Core Dump

I've decided to create a second blog at http://jeff-lamarche.blogspot.com where I'll put any posts that are not related to writing iOS software, Apple, or the mobile software industry. My first substantive post should show up some time this evening if all goes we...

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Posted in: Other blogs

Mea Culpa

The original version of my Briefs.app blog post contained a snarky comment about the Director of the App Review team and a link to a Wired article about his past. A friend of mine, who happens to work at One Infinite Loop, privately took me to task for including that link in my post.It took me about two seconds, now that I'm a little further away from it and not as angry, to realize that he's 100% right. It was a dick move on my part and I'm sorry for it. I have removed the link and offer my apologies to Phillip Shoemaker. The fact is, I have no visibility into what's going on and don't know where the holdup is on Briefs.app. For all I know, Mr. Shoemaker could be valiantly fighting for Briefs.app against higher up forces in the company, so casting an ad hominem attack like that was juvenile...

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Posted in: App Review,Apple,Rant

Briefs.app

My co-worker and all-around good guy, Rob Rhyne has officially open sourced Briefs.app as of today. After three months of being dicked around by Apple's review team, he's finally given up on getting Briefs.app onto the App Store.Throughout the ordeal, Rob has taken the whole thing with tremendous grace and has only good things to say about the people involved in the entire process. I hope he'll forgive me for not being quite so gracious. I'm pissed on his behalf, since he won't be. Make no mistake: This sucks. This is no way to treat anybody, but especially him. Rob has bent over backwards throughout the process to be nice and work within the system and to avoid saying anything negative about the problems he's faced. Rob has kept the discourse on a level I think few of us could manage. He...

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Posted in: Apple,Briefs,Rant,Review Process

Voices that Matter Philadelphia

Just wanted to let you know that I will be speaking at the next Voices That Matter iPhone Developer Conference in Philadelphia, PA which runs from October 16 and 17th. I was originally asked to do a talk on 4.0 Multitasking, which I will be doing. I've also recently been asked to give a second talk on OpenGL ES. I've agreed to do that presentation as well, and now I have a few days to decide on the specific topic and audience and to write up the abstract.I was thinking of doing a "from 1.1 to 2.0" kind of talk, exploring the differences between the fixed and programmable pipeline and trying to explain some of the more daunting concepts of the programmable pipeline. The goal would be to make the jump from 1.1 to 2.0 (which Apple is pushing) less scary.I'm not sure if that's a topic with broad...

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Posted in: conferences,OpenGL ES,Voices That Matter

Beta Builder

A week or two ago, Jeffrey Sambells had a blog post about using Xcode's Enterprise distribution for ad hoc distribution. It's a great idea that a lot of developers saw had great potential, but it had several manual steps.Since that post, Hunter Hillegas of Hanchor, LLC and developer of Vegas Mate, has created an application to automate the entire process. The app is called Beta Builder, and it's free. If you do much ad hoc distribution, you should check it o...

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Posted in: Ad Hoc Distribution,developer tools,Other blogs

App Licensing

For all those people telling me that Google's App Licensing would put a definitive stop to piracy on Android and that Apple should implement something similar, all I can say is: I told you you were wrong and here's proof, and it didn't take even as long as I said it would.I understand Google has to address piracy because it's a bit of a black eye for the platform. They need third party developers, and a lot of third party developers are gun-shy about developing for a platform with a reputation for rampant piracy. Although the iPhone has its own problems with piracy, it's on a completely different scale. The closed nature of the platform is actually an advantage for third party developers, much the way gaming consoles are. Sure, Apple's protection scheme has been compromised and any App posted...

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Posted in: Android,Google,Rant

UIImage-Blur

Many moons ago, I wrote convolution kernel for Cocoa. It had convenience class functions to do many different types of filters, including blurring, embossing, outlining, edge detection, horizontal shift, LaPlacian, soften, high pass, etc. Now, this was before Core Image and long before the switch to Intel. I don't remember exactly when I first wrote it, but I'm guessing it was around 2001 or 2002. The method that actually applied the filter to an image used AltiVec if it was available, and if it wasn't, it did a brute force filter on the CPU.Of course, once the switch to Intel happened, the AltiVec code was no longer was helpful, and then Apple came out with Core Image which includesda convolution kernel and all of the filter settings I had...

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Posted in: Categories,iPhone SDK,Sample Code

Transparent Grouped Tableviews

I ran into a problem today with a transparent grouped table view. On the table view, I set opaque to NO and set the background color to clearColor so that an image behind the table would show through:I can't show you the actual app I was working on because I'm under NDA, but I've created a sample project that shows the problem using a really ugly background image. Notice the black around the corners of the group sections:It took me a while to figure out why this was happening, but with a little crowd-source debugging thanks to Twitter, I've narrowed the culprit down. Even though you can clearly see in the first picture that the table view's background color has been set to clearColor in Interface Builder, that setting is either not being respected,...

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Posted in: Interface Builder,iOS SDK,Objective-C,UITableView

Core Data Starting Data

Yesterday, I tweeted asking for advice about the best way to provide a starter set of data in a Core Data-based application. The app I'm working on had started with just a small set of starter data, so the first time the app was run, I simply pulled in that starter data from a plist in the background and created managed objects based on the contents and all was good. The user never noticed it and the load was complete before they needed to do anything with the data.Then the data set got quite a bit larger and that solution became too slow. So, I asked the Twitterverse for opinions about the best way to provide a large amount of starting data in a Core Data app. What I was hoping to find out was whether you could include a persistent store in your application bundle and use that instead of...

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Posted in: Core Data,Objective-C

The Funny Thing About Old Code…

The funny thing about old code, and most new code, is that there's usually room for improvement. Shortly after posting NSString appendToFile:usingEncoding:, I realized I could've kill two birds with one stone by adding a category method on NSData and then calling that method from the NSString category method. That way I'd get the functionality on both classes without repeating logic.Without further ado:#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>@interface NSData(MCFileAppend)- (BOOL)appendToFile:(NSString *)path;@end@implementation NSData(MCFileAppend)- (BOOL)appendToFile:(NSString *)path{ NSFileHandle *fh = [NSFileHandle fileHandleForWritingAtPath:path]; if (fh == nil) return [self writeToFile:path atomically:YES]; [fh truncateFileAtOffset:[fh seekToEndOfFile]]; [fh writeData:self];...

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Posted in: iPhone SDK,Objective-C,Sample Code

NSString appendToFile:usingEncoding:

Somewhat frequently I find myself looking in Apple's documentation for a method that I'm sure exists but doesn't show up when I search using the Documentation Viewer in Xcode. Usually in that case, the method does actually exist, but it's not from Apple. Nine out of ten times it means I've got a category method I've used so many times that I've forgotten Apple didn't provide it. The other one out of ten, it's just an indication that I'm slowly growing senile.When this happens, I try to post the category methods because I figure if I've used the method enough over the years that I though it came from Apple, then other people might be able to use it.One bit of functionality that I've always been surprised isn't in NSString class is the ability to append the contents of a string onto an existing...

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Posted in: Foundation,NSString,Objective-C,Sample Code