitating this same estimate from an unofficial source, but I can't find an authoritative source for the actual number of apps in the store), that comparison doesn't really represent the true differential between the App Store and the Android Market. Not even 1% of the applications in the Android Market have been downloaded...
Posted in: Android
iPhone Tech Talk Hamburg
I've heard from a handful of people that the Hamburg Tech Talk acceptance e-mails have started. Good luck to everyone who appli...
Posted in: Tech Talks
Friday, October 30, 2009
More iPhone 3 Development Mini-Update
Our original belief that a chapter on supporting online play with GameKit would be long turned out to be accurate. The first draft of the online play chapter just knocked the last Core Data chapter off of its pedestal. Clocking in at 56 pages, this chapter goes through the process of creating re-usable objects to listen for network connections and to exchange information with other devices using streams. We also show you how to use Bonjour to find and connect to peers on your local network.It's been a bear to write, but I think it's good addition to the book. I could be wrong, but I think this will be the most comprehensive step-by-step guide to adding online play to a GameKit application that's available and, frankly, most of the hard work was in writing the two reusable classes that you'll...
Posted in: Book project
Tech Talk London
Sounds like the London Tech Talk World Tour acceptances have started to seep out of Cupertino. That's almost a month before NYC, so it may be a few weeks before the NYC ones start escaping from One Infinite Loop. That's a long time to keep fingers cross...
Thursday, October 29, 2009
On Private APIs
I'm hearing from a couple of different sources that Apple's App Store reviewers now have some way to scan submitted applications to detect the use of private APIs. I've never been an advocate of using Private APIs, and Dave and I strictly avoid them for the book examples, but I always thought it strange that Apple left to the honor system any use of private APIs that couldn't be easily discerned.Looks like you need to step more carefully now if you have used any private framework APIs.I know this step will annoy some developers, but in the long run, it's for the best. Private APIs add fragility to an application, and they also discourage people from submitting enhancement requests, which are how Apple gauges whether a currently private API should be made publ...
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Unity Indie Now Free
The 3D game-making toolset called Unity is now available for free to independent developers who gross less than $100k on products made with the tools. This is an interesting move on the part of Unity3D. I haven't used the tool myself, but I've heard mostly good things about it. Now that it's free for indie use, there's no excuse for not checking it o...
Posted in: Game Programming
DevDays
If you want to see some interesting chatter, take a look at the Dev Days backchannel on Twitter. It's very amusing. There's lots of ignorant hyperbole, including claims that Apple is the most evil thing on the planet because they chose to use Objective-C along with the typical complaints that it's not what they're used to, so it's bad, or ugly.There's also a fair amount of positive chatter as well. It's interesting to see just how different people's opinions can be.Most of the negative comments are just people expressing their honest (though sometimes ignorant or ill-informed) opinions, but some are just downright snarky as well as being ignorant. I know most of my readers know this, but Objective-C has a garbage collector. A really, really good garbage collector. Apple chose not to use...
Posted in: Rant
Droid Looks Nice
Here's a breif article on Droid with some nice pictures. The keyboard doesn't appeal to me, but to people who want a physical keyboard, this should have a lot of appeal, since they've put a decent-size keyboard on a phone that's almost as thin as the iPhone. I'd really like to check one of these out. I honestly do not think it's an iPhone Killer. To be that, the Android 2.0 OS would have to take a quantum leap forward in usability. It wouldn't be enough to become as-good or even a little better than the iPhone. To become an iPhone killer, a phone has to be significantly better than the iPhone. On the hardware side, though, there's some stuff that looks great on paper. The screen has a much higher resolution than existing iPhones at 854x480 pixels. I'm curious about this item, though. It's...
Posted in: Android
More iPhone 3 Development Update
The writing of More iPhone 3 Development is starting to move faster now, at least in terms of the number of pages we're churning out. It's not going as fast as we'd like, and nowhere near as fast as Apress would like, unfortunately, but it is going faster. The good news is that we're really happy with what we've written so far. More iPhone 3 Development is not just more of what was in Beginning iPhone 3 Development. We have a much greater focus in this book on application design and on writing code for maximum reuse. Many of the objects we write can be used unmodified in your own applications. We assume that the reader has done some development and is ready to take things to another level. We're just finishing up the networked applications...
Posted in: Book project
Monday, October 26, 2009
Two More iPhone Boot Camp Workshops
I'll be teaching the iPhone Boot Camp in New York City again on December 5-7. Like last time, I'll be teaching one half of a six-day workshop, with Steve Kochan doing the other half, so the full dates are December 2-7, and it's downtown, about two blocks from Penn Station, so it's easy to get there. Steve will be doing three days in Objective-C, and I'll follow with three days of iPhone development, and you can choose to take either class separately or both together.We're also going to do the same format in Chicago on December 11-16, with the iPhone portion of the workshop that I'll be teaching happening on December 14, 15, and 16.I'll post links to the signup page once I've received them from the iPhone Boot Camp fol...
Posted in: Workshop
Friday, October 23, 2009
NYC Tech Talk Update
If, like me, you've signed up for the New York City Tech Talk, do not fret if you haven't received confirmation yet. According to Apple's Graphics Technologies Evangelist, Allan Schaffer, they haven't processed the NYC ones y...
Meet Me, NYC, Nov. 5th
On November 5th, I'll be speaking at the Apple Store SoHo in New York City. I'll be speaking at the MetroMac meeting. The meeting is from 6:00 to 9:00, but I won't be speaking for the entire meeting. I believe I've been given roughly between ninety minutes and two hours, though, which is probably longer than anyone should have to listen to me. I've been given fairly free reign in terms of what I speak about, as long as it's relevant to the audience (iPhone, Mac, etc), however be aware that MetroMac is not a developer group and the audience will run the gamut from consumer to total gearhead. As a result, the talk will not be particularly technical (at least not hardcore developer-type technical). I'll be leaving about twenty minutes to a half hour for questions, and will be happy to answer...
Posted in: Speaking
Marble Madness?
The developer of Stone Loops, a marble game that used to be available in the App Store, has a very discouraging tale to tell in his blog today. Obviously, this is only one side of the story, but it does seem very suspicious to me that MumboJumbo only made these hefty claims of improper and illegal activity to Apple and not in any other forum (like, say, legal proceedings) nor have they leveled the same complaint about the multitude of previously existing platform version of Stone Loops. If Code Minions had really stolen code (among the things alleged from MumboJumbo), it seems like they would be taking more serious action than just complaining to Apple, that is, unless they don't have sufficient evidence to meet the standard of proof anywhere else, but if that's the case, then Apple shouldn't...
SQLitePersistentObjects Lives. It LIVES!
I know that some people were understandably upset and annoyed when I decided to stop new development on SQLitePersistentObjects. Although it's a project that I really enjoyed working on, I just couldn't justify spending more time on it in light of Apple's release of the far more mature Core Data in the iPhone SDK 3.0. Although I like certain things about the approach I took in SQLitePersistentObjects better than Core Data (like not having a data model file separate from the data model classes), it would have taken literally hundreds of hours (at least, maybe thousands) to get it to the point where the performance and feature set were comparable to what Core Data already has. Even if we got the performance and features to a comparable point, there's just not enough compelling advantages over...
Posted in: SQLitePersistentObjects
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Tech Talk World Tour
I didn't blog about this year's iPhone Tech Talk World Tour when it was announced. Many of the locations filled up so fast, it seemed like it would be just a tease to tell people about it when it was too late to actually do anything about it.If you did sign up, I've gotten word from a handful of people that acceptance e-mails have started to trickle out of Cupertino. I signed up for the NYC Tech Talk, but haven't received word either way yet. Fingers cross...
Posted in: Apple
Nice One, Microsoft
Microsoft opened their first Apple Store today. Wait, no. What I mean to say is that Microsoft opened their first Microsoft Store. That's the ticket. And it's very unique. I can't even imagine where they got the idea for the layout, decor, uniforms or grand opening welcome line. I also can't fathom where they got their inspiration for opening a boutique-style retail store in the first place.Hey, Redmond? Need a new tagline? How about?If it's blatant, it's Microsoft. or, maybeWe do shameless better.I think either of those would work well, and both would be accurate and honest. Although, in Microsoft's defense, Apple grand openings never have guys in suits at the end of the welcome line golf clapping. That's origin...
Patent Lawsuits: the Last Resort of the Mediocre
Nokia today announced they are suing Apple . Right in the press release, Nokia states that they are suing over patents that cover implementations of standards (GSM, WCDMA, WLAN, UMTS).WTF? That kind of misses the point of having an open standard in the first place. There's only so much difference between different implementations of the same protocol or standard. Jeebus! The problem with these cases, though, is that the judges are experts in law, but not in technology, so they rarely have the knowledge and/or cojones to issue summary judgment even in cases with no merits. Like this one. So, Nokia will, at very least, cause Apple to spend millions of dollars to defend themselve.Apple's release of the iPhone pretty much meant I'd never buy another Nokia phone again for myself, but now I will...
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Wil Shipley on Internationalization and Localization
Words of wisdom and free code from the Godfather of Cocoa, Wil Shipley. Go read now. Nuff sa...
Good Day for Android, Bad Day for Pre
The Palm Pre lost a high profile developer today (Jamie Zawinski, a notable contributor to many open source projects include Mozilla and XEmacs). He took some pretty harsh parting shots on his way out the door.Having an App Store that's more open than Apple's is one way to compete, but it's not enough. If consumers don't have a good experience with your phone, developers are not going to want to develop for ...
Posted in: Palm Pre
The Nook
For whatever reason, Amazon's Kindle has never really appealed to me. Though I read a fair amount, and am not opposed to the idea of an e-reader, I've just never had any techno-lust for it. It's not because of the DRM, though I'd rather they didn't have it. It's just that it's not that exciting. It's basically a one-trick pony. No matter how thin they make it, or how many books it can hold, it will only every serve the very limited purposes of reading books and doing some light web browsing. Boring. I can do both of those things on my phone, albeit on less than an ideal screen size, or on my laptop.Today, Barnes & Noble announced their competitor, the Nook. The Nook is based on Android. Now, people who read this blog know that my opinion of Android is that it's not as good as the iPhone...
Posted in: Android
Monday, October 19, 2009
Oh, My. Fiscal Results.
Today, Apple announced their Fiscal 2009 Q4 and boy, what a quarter it was. Funny, it's been a while since I heard someone predict the death of Apple. It's hard to believe just how common a practice that was among pundits only a decade ago.Apple sold more iPhones and more Macs last quarter than in any previous quarter in history, and they have the largest percentage of the market share they've had since 1994. That's true whether you take the lower Gartner number of 8.8% market share, or the higher IDC number of 9....
Posted in: Apple
Friday, October 16, 2009
Accessorizer 1.5
I've posted about Accessorizer before. It's just been updated to version 1.5, incorporating a new feature that sprang out of a feature request that was made by yours truly. Actually, it was more of an off-hand comment then a feature request, but Kevin Callahan, the brains behind Accessorizer liked the request and jumped on it with gusto.The new feature? Accessorizer now has the ability to auto-detect classes that are commonly used as outlets and, if you want it to, will add the IBOutlet keyword automatically to the generated property statements. I've been beta testing this new functionality, and works pretty darn well.If you do any significant amount of Objective-C programming and haven't tried Accessorizer, I'd really suggest giving it a try. In the application I wrote today for More iPhone...
Device Detection Redux
A while back, I posted some code by Max Horáth to detect the device your program was running on. That script dates from the pre-3Gs days, so won't identify that model. I'm not sure if Max has updated his script, but I found this class on Stack Overflow by Jason Goldberg. In addition to adding the more recent hardware, it uses a really efficient approach implemented in relatively few lines of code. I like that a lot.The one thing I don't like is the way the class is implemented. There's no reason to use instance methods like this and incur the overhead of object creation to. The object has no state, just behavior, so either of these methods could have been written either as C functions or as class methods, thus avoiding the need to create an object and manage its memory. At very least, this...
360|iDev Conference San Jose 2010
The dates for the 2010 360|iDev Conference in San Jose have been set for April 11-14 at the eBay Conference Center in San Jose, the same location as last year. I really enjoyed last year's conference. Tom and John do a great job organizing things (and seem to like me despite my opinion on Flash), and it's one of the best groups of attendees you could imagine. I was bummed to have to skip out on the 360|iDev Denver last month due to being behind on my writing obligations.Registration for the early-bird pricing is already open. Call for speakers will go out next we...
Posted in: conferences
Thursday, October 15, 2009
In App Purchase Can Now Be Used for Free App
Yep, just got notified by Apple. Free apps. In-app purchase. Say good-bye to "Lite" ap...
Posted in: App Store
The Little Things
I love when Apple's engineers quietly slip little things into the developer tools to make my life better. I commandeered my daughter's iPod Touch to do some peer to peer testing. Her iPod doesn't have my development provisioning profile on it, so when I went to run the app on it, I got this:I have no idea when they added this, but I know it didn't always give me the option to install and run. It's a little thing, but it saved me from having to go find the right provisioning profile and install it on her iPod.I'm often quick to note when something doesn't work right or as well as we'd like. I thought it was only fair to take a second to say kudos to Apple for quietly making my life just a little bit easi...
Posted in: Apple
Don't Fear the Interface Builder Redux
Last week, when I advised readers not to fear Interface Builder, I left out one very important piece of information. I am far from the only one who says that using Interface Builder isn't really optional. Apple's documentation says exactly the same thing, in no uncertain terms. The relevant portion is as follows:Note: Although you can create an Objective-C application without using nib files, doing so is very rare and not recommended. Depending on your application, avoiding the use of nib files can involve overriding large amounts of framework behavior to achieve the same results you would get using a nib file.I don't think Apple could be much clearer on this point. Apple and NeXT developers have been using Interface Builder for twenty-one years, longer than many programmers have been programming....
Posted in: Interface Builder
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Gamasutra on Android Game Development
Gamasutra, a great website devoted to "the art and business of making games", has an article today on developing games for Android. Of course, about half of the article is spent discussing the success of the App Store and making comparisons to it.Although I like the article, there are a few things in it that I take exception to. On the first page, for example, the article says that Android uses the "more developer friendly Java". What the hell does that mean? I've done both Java and Objective-C for a living, and neither one has ever waved to me or gotten me a cup of coffee. They're programming languages. Sure, there are more people who already know Java than Objective-C, but if that's what he meant, there were far more accurate ways of saying it.It's also just plain wrong in terms of game...
Monday, October 12, 2009
Why Objective-C Survives
Matt Gallagher, who maintains the excellent Cocoa with Love blog, has an interesting post today on the differences between the Simula and Smalltalk object models including a short discussion of the history of the two models. Objective-C uses the Smalltalk object model, most other compiled OO languages today (C++, Java, C#) follow the Simula mod...
Posted in: Other blogs
Friday, October 9, 2009
A Neat KVC Trick
Uli Kusterer has a neat little hint today on his blog with a safer way of specifying keys in KVC and K...
Posted in: Other blogs
Mobile Photoshop
Adobe just released a mobile version of Photoshop for the iPhone. Let me just surprise a few people here by saying that Adobe did a pretty awesome job with this. It's a really nice little application, and it's free. Sweet. Although it doesn't appear to be available in all of the international versions of the App Store yet.I can't help but think that this would have been a good showcase application to show off what Flash-generated iPhone applications can do. Alas, it appears to be a bog-standard Objective-C application, complete with nibs and byte-swapped PNG imag...
Adobe's Ace in the Hole?
There's one thing I'm having trouble figuring out about this whole Flash CS5 thing. Adobe invested a lot of time and money to get Flash on the iPhone, seemingly against Apple's wishes. To sink that much time and money into trying to get software onto a closed, proprietary platform without the consent or help of the gatekeeper seems odd. From an outsider's perspective, Apple seems to hold all the cards. They have any number of technical means to prevent Flash-generated apps from going on to the App Store if they decide to. It seems to me that there's only two possible explanations for Adobe's actions.Their management is desperate and completely incompetent. Possible, but doesn't seem that likely. While Adobe has made a lot of decisions in the last few years that I consider poor, I haven't seen...
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Louis Gerbarg on Flash for iPhone
The day that Adobe announced Flash CS5 with iPhone support, I took apart several of the Flash-generated iPhone applications and tweeted my findings. Louis Gerbarg has done a more detailed dissection of the Flash-generated iPhone ipa files (the actual file that gets downloaded from the App Store) than I did. He found the use of multiple (about a dozen) private API calls being used after doing what he calls a "cursory examination". His opinion of the size of the applications jived with mine as well (unnecessarily bloated), and he throws in some more concrete evidence showing that these apps do, in fact, perform poorly on iPhones prior to the 3Gs.Louis' findings would cast some doubt on Adobe's claim that they didn't do any reverse engineering. Of course, in my mind, there already was a fair...
Two Finger Rotate
Here is an Xcode project that shows how to do the two-finger rotate gesture. It's pretty straightforward, it just uses a CGAffineTransform to rotate the text on the screen to the same angle as the angle between the user's two fingers.This project does not deal with the fact that touches come into the responder methods unordered, so you may notice some minor glitches if you try and do more than a 180° rotation. That's a subject for a future blog posti...
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
More Flash Thoughts
There's been a lot of interesting discussion around the whole Flash CS 5 generating iPhone Apps thing. None of it has changed my opinion that it's in Apple's best interests and ultimately the best interests of iPhone users for them to take steps to stop Adobe from moving forward with this, or at least for Apple to set some boundaries with Adobe and phase the program in over time to avoid overwhelming the App Store infrastructure. The problem is multi-faceted, which can be confusing. To me, it seems to break out into a couple of related, but distinct issues:Technical: Are the applications generated by Flash 5 as good, or at least "close enough" to being as good as those created using Xcode? It's not a simple question, because even the best tools can be used to generated sloppy, bloated executables,...
Code Consequences
I think we're all aware that our actions have consequences for ourselves and, often, for others. I'm going to talk about such a situation that is relevant to iPhone developers.I've had to turn down some development work while writing More iPhone 3 Development. This isn't a big deal, as I expected that to happen when I agreed to do the book, and I like to see it, because it tells me that our platform is still doing well. However, a surprising number of the projects that I've turned down have been to fix iPhone applications written by other contract developers, something I don't consider to be such a good sign.Even if I were available to take the work, there's something inherently uncomfortable about these situations. Some developer whose identity is unknown to me wrote this code. That developer...
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
What an Apple Offer Looks Like
No, I don't have an offer from Apple, but someone else does, and it's pretty damn cool to see what it looks like.via CocoaGeek on Twit...
Posted in: Other blogs
This Made Me Laugh
Sometimes 140 characters is just enough to make a point. If you don't get the reference, AOT is the term Adobe is using to describe what they're doing to avoid JIT compilation, which the iPhone SDK doesn't perm...
Sue Me, I Think Developers Should Care
James Higgs has a different take on MonoTouch and Flash for iPhone. You should read it. It's good to see other points of view.That being said, I can't say that I agree with most of it. Indeed, I feel like James is missing the point and misrepresenting the point of view of well-respected members of the Objective-C community by cherrypicking individual tweets. The fact is, I agree with both tweets referenced in his blog post, even though they come off as a little crass and even elitist without context and given that the authors had only 140 characters to make a point.To highlight my main difference with James' opinion, let me respond to his concluding paragraph that he seems to think no reasonable person could have a problem with, and tell you my problem with it:It boils down to this: if MonoTouch...
