Speaking at MDevCon

I'm proud to publicly announce my first speaking opportunity of 2012. I'll be speaking at MDevCon in Amsterdam this year on March 10th. This will be my first trip to Amsterdam and I'm incredibly excited to have the opportunity. I'm so excited, actually, that I'll be staying in the city for several days after the conference to hang out in Appsterdam and visit. When I know exactly which days I'll be in the city, I'll let you know.I have one other conference that I've already agreed to speak at this year, but that one hasn't been publicly announced yet, so I can't spill the beans quite yet, but I'm equally excited about that o...

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Posted in: conferences,iOS,Speaking

Treadmill Desk Update

I'm coming up on the end of my second week using my treadmill desk, albeit two relatively quiet work weeks thanks to the holidays. I haven't put together the plans yet for those who might be interested in building a similar one, but the desk does seem to be holding up well. It's still very sturdy and has been working great for me.After a really great first day where I put in over nine miles, my daily averages have backed off a bit to more in the 6-7 mile range and I'm averaging about 800 calories a day burned according to the treadmill. It seems that 1.6 MPH is my sweet spot for being able to type and mouse, though I sometimes go a little slower if I'm tired. I also usually start the morning at about 1.3 MPH, but after about 15 minutes, I'm usually up to 1.6.I'm not finding it difficult to...

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Posted in: Treadmill Desk

Brilliantly Simple Idea: the Treadmill Desk

Software development is not the easiest vocation for getting or staying in shape. For that matter, being part-owner of a relatively young business isn't either. I've been steadily putting on weight and getting in worse shape since before the dot com boom. Since we started MartianCraft, I've had very few days off, and my average work day has been probably twelve hours, possibly longer. Every time I try and get into a routine of exercising, something happens: a client emergency, a deadline, a build, a new prospective client, a minor family emergency. When there's not enough hours in the day (and there never are), the exercise was always the first thing to get cut.Recently, I came across this brilliantly simple idea from a Mayo Clinic cardiologist....

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Posted in: Exercise,MIsc,Software Development

Comments Gone

I regret to inform you that I've had to completely disable comments on the blog. I had to switch to moderation a while back since the spam detectors were failing to catch anything meaningful. Unfortunately, the rate of spam comments has been accelerating recently to the point where I simply don't have the time to search for the few actual and valid comments in the proverbial haystack of spam.I wish I didn't have to do this. I like comments. I like hearing other peoples' takes on things and love it when somebody catches a mistake or proposes a better solution. But, comment moderation has been sucking away what little time I have for the block lately.Maybe at some point I'll have the time to transition to software that can handle spam comments better, but I don't right now.Sorry it had to be...

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Posted in: comments,spam

Flash is Dead. No, Really this Time

It appears that Adobe is going to cease development of mobile Flash.I'm not ordinarily one to gloat or dwell on I-told-you-sos, but I'm going to make an exception in this one instance. I took an awful lot of heat for those blog rants backin 2009 for saying things likeI hate to break it to you, but Flash, as it currently exists, is dead. Oh, it's not going to die quickly, it's going to die a slow painful death precisely because there has been such a large investment of time and money into using it by so many large corporations like Disney. Flash's roots run way too deep for it to disappear quickly.Here's the thing, though: Flash is a product of a different generation of computing. It's a product of a world where 90% of the people used one platform, and the bulk of the remaining used another....

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Posted in: Apple,Flash,mobile

Objective-C 2.0 Compiler Directives

Steffen Itterheim has posted a really nice list of all the Objective-C 2.0 compiler directives along with examples of how to use them.Ni...

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Posted in: Other blogs

GLKit Examples

I've added three new projects to my iOS OpenGL ES repository on GitHub. They are fairly simple examples of how to use GLKit and GLKBaseEffect. You can find them in the GLKit Stuff directory.They're kind of rough, but they should be helpful to you if you're just getting started with GLKit and trying to figure out how to use it.Thanks to Julián Oliver for tweeting the solution to a problem I was having getting textures to work with GLKBaseEffe...

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Posted in: GLKit,OpenGL ES,Sample Code

CGAffineTransform Additions

As you probably know, Apple provides a bunch of functionality for manipulating objects in 2D space using CGAffineTransform. Oddly, Apple doesn't provide you with a way to extract the scale, transform, and rotation information from a CGAffineTransform and they don't provide any shearing functionality at all.Here are some additional inline functions that I use. This adds the ability to extract component values of the CGAffineTransform and also adds the ability to create and extract shear information.As always, this code is free to use without restriction or limitation, but has no warranty whatsoever. If you fix a bug, feel free to let me know about the fix so I can incorporate the fix.#ifndef __MCP_AFFINE_TRANSFORM_ADDITIONS__#define __MCP_AFFINE_TRANSFORM_ADDITIONS__#import <CoreGraphics/CoreGraphics.h>#ifdef...

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Posted in: CGAffineTransform,free code,Objective-C

Long Live the King

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has an interesting post today about being a developer for Apple's ecosystem. We'll leave aside for now the fact that Jeff isn't and has never been an Apple developer and is, in fact, a strong proponent of Microsoft's developer stack. Despite that flaw, I usually enjoy reading Coding Horror. I think Jeff's a smart guy with a lot to offer the world in terms of insight about software development.But…Jeff's premise today is that third party Apple developers "serve at the pleasure of the king", which is absolutely true. But, he finishes his post by saying he would never develop for Apple's app stores because of the chance of "being thrown under a bus" by Apple. Fair enough, we all have different tolerance levels for things, and his assumption here is essentially correct....

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Posted in: Other blogs,Rant

Disappointing

So, like others, I was tempted to write a defense of the iPhone 4S after all the pundits and naysayers came out last week calling the iPhone 4S "disappointing". I'm glad I never found the time. As it turns out the iPhone 4s doesn't need anybody to stand up for it.1,000,000 phones sold on the first day of pre-orders. That's 400,000 more than the iPhone 4. And, that's not counting the number that will sell on October 14th when they arrive at the Apple Stores in 7 countries. There's also a large batch of countries that don't get the phone until October 28, and a whopping 40 more countries (including China, where new Apple Stores have been shattering sales records lately) that won't get the iPhone 4s until some time in December.Yeah. Disappointing. You guys in the media sure nailed that o...

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Posted in: Apple,iPHone,iPhone 4s

Respect & Shame

It's been fascinating seeing how many people have responded to the death of Steve Jobs exactly the way I did. It's truly amazing how many people who never met the man feel not just that the world has lost somebody significant but that they themselves have lost a friend.Hearing others express exactly what I'm feeling? It helps. And, for the most part, the media has been right there with us, responding to Steve's death by focusing on his impact and the good he has done. I really hope seeing how many peoples' lives he has touched is helping Steve's family and friends get through this.But not all of the media has chosen to focus on the good. I won't link to any of the actual articles, but Gawker and the New York Times top a short list of media outlets that have chosen to focus on Steve's flaws...

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Posted in: Apple,Rant,Steve Jobs

Sad Mac

I haven't had much time for blogging lately. I have about a half-dozen unfinished blog posts in my queue, but have been too busy to finish any of them. One of the things keeping me busy right now is work for Apple through MartianCraft. This work, in many ways, is a dream come true for me, as I wanted to work for Apple for years and never managed it. I started programming on an Apple ][+ in 1980 and Apple has been a part of my life ever since then. I don't need to look much further than the desk I'm sitting at to realize just how much my life has been impacted by this company called Apple started in a garage by two guys named Steve. I make a living using Apple's products and developing for Apple's products, but more importantly, my life is better...

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Posted in: Apple,Rant,Steve Jobs

Online Session Code for Big Objects (Plus a Warning)

In Chapter 9 of More iPhone Development, we wrote a set of classes that mimicked the behavior of GameKit's peer-to-peer connectivity, but for regular network connections (GameKit's only works with BlueTooth and local network connections). Basically, we wrote a class that lets you send and receive anything that can be packaged into an instance of NSData. Since it's relatively trivial to implement NSCoding for most classes, this means passing objects between two iOS apps (or an iOS and a Mac app) becomes pretty easy. You don't have to poll for the data, or worry about chunking out the data. You just make a method call and pass an NSData instance to send data, and then implement a delegate method for receiving data back from the other end. Life is good, right?Hmm...Maybe not. There's a pretty...

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Posted in: Book project,New Category,Objective-C,Sample Code

Working for MartianCraft

In case you missed my tweets earlier this week, MartianCraft is looking to add a few developers. We're looking for a couple of experienced developers, and are also thinking about bringing in one or two entry-level devs without significant experience to be trained up.Initially, the work would be project-based contracting and would start in late August. Conversion to full-time employment is a possibility, but not right away. If you're interested in being considered, send an e-mail with relevant work experience and/or résumé/CV to work@martiancraft.c...

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Posted in: MartianCraft

Auto-Incrementing Build Numbers for Release Builds in Xcode

I use the wonderful Test Flight to distribute builds. One thing that Test Flight is a little picky about is build numbers. When you upload a build, it uses the build number to see if you're uploading a replacement or a new build. It will let you create a new build even if you don't remember to increment the build number, but it's an extra manual step, and then you end up with two builds with the same build number.Because I'm forgetful, I wanted to automated this process. Basically, I wanted to increment the version short string any time we do an Archive and increment the bundle build ID any time we do a Release configuration build, but leave the version numbers alone on Debug builds.Unfortunately, several of our projects are ones that we inherited or took over, so not every project uses the...

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Posted in: Tips,Xcode 4