Fonts and Font Families

I'm not sure if Apple publishes an official list of supported fonts on iOS, but when working with designers, it's a questions that we developers often need the answer too. Fortunately, it's easy enough to determine it. In fact, the code to generate the list of fonts is the first (and so far only) thing that I've put into Xcode 4's new snippet feature. I'm generally not a big snippet fan. If I use code enough that I feel a need to have it as a snippet, more often than not, it makes sense to encapsulate that functionality generically in a class or category or as part of a common library.

But, there are definitely pieces of code that it's good to have around and that don't really lend themselves to that. Here's my snippet for generating font and family names. Cherish this; I slaved for hours over it. Well, okay… maybe not hours, but it did take me a minute or two to type it in.

for (NSString *family in [UIFont familyNames])
{
    NSLog(@"%@", family);
    for (NSString *font in [UIFont fontNamesForFamilyName:family])
    {
        NSLog(@"\t%@", font);
    }
}

The result of running this code on the current version of iOS 4 (4.0.2 / 8A400) follows. It's a handy list to provide the designers you work with so they know if they use a font not on the list, you'll have to substitute something else, or whoever's footing the bill will have to cough up potentially expensive font licensing fees.

If you want to see what the fonts actually look like, Michael Critz has put together this nice page that shows them all

Arial Hebrew
           ArialHebrew-Bold
           ArialHebrew
Zapfino
           Zapfino
Oriya Sangam MN
           OriyaSangamMN
           OriyaSangamMN-Bold
Cochin
           Cochin
           Cochin-BoldItalic
           Cochin-Italic
           Cochin-Bold
Baskerville
           Baskerville
           Baskerville-BoldItalic
           Baskerville-Italic
           Baskerville-Bold
Verdana
           Verdana-Bold
           Verdana-BoldItalic
           Verdana-Italic
           Verdana
Gurmukhi MN
           GurmukhiMN
           GurmukhiMN-Bold
Palatino
           Palatino-BoldItalic
           Palatino-Italic
           Palatino-Bold
           Palatino-Roman
Tamil Sangam MN
           TamilSangamMN-Bold
           TamilSangamMN
Marker Felt
           MarkerFelt-Wide
           MarkerFelt-Thin
Courier New
           CourierNewPS-BoldMT
           CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
           CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
           CourierNewPSMT
Courier
           Courier-Oblique
           Courier
           Courier-Bold
           Courier-BoldOblique
DB LCD Temp
           DBLCDTempBlack
Trebuchet MS
           TrebuchetMS-Italic
           Trebuchet-BoldItalic
           TrebuchetMS
           TrebuchetMS-Bold
Arial Rounded MT Bold
           ArialRoundedMTBold
Bangla Sangam MN
           BanglaSangamMN
           BanglaSangamMN-Bold
Telugu Sangam MN
           TeluguSangamMN
           TeluguSangamMN-Bold
American Typewriter
           AmericanTypewriter-Bold
           AmericanTypewriter
Arial
           ArialMT
           Arial-ItalicMT
           Arial-BoldMT
           Arial-BoldItalicMT
Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN
           HiraKakuProN-W3
           HiraKakuProN-W6
AppleGothic
           AppleGothic
Heiti SC
           STHeitiSC-Light
           STHeitiSC-Medium
Malayalam Sangam MN
           MalayalamSangamMN-Bold
           MalayalamSangamMN
Thonburi
           Thonburi
           Thonburi-Bold
Helvetica
           Helvetica-BoldOblique
           Helvetica
           Helvetica-Oblique
           Helvetica-Bold
Futura
           Futura-CondensedExtraBold
           Futura-MediumItalic
           Futura-Medium
Gujarati Sangam MN
           GujaratiSangamMN-Bold
           GujaratiSangamMN
Heiti K
           STHeitiK-Medium
           STHeitiK-Light
Devanagari Sangam MN
           DevanagariSangamMN-Bold
           DevanagariSangamMN
Heiti TC
           STHeitiTC-Light
           STHeitiTC-Medium
Sinhala Sangam MN
           SinhalaSangamMN
           SinhalaSangamMN-Bold
Kannada Sangam MN
           KannadaSangamMN-Bold
           KannadaSangamMN
Georgia
           Georgia-BoldItalic
           Georgia-Italic
           Georgia-Bold
           Georgia
Heiti J
           STHeitiJ-Medium
           STHeitiJ-Light
Times New Roman
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPSMT
Geeza Pro
           GeezaPro
           GeezaPro-Bold
Helvetica Neue
           HelveticaNeue-Bold
           HelveticaNeue
Arial Hebrew
           ArialHebrew-Bold
           ArialHebrew
Zapfino
           Zapfino
Oriya Sangam MN
           OriyaSangamMN
           OriyaSangamMN-Bold
Cochin
           Cochin
           Cochin-BoldItalic
           Cochin-Italic
           Cochin-Bold
Baskerville
           Baskerville
           Baskerville-BoldItalic
           Baskerville-Italic
           Baskerville-Bold
Verdana
           Verdana-Bold
           Verdana-BoldItalic
           Verdana-Italic
           Verdana
Gurmukhi MN
           GurmukhiMN
           GurmukhiMN-Bold
Palatino
           Palatino-BoldItalic
           Palatino-Italic
           Palatino-Bold
           Palatino-Roman
Tamil Sangam MN
           TamilSangamMN-Bold
           TamilSangamMN
Marker Felt
           MarkerFelt-Wide
           MarkerFelt-Thin
Courier New
           CourierNewPS-BoldMT
           CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
           CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
           CourierNewPSMT
Courier
           Courier-Oblique
           Courier
           Courier-Bold
           Courier-BoldOblique
DB LCD Temp
           DBLCDTempBlack
Trebuchet MS
           TrebuchetMS-Italic
           Trebuchet-BoldItalic
           TrebuchetMS
           TrebuchetMS-Bold
Arial Rounded MT Bold
           ArialRoundedMTBold
Bangla Sangam MN
           BanglaSangamMN
           BanglaSangamMN-Bold
Telugu Sangam MN
           TeluguSangamMN
           TeluguSangamMN-Bold
American Typewriter
           AmericanTypewriter-Bold
           AmericanTypewriter
Arial
           ArialMT
           Arial-ItalicMT
           Arial-BoldMT
           Arial-BoldItalicMT
Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN
           HiraKakuProN-W3
           HiraKakuProN-W6
AppleGothic
           AppleGothic
Heiti SC
           STHeitiSC-Light
           STHeitiSC-Medium
Malayalam Sangam MN
           MalayalamSangamMN-Bold
           MalayalamSangamMN
Thonburi
           Thonburi
           Thonburi-Bold
Helvetica
           Helvetica-BoldOblique
           Helvetica
           Helvetica-Oblique
           Helvetica-Bold
Futura
           Futura-CondensedExtraBold
           Futura-MediumItalic
           Futura-Medium
Gujarati Sangam MN
           GujaratiSangamMN-Bold
           GujaratiSangamMN
Heiti K
           STHeitiK-Medium
           STHeitiK-Light
Devanagari Sangam MN
           DevanagariSangamMN-Bold
           DevanagariSangamMN
Heiti TC
           STHeitiTC-Light
           STHeitiTC-Medium
Sinhala Sangam MN
           SinhalaSangamMN
           SinhalaSangamMN-Bold
Kannada Sangam MN
           KannadaSangamMN-Bold
           KannadaSangamMN
Georgia
           Georgia-BoldItalic
           Georgia-Italic
           Georgia-Bold
           Georgia
Heiti J
           STHeitiJ-Medium
           STHeitiJ-Light
Times New Roman
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPSMT
Geeza Pro
           GeezaPro
           GeezaPro-Bold
Helvetica Neue
           HelveticaNeue-Bold
           HelveticaNeue
Arial Hebrew
           ArialHebrew-Bold
           ArialHebrew
Zapfino
           Zapfino
Oriya Sangam MN
           OriyaSangamMN
           OriyaSangamMN-Bold
Cochin
           Cochin
           Cochin-BoldItalic
           Cochin-Italic
           Cochin-Bold
Baskerville
           Baskerville
           Baskerville-BoldItalic
           Baskerville-Italic
           Baskerville-Bold
Verdana
           Verdana-Bold
           Verdana-BoldItalic
           Verdana-Italic
           Verdana
Gurmukhi MN
           GurmukhiMN
           GurmukhiMN-Bold
Palatino
           Palatino-BoldItalic
           Palatino-Italic
           Palatino-Bold
           Palatino-Roman
Tamil Sangam MN
           TamilSangamMN-Bold
           TamilSangamMN
Marker Felt
           MarkerFelt-Wide
           MarkerFelt-Thin
Courier New
           CourierNewPS-BoldMT
           CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
           CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
           CourierNewPSMT
Courier
           Courier-Oblique
           Courier
           Courier-Bold
           Courier-BoldOblique
DB LCD Temp
           DBLCDTempBlack
Trebuchet MS
           TrebuchetMS-Italic
           Trebuchet-BoldItalic
           TrebuchetMS
           TrebuchetMS-Bold
Arial Rounded MT Bold
           ArialRoundedMTBold
Bangla Sangam MN
           BanglaSangamMN
           BanglaSangamMN-Bold
Telugu Sangam MN
           TeluguSangamMN
           TeluguSangamMN-Bold
American Typewriter
           AmericanTypewriter-Bold
           AmericanTypewriter
Arial
           ArialMT
           Arial-ItalicMT
           Arial-BoldMT
           Arial-BoldItalicMT
Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN
           HiraKakuProN-W3
           HiraKakuProN-W6
AppleGothic
           AppleGothic
Heiti SC
           STHeitiSC-Light
           STHeitiSC-Medium
Malayalam Sangam MN
           MalayalamSangamMN-Bold
           MalayalamSangamMN
Thonburi
           Thonburi
           Thonburi-Bold
Helvetica
           Helvetica-BoldOblique
           Helvetica
           Helvetica-Oblique
           Helvetica-Bold
Futura
           Futura-CondensedExtraBold
           Futura-MediumItalic
           Futura-Medium
Gujarati Sangam MN
           GujaratiSangamMN-Bold
           GujaratiSangamMN
Heiti K
           STHeitiK-Medium
           STHeitiK-Light
Devanagari Sangam MN
           DevanagariSangamMN-Bold
           DevanagariSangamMN
Heiti TC
           STHeitiTC-Light
           STHeitiTC-Medium
Sinhala Sangam MN
           SinhalaSangamMN
           SinhalaSangamMN-Bold
Kannada Sangam MN
           KannadaSangamMN-Bold
           KannadaSangamMN
Georgia
           Georgia-BoldItalic
           Georgia-Italic
           Georgia-Bold
           Georgia
Heiti J
           STHeitiJ-Medium
           STHeitiJ-Light
Times New Roman
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPSMT
Geeza Pro
           GeezaPro
           GeezaPro-Bold
Helvetica Neue
           HelveticaNeue-Bold
           HelveticaNeue
Arial Hebrew
           ArialHebrew-Bold
           ArialHebrew
Zapfino
           Zapfino
Oriya Sangam MN
           OriyaSangamMN
           OriyaSangamMN-Bold
Cochin
           Cochin
           Cochin-BoldItalic
           Cochin-Italic
           Cochin-Bold
Baskerville
           Baskerville
           Baskerville-BoldItalic
           Baskerville-Italic
           Baskerville-Bold
Verdana
           Verdana-Bold
           Verdana-BoldItalic
           Verdana-Italic
           Verdana
Gurmukhi MN
           GurmukhiMN
           GurmukhiMN-Bold
Palatino
           Palatino-BoldItalic
           Palatino-Italic
           Palatino-Bold
           Palatino-Roman
Tamil Sangam MN
           TamilSangamMN-Bold
           TamilSangamMN
Marker Felt
           MarkerFelt-Wide
           MarkerFelt-Thin
Courier New
           CourierNewPS-BoldMT
           CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
           CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
           CourierNewPSMT
Courier
           Courier-Oblique
           Courier
           Courier-Bold
           Courier-BoldOblique
DB LCD Temp
           DBLCDTempBlack
Trebuchet MS
           TrebuchetMS-Italic
           Trebuchet-BoldItalic
           TrebuchetMS
           TrebuchetMS-Bold
Arial Rounded MT Bold
           ArialRoundedMTBold
Bangla Sangam MN
           BanglaSangamMN
           BanglaSangamMN-Bold
Telugu Sangam MN
           TeluguSangamMN
           TeluguSangamMN-Bold
American Typewriter
           AmericanTypewriter-Bold
           AmericanTypewriter
Arial
           ArialMT
           Arial-ItalicMT
           Arial-BoldMT
           Arial-BoldItalicMT
Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN
           HiraKakuProN-W3
           HiraKakuProN-W6
AppleGothic
           AppleGothic
Heiti SC
           STHeitiSC-Light
           STHeitiSC-Medium
Malayalam Sangam MN
           MalayalamSangamMN-Bold
           MalayalamSangamMN
Thonburi
           Thonburi
           Thonburi-Bold
Helvetica
           Helvetica-BoldOblique
           Helvetica
           Helvetica-Oblique
           Helvetica-Bold
Futura
           Futura-CondensedExtraBold
           Futura-MediumItalic
           Futura-Medium
Gujarati Sangam MN
           GujaratiSangamMN-Bold
           GujaratiSangamMN
Heiti K
           STHeitiK-Medium
           STHeitiK-Light
Devanagari Sangam MN
           DevanagariSangamMN-Bold
           DevanagariSangamMN
Heiti TC
           STHeitiTC-Light
           STHeitiTC-Medium
Sinhala Sangam MN
           SinhalaSangamMN
           SinhalaSangamMN-Bold
Kannada Sangam MN
           KannadaSangamMN-Bold
           KannadaSangamMN
Georgia
           Georgia-BoldItalic
           Georgia-Italic
           Georgia-Bold
           Georgia
Heiti J
           STHeitiJ-Medium
           STHeitiJ-Light
Times New Roman
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPSMT
Geeza Pro
           GeezaPro
           GeezaPro-Bold
Helvetica Neue
           HelveticaNeue-Bold
           HelveticaNeue
Arial Hebrew
           ArialHebrew-Bold
           ArialHebrew
Zapfino
           Zapfino
Oriya Sangam MN
           OriyaSangamMN
           OriyaSangamMN-Bold
Cochin
           Cochin
           Cochin-BoldItalic
           Cochin-Italic
           Cochin-Bold
Baskerville
           Baskerville
           Baskerville-BoldItalic
           Baskerville-Italic
           Baskerville-Bold
Verdana
           Verdana-Bold
           Verdana-BoldItalic
           Verdana-Italic
           Verdana
Gurmukhi MN
           GurmukhiMN
           GurmukhiMN-Bold
Palatino
           Palatino-BoldItalic
           Palatino-Italic
           Palatino-Bold
           Palatino-Roman
Tamil Sangam MN
           TamilSangamMN-Bold
           TamilSangamMN
Marker Felt
           MarkerFelt-Wide
           MarkerFelt-Thin
Courier New
           CourierNewPS-BoldMT
           CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
           CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
           CourierNewPSMT
Courier
           Courier-Oblique
           Courier
           Courier-Bold
           Courier-BoldOblique
DB LCD Temp
           DBLCDTempBlack
Trebuchet MS
           TrebuchetMS-Italic
           Trebuchet-BoldItalic
           TrebuchetMS
           TrebuchetMS-Bold
Arial Rounded MT Bold
           ArialRoundedMTBold
Bangla Sangam MN
           BanglaSangamMN
           BanglaSangamMN-Bold
Telugu Sangam MN
           TeluguSangamMN
           TeluguSangamMN-Bold
American Typewriter
           AmericanTypewriter-Bold
           AmericanTypewriter
Arial
           ArialMT
           Arial-ItalicMT
           Arial-BoldMT
           Arial-BoldItalicMT
Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN
           HiraKakuProN-W3
           HiraKakuProN-W6
AppleGothic
           AppleGothic
Heiti SC
           STHeitiSC-Light
           STHeitiSC-Medium
Malayalam Sangam MN
           MalayalamSangamMN-Bold
           MalayalamSangamMN
Thonburi
           Thonburi
           Thonburi-Bold
Helvetica
           Helvetica-BoldOblique
           Helvetica
           Helvetica-Oblique
           Helvetica-Bold
Futura
           Futura-CondensedExtraBold
           Futura-MediumItalic
           Futura-Medium
Gujarati Sangam MN
           GujaratiSangamMN-Bold
           GujaratiSangamMN
Heiti K
           STHeitiK-Medium
           STHeitiK-Light
Devanagari Sangam MN
           DevanagariSangamMN-Bold
           DevanagariSangamMN
Heiti TC
           STHeitiTC-Light
           STHeitiTC-Medium
Sinhala Sangam MN
           SinhalaSangamMN
           SinhalaSangamMN-Bold
Kannada Sangam MN
           KannadaSangamMN-Bold
           KannadaSangamMN
Georgia
           Georgia-BoldItalic
           Georgia-Italic
           Georgia-Bold
           Georgia
Heiti J
           STHeitiJ-Medium
           STHeitiJ-Light
Times New Roman
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPSMT
Geeza Pro
           GeezaPro
           GeezaPro-Bold
Helvetica Neue
           HelveticaNeue-Bold
           HelveticaNeue
Arial Hebrew
           ArialHebrew-Bold
           ArialHebrew
Zapfino
           Zapfino
Oriya Sangam MN
           OriyaSangamMN
           OriyaSangamMN-Bold
Cochin
           Cochin
           Cochin-BoldItalic
           Cochin-Italic
           Cochin-Bold
Baskerville
           Baskerville
           Baskerville-BoldItalic
           Baskerville-Italic
           Baskerville-Bold
Verdana
           Verdana-Bold
           Verdana-BoldItalic
           Verdana-Italic
           Verdana
Gurmukhi MN
           GurmukhiMN
           GurmukhiMN-Bold
Palatino
           Palatino-BoldItalic
           Palatino-Italic
           Palatino-Bold
           Palatino-Roman
Tamil Sangam MN
           TamilSangamMN-Bold
           TamilSangamMN
Marker Felt
           MarkerFelt-Wide
           MarkerFelt-Thin
Courier New
           CourierNewPS-BoldMT
           CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
           CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
           CourierNewPSMT
Courier
           Courier-Oblique
           Courier
           Courier-Bold
           Courier-BoldOblique
DB LCD Temp
           DBLCDTempBlack
Trebuchet MS
           TrebuchetMS-Italic
           Trebuchet-BoldItalic
           TrebuchetMS
           TrebuchetMS-Bold
Arial Rounded MT Bold
           ArialRoundedMTBold
Bangla Sangam MN
           BanglaSangamMN
           BanglaSangamMN-Bold
Telugu Sangam MN
           TeluguSangamMN
           TeluguSangamMN-Bold
American Typewriter
           AmericanTypewriter-Bold
           AmericanTypewriter
Arial
           ArialMT
           Arial-ItalicMT
           Arial-BoldMT
           Arial-BoldItalicMT
Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN
           HiraKakuProN-W3
           HiraKakuProN-W6
AppleGothic
           AppleGothic
Heiti SC
           STHeitiSC-Light
           STHeitiSC-Medium
Malayalam Sangam MN
           MalayalamSangamMN-Bold
           MalayalamSangamMN
Thonburi
           Thonburi
           Thonburi-Bold
Helvetica
           Helvetica-BoldOblique
           Helvetica
           Helvetica-Oblique
           Helvetica-Bold
Futura
           Futura-CondensedExtraBold
           Futura-MediumItalic
           Futura-Medium
Gujarati Sangam MN
           GujaratiSangamMN-Bold
           GujaratiSangamMN
Heiti K
           STHeitiK-Medium
           STHeitiK-Light
Devanagari Sangam MN
           DevanagariSangamMN-Bold
           DevanagariSangamMN
Heiti TC
           STHeitiTC-Light
           STHeitiTC-Medium
Sinhala Sangam MN
           SinhalaSangamMN
           SinhalaSangamMN-Bold
Kannada Sangam MN
           KannadaSangamMN-Bold
           KannadaSangamMN
Georgia
           Georgia-BoldItalic
           Georgia-Italic
           Georgia-Bold
           Georgia
Heiti J
           STHeitiJ-Medium
           STHeitiJ-Light
Times New Roman
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPSMT
Geeza Pro
           GeezaPro
           GeezaPro-Bold
Helvetica Neue
           HelveticaNeue-Bold
           HelveticaNeue
Arial Hebrew
           ArialHebrew-Bold
           ArialHebrew
Zapfino
           Zapfino
Oriya Sangam MN
           OriyaSangamMN
           OriyaSangamMN-Bold
Cochin
           Cochin
           Cochin-BoldItalic
           Cochin-Italic
           Cochin-Bold
Baskerville
           Baskerville
           Baskerville-BoldItalic
           Baskerville-Italic
           Baskerville-Bold
Verdana
           Verdana-Bold
           Verdana-BoldItalic
           Verdana-Italic
           Verdana
Gurmukhi MN
           GurmukhiMN
           GurmukhiMN-Bold
Palatino
           Palatino-BoldItalic
           Palatino-Italic
           Palatino-Bold
           Palatino-Roman
Tamil Sangam MN
           TamilSangamMN-Bold
           TamilSangamMN
Marker Felt
           MarkerFelt-Wide
           MarkerFelt-Thin
Courier New
           CourierNewPS-BoldMT
           CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
           CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
           CourierNewPSMT
Courier
           Courier-Oblique
           Courier
           Courier-Bold
           Courier-BoldOblique
DB LCD Temp
           DBLCDTempBlack
Trebuchet MS
           TrebuchetMS-Italic
           Trebuchet-BoldItalic
           TrebuchetMS
           TrebuchetMS-Bold
Arial Rounded MT Bold
           ArialRoundedMTBold
Bangla Sangam MN
           BanglaSangamMN
           BanglaSangamMN-Bold
Telugu Sangam MN
           TeluguSangamMN
           TeluguSangamMN-Bold
American Typewriter
           AmericanTypewriter-Bold
           AmericanTypewriter
Arial
           ArialMT
           Arial-ItalicMT
           Arial-BoldMT
           Arial-BoldItalicMT
Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN
           HiraKakuProN-W3
           HiraKakuProN-W6
AppleGothic
           AppleGothic
Heiti SC
           STHeitiSC-Light
           STHeitiSC-Medium
Malayalam Sangam MN
           MalayalamSangamMN-Bold
           MalayalamSangamMN
Thonburi
           Thonburi
           Thonburi-Bold
Helvetica
           Helvetica-BoldOblique
           Helvetica
           Helvetica-Oblique
           Helvetica-Bold
Futura
           Futura-CondensedExtraBold
           Futura-MediumItalic
           Futura-Medium
Gujarati Sangam MN
           GujaratiSangamMN-Bold
           GujaratiSangamMN
Heiti K
           STHeitiK-Medium
           STHeitiK-Light
Devanagari Sangam MN
           DevanagariSangamMN-Bold
           DevanagariSangamMN
Heiti TC
           STHeitiTC-Light
           STHeitiTC-Medium
Sinhala Sangam MN
           SinhalaSangamMN
           SinhalaSangamMN-Bold
Kannada Sangam MN
           KannadaSangamMN-Bold
           KannadaSangamMN
Georgia
           Georgia-BoldItalic
           Georgia-Italic
           Georgia-Bold
           Georgia
Heiti J
           STHeitiJ-Medium
           STHeitiJ-Light
Times New Roman
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
           TimesNewRomanPSMT
Geeza Pro
           GeezaPro
           GeezaPro-Bold
Helvetica Neue
           HelveticaNeue-Bold
           HelveticaNeue

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Posted in: fonts,iOS4,snippet

Blender 2.5 Objective-C Export Script

Paul Horalek has taken my old Blender 2.49 script for exporting 3D objects to Objective-C header files and has ported it to the new Blender 2.5 Python API. I'd been meaning to do this for quite some time, as I've been using Blender 2.5 since the early alpha releases, but never found time. Now I don't have to.

You can find the new version of the script right here.

Thanks, Paul!

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Posted in: Blender,OpenGL ES

NSOperation File Template Notes

I've had a few questions about the NSOperation subclass file template I posted earlier. Instead of individually responding, I thought I'd clarify here:

First, in order to use the templates, you'll need a couple of categories on NSInvocation that you can find here. I forgot that those methods weren't part of NSInvocation because I use them so frequently.

Also, you'll notice replacement tokens in the template, similar to those you get for parameters when you use autocomplete with a method or function. This was intentional. If I had used any of the file template replacement tokens, the delegate methods would have begun with a capital letter and the method names wouldn't have always made sense. Instead, you have to replace the tokens with a value - the same value.

In theory, typing the value for one replacement token should change the value for all replacement tokens of the same name, but it doesn't seem to work in the header file, for some reason I haven't been able to figure out yet.

Anyway, hope that helps with some of the confusion.

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Call for Testers!

Update: All of my available device slots are gone.

Okay, I've got room in my device list for 15 testers for the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs application. I'd love to accept more, but the 100 device limit prevents me from using too many slots for a personal side project like this.

There's a catch: I need at least one device running iOS 3.1.x and at least one older device (3G, Original iPhone, 1st or 2nd gen iPod touch). Ideally, I'd have a nice spread of devices. The iPad won't be supported in the first release, so iPhone and iPod touch users only please. I'm considering adding iPad at a future date, but don't have the time to devote to it at the moment.

I expect to distribute the first beta build by the end of the week, possibly earlier, but no promises, since client work and the book have to take priority. I have one bug I still need to chase down and one feature I still want to add, and then I'll be ready to distribute.

If interested, e-mail me with what model device you have and the iOS version you're running. If I can use you, I'll respond and have you can send me your UDID. This will mostly be first-come-first-served, except I may have to skip people to make sure I get at least one older device and one older version of iOS.

P.S. My e-mail address is my twitter name at mac dot com.

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Posted in: App Store,Testers

Testers, Maybe?

I read on Daring Fireball yesterday about the new Library of Congress iPhone application. I love libraries, museums, and any large collection of interesting data and was really excited about this app.

It's a nice app, and a really good start for the Library of Congress, but it's missing something I wanted: access to the Prints & Photographs Online Collection. For over a decade, the Library of Congress has been digitizing material from their collections and putting them online. Unfortunately, the web interface is kinda weak on a computer and nigh unusable on an iPhone. Which is too bad, because there's a lot of really cool stuff in here, including works by and photographs of many famous artists such as Ansel Adams, Alice Boughton, Edward Weston, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and many others. There is also a huge amount of historical photographs, artworks, and documents going back to the founding of our country and even earlier. It's the kind of place you can easily lose hours exploring.

I actually hacked out an iPhone app for searching the Prints & Photographs Collections quite a while back. I started it originally because I wanted to play with a few things I hadn't used yet, like iAds, and I find it's easier to do so if I'm writing a "real" app rather than just playing.

And when I say "hacked out", I'm not exaggerating in this case. This wasn't architected so much as thrown together. It started out an entry page where you enter a search term, and then a single table view with the results. I wrote it in one Saturday night after several beers, scope creep increasing with each new beer. But… it works and seems to work pretty well. I spent another couple of hours this evening cleaning up the rough edges and running it through Instruments. I've got a short list of bugs I need to fix, but it probably needs not more than a day's worth of work before it could go to testers.

After the Library of Congress came out with their own app and it didn't include this functionality, I started thinking it might be worth throwing this on the app store as a free app to complement the official one. The ads might generate a little income, but I don't expect very much from what I've heard about iAds fill-rate, and it doesn't really matter, most of the work is already done. Be kinda nice if one of the many abandoned apps in my dev folder got to see the light of day.

So, what do you think? Any interest? I've attached some screenshots of the app so you can see how it works. You can click them for full iPhone 4 resolution. Let me know in the comments if you think this is an app you'd download and also let me know if you're interested in testing.

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Posted in: App Store,Beta Testers,Library of Congress

Xcode 3, Instruments 4

This was a bit of a "duh" moment for me, but probably worth mentioning, despite being a "Captain Obvious" post.

I'm a big fan of what Apple's doing with Xcode 4, but in my opinion it's just not ready for production use yet. I'm using it for the book and occasional forays, but not for regular client work yet. However, I also run my machine using the 64-bit kernel, which means I can't use Shark without rebooting. I've been really looking forward to the Time Profiler template in the 4.0 version of Instruments as well as the two new OpenGL ES templates and the Energy Diagnostics template.

But, while grumbling about their lack in the current release version of Instruments, it struck me: you don't have to launch Instruments from the same folder you launch Xcode from. You can launch Instruments separately and attach it to a running process in the Simulator or on an attached iPhone. That means, you can launch Instruments from the Xcode4 folder instead of from the Developer folder. This allows you to develop and debug with the less-shiny-but-production-ready Xcode 3.x and also use the new Instruments templates like Time Profiler, OpenGL ES, and Energy Diagnostics.

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Posted in: Captain Obvious,Duh,Instruments,Tips,Tricks,Xcode

Core Data Odds and Ends

I've been doing a fair bit of work with Core Data lately, and have picked up a few tricks to make my life easier, so I thought I'd share.

Mo' Power

Back in the EOF days, there was a great little piece of third-party software called EOGenerator that implemented something called the generation gap design pattern. Essentially, this little program would create your custom subclasses of EOGenericRecord (EOF's equivalent of NSManagedObject) for you. It wouldn't just create that, though, it would actually create two classes for each entity in your EOModel.

One of these two classes was yours to modify as you saw fit. It would never get overwritten even if you ran the EOGenerator script again, over and over. The other class contained all the generated code derived from your EOModel and was designed not to be touched by the programmer. You had your class, EOGenerator had its class, and you could both work without any fear of stepping on each other's toes. You could add attributes and entities to your data model and regenerate the machine-readable classes without any chance of losing your custom validation or methods. It was nice.

Wolf Rentzsch has re-implemented this idea for Core Data, and the result is called MOGenerator. If you spend any time with Core Data and aren't familiar with MOGenerator, go become familiar with it. It will make your life much, much, much better.

SQLite to Check Data

The default persistent store type for Core Data under iOS is a SQLite store, which means that Core Data keeps all of its data inside of a single SQLite database in your application's /Documents folder. Now, the format of the persistent store is undocumented and you should never, ever, ever, ever, never change data in the persistent store or make any assumptions about how Core Data stores the data. That's part of why we use Core Data: It's an abstraction layer that lets us not worry about the underlying storage details.

But, sometimes, it can be really helpful to know whether data is getting into the persistent store or not. I often work on my data model before my user interface, so being able to peek in the data store to make sure all is well is really helpful.

The first thing you might want to consider doing, if you plan to do that, is to create a SQLite config file. This is a file of commands that will execute whenever you launch SQLite. To do that, simply create a file called .sqliterc in your home directory. Here's what mine looks like:

.mode column
.header on
.table

In mine, the first line tells SQLite to print the column names when I issue a SELECT command. The second line tells SQLite to present the data in tabular form. The last line prints out a list of all the tables in the database before it shows me the SQL command prompt. That's handy given that the table names don't usually exactly match your entity or class names.

Once you have a config file in place, you can open up any persistent store using the sqlite3 command in Terminal.app, like so:

sqlite3 MyApplication.sqlite

You can't, of course, execute this directly against database files on your phone, but you can do it in the simulator as well as on files copied from your phone using Xcode's Organizer. If you're using the simulator, you can look for your SQLite databases at the following location:

/Users/[your account name]/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/[SDK version #]/Applications/[application UUID]/Documents/[Application Name].sqlite

When I log into a database with my SQLite config file, this is what I see:

-- Loading resources from /Users/jeff/.sqliterc
ZHERO         ZPOWER        Z_METADATA    Z_PRIMARYKEY
SQLite version 3.6.12
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite>

Notice that it has dumped the names of all my tables. It's pretty easy to figure out which table holds what data once they're right in front of you. The example above is the persistent store from the SuperDB application from More iPhone 3 Development. The Hero entity managed objects are stored in ZHERO and the Power entity managed objects are stored in ZPOWER. To look at the contents of a table, you just need to execute a SQL SELECT command. The simplest is just SELECT * FROM TABLENAME;, which prints the entire contents of the table to the console, like so:

sqlite> select * from ZPOWER;
Z_PK        Z_ENT       Z_OPT       ZHERO       ZSOURCE     ZNAME     
----------  ----------  ----------  ----------  ----------  ----------
1           2           2           1           Mutation    Fire      
sqlite> 

The format of the data is pretty easy to figure out but, again, you really should look and not touch. It'd be very easy to accidentally destroy a persistent store. A seemingly inconsequential change could get the metadata out of whack and prevent your app from using the persistent store any more.

Better Descrption

I noticed a few days ago that Wil Shipley was complaining about the fact that many of Apple's delivered UIKit and Foundation objects have not overridden the -description method. This method is important because it's the one that is used in format strings, NSLog(), and when you type the po command in GDB. Instead of getting a meaningful description of many delivered objects, you instead get the class name and memory address of the instance, which is what NSObject's implementation provides, which isn't very much help while debugging.

Unfortunately, NSManagedObject is one of the many, many classes that doesn't have its own meaningful implementation of -description. That doesn't mean you can't provide one, though.

One thing you can do is to create an abstract subclass of NSManagedObject and put the -description method there. If you then subclass this abstract class, all of your managed objects will inherit the method from the abstract class. If I have other common functionality, I'll often do exactly that. But if I don't (and often you won't) I personally hate to clutter up my object hierarchy to add debugging tools. So I actually will cheat and do something you're not really supposed to do, which is override a method using a category. The reason it's bad to do this is because the Objective-C language does not specify which method should be used, which can lead to unpredictable behavior. But, when a class inherits a method from a superclass, I've found that overriding it in a category always works. I'm not suggesting you should do this in a shipping app, however. I wrap my method in pre-compiler definitions so that it doesn't get compiled into the release version of my application.

My version of -description assumes you're generating properties for your managed objects (I always do) and also assumes you're using custom subclasses (but you are, because you're using MOGenerator, right??). The method iterates over all the properties of the class and all its superclasses up to NSManagedObject, then prints them to the console. The categories I use look like this:

#if DEBUG
@implementation NSObject(MCManagedObjectDebug)
+ (NSMutableArray *)MCproperties
{
    NSMutableArray *properties = nil;
    
    if ([self superclass] != [NSManagedObject class])
        properties = [[self superclass] MCproperties];
    else
        properties = [NSMutableArray array];
    
    
    unsigned int propCount;
    objc_property_t * propList = class_copyPropertyList([self class], &propCount);
    int i;
    
    for (i=0; i < propCount; i++)
    {
        objc_property_t oneProp = propList[i];
        NSString *propName = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:property_getName(oneProp)];
        if (![properties containsObject:propName])
            [properties addObject:propName];
    }
    return properties;
}
@end

@implementation NSManagedObject(MCManagedObjectDebug)
- (NSString *)description
{
    NSArray *properties = [[self class] MCproperties];
    NSMutableString *ret = [NSMutableString stringWithFormat:@"%@:", [self className]];
    NSDictionary *myAttributes = [[self entity] attributesByName];
    
    for (NSString *oneProperty in properties)
    {
        NSAttributeDescription *oneAttribute = [myAttributes valueForKey:oneProperty];
        if (oneAttribute != nil) // If not, it's a relationship or fetched property
        {
            id value = [self valueForKey:oneProperty];
            [ret appendFormat:@"\n\t%@ = %@", oneProperty, value];
        }

    }
    return ret;
}

@end
#endif

The +MCProperties method uses the Objective-C runtime to discover and iterate over properties in the class definition, including @dynamic properties that were created at runtime. Because the property runtime calls do not include properties inherited from parent classes, the method acts recursively, iterating up the object hierarchy until it gets to NSManagedObject. The actual -description method simply prints out each of the attributes and the value currently stored for that attribute for this object instance. Once you do this, if you use NSLog() or po, the result is much richer information about the objects getting printed to the console. This version ignores relationships and fetched properties, but it wouldn't be hard to add those in if you needed them.

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Posted in: Core Data,Tip,Tips

Time Moves On…

Justin from CarpeAqua has an interesting rant this morning about pull-to-refresh. I don't expect everybody to like every new mode of interaction that gets introduced (I certainly don't), and I've been known to rant myself at times, but I must admit I don't quite get the fervor with which some people, like Justin, hate experimentation with new methods of interaction.

In his post, Justin sums up his feelings by quoting a tweet by Marco Arment that reads:

The problem, like gradients, reflections, animations, and PHP, is not that it's a bad idea but that many won't use it properly.

This argument reminds me of the arguments I've heard against dot notation in Objective-C. It amounts to "somebody might use it poorly, therefore it's bad".

I've got news for you: There's almost nothing in life you can't say that about. If you're holding up the potential abuse of something as a reason not to use it, then you're making excuses for your own desire for things to stay as they always were. In the history of human innovation, there's almost nothing that couldn't be abused or put to an inappropriate use.

Sure, you can do this with Objective-C 2.0+:

someObject.release;

That's a perfectly legal way to release an object. Most, including me, would argue that it's not a good way; it's likely to cause confusion and makes the intention of your code harder to read. But, just because you can do this doesn't mean dot notation is inherently flawed (though a vocal minority of Objective-C developers argue exactly that). The same thing goes for gradients, reflections, PHP, animations and, yes, pull-to-refresh. Actually, scratch that… PHP really is bad¹. But the rest of them aren't.

Even the greatest interaction ideas can be mis-used and over-used and, in fact, they usually are. I'd almost argue that they have to be. All ideas get refined as they are used more. It's natural behavior to explore, expand, and find the limits of any new idea. Thought experiments are all well and good, but until you get a new mode of interaction in front of a lot of people to try it, all you've got is your best guess based on your own opinion. In other words, overuse of the novel isn't, in the scheme of things, a bad thing. Over time, the overuse ends and we're left with something we understand much, much better and that works really, really well.

Basically, we don't know how to use new concepts "properly" until they've been used a lot, in a lot of different ways, by a lot of different people. There's nothing to guide the use of the novel. There's no way to find what works and what doesn't except by trying. And sometimes the things we try won't work, or won't work for all people. Sometimes they'll be downright bad.

A lot of our current desktop interaction model, things that we think of as universal and standard, weren't always standard or universal. I can remember when ⌘C, ⌘X, ⌘V, and ⌘P did not automatically mean cut, copy, paste, and print on the Mac. It took several years for key commands to truly become standard and universal on the Mac. Heck, many early versions of Mac applications didn't make much use of key shortcuts at all, and when they did, they weren't at all consistent in which keys they used to do what. You can't dictate what works in user interaction. You have to put it out there, observe and listen, and be willing to change based on what you see and hear.

Personally, I like pull-to-refresh as it's used in Tweetie Twitter. I find myself doing it in Mail.app, even though it doesn't work there. To me, it's the perfect gesture for the iPhone in apps where you're primarily consuming small chunks of content in a table, like your inbox or twitter apps. When I'm using apps of this nature, I'm often in one-handed mode, using my thumb to scroll. My thumb can't comfortably reach the entire screen (e.g. a refresh button in the navigation bar), and I don't want to bring my other hand over every time I want new tweets. When I'm in editing mode, I'm naturally using my other hand, and that's great, but if I'm standing in line at the grocery store or waiting to board a plane and I'm just reading my timeline, I like that I can just flick my thumb to get more tweets. It's a benefit to me to be able to work one handed. It's a nearly ideal form of interaction for the way I use the application most of the time. Obviously, I'm not the only one who feels this way. You don't see lots of people rushing to copy features that don't work or aren't liked.

In other apps, or especially on the iPad, pull-to-refresh doesn't seem like it would be a natural form of interaction, but I've never tried pull-to-refresh in other contexts, so I don't know. But developers will try it (and are trying it), and many uses of pull-to-refresh that don't work well will die. Either the application will fail to sell, or the author will decide to change it to something that works better for his or her users. But we might just discover new and wonderful uses for the concept in the process.

That's how this whole messy process works. That's how we get progress in user interaction. We try things. Sometimes they work, often they don't. If, as developers, we only use things that are tried and true, nothing will ever change.

Progress in user interaction, like anything else where hard-to-predict humans play a major role, is messy and slow and imperfect and no amount of ranting about it will change that fact. If we want progress... if we want to keep moving forward, that's the price we pay. You can get angry about it, but you can't change it. You'd have about as much luck arguing with the weather.

---

1 No, not really. That was a joke.

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Posted in: Other blogs,Rant

NSOperation Xcode File Template

Although I'm generally averse to using a lot of template or boilerplate code, there are times when it's handy to have file template beyond those that Apple provides. Something I've done a fair amount of lately is to create NSOperation subclasses, and there's enough work involved with setting up an operation that I made an Xcode file template that contains all that setup work.

This template includes a delegate and a protocol and some private methods for communicating with the delegate. Now, when I have lots of NSOperation subclasses in a single project, I'll actually move much of this stuff to an abstract parent class or a category on NSOperation, but templates don't have any way of setting up dependencies, so I've made this self-contained and you can do your own refactoring.

I added this particular template under the Objective-C class icon so that it comes up as a new option under the Subclass of popup menu.



You can find the template files right here. The zip file contains the full path to install everything in the correct place, so if you want to install it so that you can use it from Xcode, you would use the following command:

unzip NSOperationTemplate.zip -d /

If you just unzip it regularly, you'll find the actual files nested several folders down as a result of the path information.

I've only touched one existing file, which is a property list that causes the new template to show up in Xcode's Subclass of dropdown menu. The rest are new files, so installing this shouldn't interfere with Xcode in any way. But caveat emptor. You do keep good backups, right?

Hopefully this will be useful to some of you. If you have suggestions for making it better, please let me know.

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Posted in: File Template,iPhone SDK,Xcode

App Licensing

Google took an interesting step recently by adding a service called App Licensing to the Android SDK. I haven't looked at it in detail, but the gist of it is that it's a license validation system for third party apps. It allows third party apps to check with the Android Marketplace to see if it's authorized to run on the particular device. To simplify it beyond recognition: It's sort of like Steam for Android Apps.

This is a bit of a double-edged sword for Google, though. Steam-style online authentication isn't exactly warmly embraced by the proponents of "open" systems, but given how easy it is to pirate applications downloaded from the Android Marketplace (and then return them for a refund!), it's probably a necessary step to attract developers to the platform. Google has to at least look like they're trying to stop the rampant piracy.

But here's the thing: With an open source OS, I can think of a dozen different ways to try and circumvent something like this, and I'm hardly a 1337 hacker. Google can add complexity and make it harder to circumvent, but if someone with the right skills has full access and control over the hardware and software, you can't stop them from getting around any kind of licensing authentication scheme you create. It's like DRM. Within a few months (at most), there'll be an exploit or hack to allow pirated Marketplace apps that use App Licensing to be run without a license. I can almost guarantee it. Google can keep changing the process to fight the pirates, but it's a losing battle, and likely would entail a lot of inconvenience to developers in the process.

This is one area where a closed system has advantages. For us iPhone developers, only about 10% of our potential audience can possibly pirate our apps because pirating requires jailbreaking. That 10% is the starting point. The most it can be. Jailbraking is a quid pro quo, so 90% of our potential market can't, won't, or wouldn't know how to pirate an app. But the real number is even smaller than that. Not everybody who jailbreaks their phone pirates apps - there are other valid reasons to jailbreak (so I'm told, I've never been tempted myself) - and I know people who have jailbroken their phones who are ethical and wouldn't consider pirating an app.

There's no doubt that there are advantages to "open" systems, but there are also disadvantages. In this particular case, one of the most major drawbacks of "open" doesn't hurt Google or the Wireless providers, it hurts third party developers. If that wasn't true, Google wouldn't be devoting engineering hours to try and stop it with 'app licensing'.

Life as an iPhone Dev has it's problems, no doubt. When you have an app sitting in review for months, the way Briefs has been, when you get rejected on seemingly arbitrary or inconsistent grounds, or when you can't implement something that would benefit your users because of a term in the license agreement, it sucks. But, when all is said and done, a good app on the App Store properly promoted can make enough money for a development team to live on. Until that can be said about the "open" Android Marketplace, I simply can't buy into the "open is better" mantra.

If a curated platform offers a better user experience and allows third party developers to actually make money, I just don't see "curated" as a dirty word, no matter how many times Google's Android Evangelist tweets it.

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Posted in: Android,App Store,Marketplace

Those Were the Days…

The Computer History Museum has recently posted the original source code for MacPaint and QuickDraw! Apple has given them permission to publish them both, and they're well worth taking a look at if for no other reason than to realize just how good we programmers have it today.

The source code is a combination of 68k assembly, resource files, and Pascal, and all of the code was written by the incomparable Bill Atkinson, one of the early heroes of Mac programming and author of Hypercard (among many other things).

As an interesting aside, Bill stopped programming several years ago to focus on photography, but started programming again after the iPhone SDK came out so that he could create PhotoCard.

If you're not really familiar with who Bill is, you might want to read some of the stories on Folklore.org, but be warned, it's easy to lose track of time at that site if you have any interest in Apple history.

Note: One question that occurred to me looking at this source code was "how could Bill could have coded this back then?" These were written before the Mac shipped, and the Mac shipped with only 128k of RAM, which is smaller than the MacPaint Pascal source. You couldn't have opened some of these source code files on an early Mac due to their size. The answer appears to be that they were written on a Lisa, which shipped with a meg of RAM. That was some crazy amount of memory for the day and part of the reason the Lisa cost $9,999 (somewhere between $19k and $40k in today's dollars. I do seem to recall reading, though, that the early versions of QuickDraw (aka LisaGraf) were written on some model of Apple 2, though.

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Posted in: Apple,Bill Atkinson,History

A few things iOS developers ought to know about the ARM architecture

The Wandering Coder has a great post today titled A few things iOS developers ought to know about the ARM architecture. There's some really good information about the different ARM architectures in different iOS devices and different generations of certain devices. Well worth the read.

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Posted in: ARM,Other blogs

On Swords, Perspective, and Spin…

Although I thought Apple started off a little too defensive yesterday, when you boil it down, I thought they did the right thing. If you're having a problem and a case can fix it, here, have a free case. If you already bought a case, they'll refund the money you paid for that case. If you bought an iPhone 4 and the problem keeps you from being able to use or enjoy your phone, they'll take it back, no restocking fee, no questions asked.

All other issues aside, I'm not sure what more Apple could or should have done. There aren't many products that come with an unconditional guarantee any more, yet reading some of the output of various so-called tech "journalists" since yesterday's press conference, it seems that there are many who think that Apple didn't do enough and didn't "do the right thing". Short of Apple's senior management taking out swords and falling on them (at least proverbially, if not literally), I don't think anything would have made certain journalists (and I use the term very loosely) happy.

Of course, it's not exactly good for the tech press if this quietly goes away or turns out to be much ado about nothing. They're having a grand old time and raking in a lot of page hits on this whole "antennagate" thing they've created, so I guess it's understandable that they don't want to accept a reasonable response from Apple. They clearly wanted nothing less than a fall from grace… an admission that Apple didn't design or test properly. Instead, they got treated to a number of facts that didn't jive with what they wanted to hear. They were shown other phones experiencing similar phenomenon. They were shown a little about the testing procedures the phone went through and the investment Apple has made toward testing their antenna designs. They were shown, in short, why Steve doesn't think they did anything wrong.

The natural reaction to cognitive dissonance is anger, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the angry diatribes from some sectors of the tech press, especially those who aren't fans of Apple to begin with. But anybody who expected anything else out of yesterday's conference call are either intentionally stoking the fires for their own benefit or else they're morons who fail to realize there are perspectives other than their own. Perspective is an interesting thing, and it's not quite the same thing as "spin", which it is often mistaken for. Perspective is your own world view. It's a combination of a whole bunch of things that make up the way one person thinks about things: their likes, dislikes, biases, priorities, and fears. Spin, on the other hand, is when somebody intentionally tries to conflate facts, or select facts to make their position look better.

And make no mistake, we saw some spin yesterday. Some of the statistics early on were very carefully selected. The iPhone 4 dropped call rate being 1 in 100 less more than the 3Gs call drop rate, for example, sounds small, but what was the 3Gs' dropped call rate? If it was 1 in 10,000, then that's a statistically huge change. If it was 3 in 100, then it's statistically tiny, probably within the margin of error. We weren't given enough information to know what that statistic meant. If I had to guess, I'd say the difference was probably statistically significant (though not necessarily huge) or they wouldn't have presented the data that way.

But, even with the spin, it was pretty clear that from Steve's perspective Apple went through a very rational, valid design and testing process and achieved something pretty amazing. And I tend to agree. I wouldn't easily give up my iPhone 4 now. It's an amazing piece of technology. It really is. I love just holding the damn thing in my hand. It's such a refreshing change from all the cheap plastic consumer devices in my life. Every other device that the iPhone manages to replace in my life (my point and shoot camera was the latest casualty), the happier I am. I would quite honestly give up using cell phones before I'd let somebody replace my iPhone 4 with a junky plastic Blackberry or Nokia phone with their confusing, poorly written and terribly designed software.

Now, that's not meant to downplay the antenna issue, because for some people it is real and a hassle, I'm just stating my own perspective. Regardless of your perspective, however, the evidence seems to show that statistically speaking, most people in most places are going to have better reception with this phone. All design is about tradeoffs and all products are designed to meet the needs of a wide variety of people. Moving to an external antenna system was a conscious choice that Apple made, and it appears to have been well thought-out, researched, and tested. A conscious design decision was made that would make more room for battery and additional sensors and gadgets while making the phone more solid feeling and still thinner than any previous phone. The tradeoff, other than the obvious ones of manufacturing costs, was the increased possibility for attenuation. Now, we know, thanks to Anandtech, that this attenuation can cause a reduction of up to 24dBm of signal strength. We also know that that amount makes no measurable difference in data speed or voice reception for most users in most locations. Months ago, before the iPhone 4 came out, and without the benefit of hindsight or knowing what kind of media circus would ensue, that almost certainly would have seemed like a perfectly valid tradeoff. "Wait, if we do this, most people, most of the time will have better reception and we can make the phone smaller and have better battery life and fit a gyroscope, and the only tradeoff is that some people in some situations if they hold the phone in a certain way will have one or two less bars? Great!"

Was it the right decision? Well, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps not if you factor in the negative publicity they've gotten. But, was the decision the kind of stupid mistake that deserves payment in blood? Absolutely not. Even suggesting it is ridiculous.

The iPhone is a consumer product. It's like off-the-rack clothing. It's not custom tailored to any one individual. It's the product of a long series of design decisions trying to make the best product for the largest section of the population. If you're an outlier - if you're one of those people for whom the issue is preventing you from using the phone, put it in a free case, or bring it back. Apple will give you your money back, AT&T will let you out of your contract. No questions asked, no restocking fee. You're then free to go find a phone that works better for you.

If you want or expect more than that, you've got pretty serious entitlement issues. If you don't want to do that because you think you can't find a better phone, then maybe you need to re-assess your own perspective.

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Posted in: Apple,iPhone 4,Rant

iPhone 4 Press Conference

Well, the iPhone 4 press conference just ended, and I thought I'd type up my thoughts quickly before diving back into work. Overall, the end result is exactly what I thought they'd do: free cases and refunds for those who want them. Seems very like a fair response to me.

I thought Steve started the presentation sounding a little defensive, though I can understand why. By the middle of the performance, though, he really hit his stride, and by the end I'd have to say it was one of Steve's best performances to date when you factor in that he wasn't announcing a new product, but instead defending an existing one, which is never as much fun or as easy.

The main points were that yes, you can interfere with reception on the iPhone 4 by grasping it a specific way, but you can also do that on most smart phones (they demonstrated it on several models of competitor phones), and that the press was making a bigger deal out of this than customers were in search of a headline. He pointed out that both Apple and AT&T were seeing lower return rates for the iPhone 4 than for the 3GS, in fact the returns have only been a third of what they saw with the 3GS.

There were little bits of insight into life at Apple that were unusual. We don't usually hear much about their actual processes (except manufacturing processes which have been part of their PR since the unibody computers). Seeing the anechoic chamber was cool and it was interesting to hear a bit about the process they go through to test reception on the antenna designs. Hearing about the problems AT&T has with getting new cell towers approved in San Francisco was somewhat enlightening. I've been rather harsh about AT&T's signal in NYC and SF myself, but never really though about the NIMB factor. I'm not ready to become an AT&T fan boy, but I am ready to cut them a little bit of slack on that issue now.

We also heard that Apple has sold over three million iPhone 4s in roughly 3 weeks and that they're still selling every one they can make. That's impressive considering the amount of bad publicity they've gotten from this issue.

At the end of the session, Steve pulled up Bob Mansfield and Tim Cook to answer questions, and I thought that was especially well handled with some nice bits of humor, though they took off the gloves about a few reports, especially one from the NYTs about a supposed software bug contributing to the reception issue. I especially like the comment that was made when Bob Mansfield was talking about how they sometimes send engineers to a customer's house to test reception. Bob said "For the record, we notify them we're coming", and Steve chimed in with "…and we didn't bash in any doors". Just a great response, it showed a sense of humor while getting in a bit of a jab at Gizmodo (who were never once mentioned by name that I can remember - it was always "some website" when talking about things they did).

There were two other things that struck me, but I'm not sure if they are worth mentioning, they might just be be reading too much into things, but I will because it's fun to speculate about such things.

The first thing is that Steve mentioned that Apple has Verizon cells on campus in addition to AT&T cells. Now, it's not uncommon for large companies to have towers onsite to ensure their employees get good reception at work, but it seemed odd that he felt it was worth mentioning that they had Verizon cells on campus when talking about an issue that would only be affected by AT&T towers.

The other thing that struck me as odd was the fact that in one of the question responses, Steve talked about the press "going after" Google because they were successful and that he wished the they wouldn't do things like that. He talked about how great the stuff Google made was and made a weird little comment about people not appreciating innovation that's still happening inside the U.S. Again, it may not mean anything, he could have just been trying to think of a big successful U.S. tech company and that was the first one that jumped to mind, but given the state of affairs between Apple and Google lately, it seemed oddly conciliatory and defensive. Perhaps a hint that the Google/Apple competition is headed back to more civil grounds even if may never go back to the days of friendly coopetition of yore? I dunno, but maybe. We can hope.

That's all, now it's back to work. You should too, slacker. ☺

Update: Apple has just posted a new page explaining attenuation and signal loss.

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Posted in: Apple,iPhone 4,PR

On the iPhone 4 Reception Issue…

Until today, I've kept pretty much quiet on the iPhone 4 reception issue. Part of that was simply that I didn't own a phone until a week ago when my pre-ordered phone finally arrived. Part of it was just that I'm crazy heads-down on the book and doing client work right now. And part of it is that I'm having trouble deciding exactly what I feel about it. It feels to me like the issue is being overblown, but I doubt that people who are severely impacted feel that way.

I also don't think Apple has handle the situation as well as it, perhaps, could have. Apple is normally exceptionally good at "spin", but the response to this issue has felt a little ham-handed.

For me, I can recreate the issue if I try, but not in the drastic way that some people can, and not consistently. I've been able to get my phone to drop from five bars down to three, on a few occasions even down to two. Sometimes it won't go down at all. I don't know if it's whether there's moisture on my hand or what, but sometimes no amount of pressing will cause it to drop, other times, simply placing my thumb over the break on the left side will cause it to drop one or two bars.

Fortunately, even though I usually hold my phone in my left hand both for voice and data, this just doesn't affect me. The way I hold my phone, I don't bridge the gap. But even when I do bridge the gap intentionally, my phone still functions fine even with the lower bars. In fact, my reception and data transfer speeds are measurably faster over 3G than they were on my iPhone 3Gs. We have some large "warehouse" stores in the area (Lowes, BJ's) where I have always lost reception with every cell phone I've ever head when I get more than fifteen or twenty feet into the store. That was true even back when I was on Verizon. My iPhone 4 gets signal in those stores, throughout the store. I also haven't had a single dropped call since I got my iPhone 4. So, for me, not only is this not an issue, I'm thrilled with the reception my phone.

I know it's a real and serious issue for some people and for them, it's preventing them from fully using their phone, and that's gotta suck. But for me, and for all but two people that I've talked to (and I know a few people with iPhone 4s) it's mostly a non-issue in terms of real day-to-day usage. The foofoorah over this really seems a bit overblown to me, not that I've come to expect anything more from powerhouses of journalistic integrity like Gizmodo, but still…

If Apple were to recall the phones or offer a refund, I wouldn't let them have mine. I wouldn't willingly go back to an iPhone 3G at this point. Now, if Apple offers a free bumper, I might take them up on that. I've been thinking about getting one anyway, and only the fact that I live 45 miles from the nearest Apple Store has kept me from getting one already, but I'm not going to be upset if they don't.

I'll be curious to hear what Apple does say tomorrow in their press conference. I have to think that the days of ham-handed responses to this issue are over. They can't afford for those days not to be over. This is hurting their reputation far more than it should.

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Posted in: Apple,iPhone 4

Ahh… the Sweet Smell of "Open"

I bet owners of Droid X phones are thrilled to have such an "open" phone. Man, I was just so off-base when I discussed Android and the practical reality of openness in a world controlled by wireless providers. Oh, wait… no I wasn't.

via several people on Twitter

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Posted in: Android

Core Data Encryption

I've been asked a number of times about the best way to encrypt a Core Data persistent store. The answers I've had to give have always been somewhat kludgey at best. Apparently, with iOS 4, there's a better answer, and I was completely unaware of the change. If you're storing anything remotely secure in Core Data, it's worth a few minutes of your time to read Nick Harris' post.

via Brent Simmon's ranchero.com

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Posted in: Core Data,Encryption

OpenGL ES 2.0 Book Teaser

I've been making really good progress on the OpenGL ES 2.0 book for Prags, and I'm really happy with what I've done so far. The book isn't quite as hand-holding as Beginning iPhone 3 Development was, but it's probably more hand-holding than any graphics programming book I've ever read. If you've got prior experience with graphics programming, you may get frustrated with the pace of the book. I'm working on Chapter 8 now, and I haven't even gotten to lighting yet.

Those of you who have never worked with a programmable pipeline engine like OpenGL ES 2.0 or have tried and been frustrated by the books and resources available, will (I hope) appreciate the approach I'm taking. I'm trying to be very, very thorough. I'm trying not to leave any questions hanging in the air. I've found, over the years, graphics programming books to be frustrating in that they assume a certain level of prior knowledge that's not easy to obtain outside of college math classes. It's my goal to explain not only how to do things, but why, and give at least some high-level information about the underlying concepts and math. My goal is to make graphics programming approachable for people who don't necessarily have math knowledge beyond basic high school geometry and trig. I can't do that with everything. For example, with projection matrices, I simply didn't think it was worth trying to cover homogeneous coordinates, so I focused on how projection vectors worked and mostly skipped the why. But that's an exception. In most cases, I'm really focusing on why we do what we do.

Writing books like this is fun, to be honest. I'm learning OpenGL ES 2.0 at a much deeper level than I previously knew and I feel good about the progress of the book. From the discussions I've had, I think there's a lot of people out there who want to program in OpenGL ES 2.0 so they can do cool stuff on the iPhone and iPad, but who just don't really know where to start. It's like all the cool stuff is sitting on a shelf just out of reach. And that's frustrating.

I don't know yet when the book will be available. I'm hoping that it will get accepted into the beta books program when it's far enough along. If that happens, I'll make sure to post about it here, because then the book will be available for reading online before the official release.

Now, no part of the book is ready for public consumption yet, but I'm going to post some of my code from the book today. I know there's a shortage of good, clean, straightforward iOS OpenGL ES 2.0 code out there, so I though I'd post one of the projects from the chapter I'm working on now for anybody who wanted to try and figure out how it all fits together.

Although it's a a simple app, there's a fair amount going on. I take care of setting up a perspective projection and a model view matrix that both moves and rotates the object and also do texture mapping. There's a simple vertex shader and a fragment shader that take care of transforming the scene and doing the texture mapping. Now, in OpenGL ES 2.0, there are no built-in functions to handle any of these tasks, so it's all got to be done manually, primarily in the shaders. There are also some useful classes and functions you may be able to leverage in your own code. Much of what's in here is based on code I've posted in the past, but it's all been updated and tweaked for use in the OpenGL ES 2.0 programmable pipeline.


Yes, it's our old friend, the icosahedron, but all dressed up to look like a twenty-side die. Because, you know, what's more geeky than a twenty-sided die?

Now, this project hasn't been code reviewed. Heck, the chapter it's for hasn't even been written yet, so I'm sure there are mistakes and CBBs (could be betters). This is also not particularly efficient code. I'm putting off until later in the book a number of optimizations, including vectorizing the matrix and vector functions, interleaving per-vertex attributes, and using VBOs and VAOs. At this point, I'm much more focused on clarity and concepts than on performance, so just be aware of that before you decide to incorporate any of this code into a production project.

As always, there are no requirements placed on your use of this code. You don't have to give attribution, and you don't have to contribute back changes, though if you do fix or improve something, I'd be glad to hear about it.

You can find the Xcode project right here.

I've also made the original Blender and Pixelmator files I used to create the vertices and texture coordinates of the icosahedron as well as the texture. You can download those here.

I am sorry, but have to say that I won't be able to answer questions about the code. Between the book and client work right, most days I'm at my desk from 8:00 in the morning until 1:00 or 2:00 the next morning, seven days a week, so if you need explanations, you're going to have to wait for the book.

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Posted in: Book project,OpenGL ES,Sample Code

Thumb

I thought I had done a post on this at some point, but after Googling around, I guess I never did. There were a couple of Twitter discussions about the subject in the past few days, so I thought it was worth mentioning. You can get more in-depth detail about this subject by watching the two OpenGL ES videos from the 2009 Tech Talk World Tour Videos (iTunes link, requires logging in with iPhone SDK account).

The ARM architecture has something called thumb mode (or just thumb). Now, I'm not a hardware engineer so the following may not be 100% technically accurate, but my understanding is that basically thumb mode uses a subset of the processor's available operations and passes two 16-bit operations in the space of a single 32-bit operation, allowing commands to be sent to the CPU twice as fast. For most applications, this is great, and leads to an improvement in overall performance.

However, with the ARMv6-based chips in the original iPhone, the iPhone 3g, and the first generation iPod touch¹, thumb mode didn't have access to the vector processors, so floating point operations forced the processor to convert the two 16-bit operations back into two 32-bit operations, perform the floating point math, and then convert back to the thumb operations, meaning you not only didn't see a performance increase, you often saw a dramatic decrease in performance with thumb on when writing heavy floating-point code, such as you would for an OpenGL ES application.

The version of thumb in ARMv7 which is used by the chip in the iPhone 3Gs and which is also used by Apple's A4 chip and therefore available on the iPad and iPhone 4, does have full access to the vector processors, so you can get the benefit of thumb while doing large amounts of floating point operations, so you want thumb on for these processors.

Therefore, if you're writing an OpenGL ES application, or anything else that does a lot of floating point operations, you want to use conditional build settings in Xcode to turn "Compile for Thumb" ON for ARMv7 and OFF for ARMv6.

You can add conditional build settings by selecting the build setting in Xcode and using the little gear button in the lower left corner of the Build Settings window. If you click it, it will popup a menu, and one of the options will be "Add Conditional Build Setting", which will add a new subrow to that setting. Select "ARMv6" on the left column and use the right column to turn it off. Once you do that, your application will build as a fat binary with an ARMv6 version that doesn't use thumb, and an ARMv7 version of the binary that does. Generally, the increase in application size is relatively minor compared to application's image and sound resources, and the performance gains can be substantial.

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Posted in: OpenGL ES,Thumb,Xcode

Pressure Sensitive iPad

One thing that I've wished the iPad had from the beginning was the ability to detect different levels of pressure, similar to a Wacom tablet. That would make it much more useful for things like sketching. I've heard from a few people that the hardware supports it, but I've been skeptical of those claims. How could a capacitative touch device detect pressure? But a few people I talked to at WWDC insisted it was possible with the hardware.

Turns out they were right. This is really cool. I don't know anything about the technology - whether they're really using pressure (I tend to doubt it) or just the relative size of the area being touched, but the results in the video look promising. I also hope the final version can be accomplished with only public APIs somehow.

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Posted in: iPad,iPhone SDK

Synthesize by Default

So, in my previous post, I told you I was excited about the "synthesize by default" functionality that's now available in LLVM 1.5. And I am, very much so. But it turns out there's a caveat that tempers my excitement at the moment.

With synthesized iVars, we've had direct access to the underlying synthesized variable for a while now, so if you created a class like this:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface MyViewController : UIViewController 
{
}
@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *foo;
@end

You're able to access the NSString variable foo that backs the property of the same name within the scope of your class. So, in your dealloc method, you can do this, to give one common example:

- (void)dealloc
{
    [foo release], foo = nil;
    [super dealloc];
}

However, if you enable the "synthesize by default" feature in LLVM 1.5 and use it, meaning you don't actually have a @synthesize statement for the foo property, you lose this direct access to the underlying variables, leaving you with a bit of a conundrum - how do you do your memory cleanup without unintentionally triggering unwanted functionality, such as those in a lazy accessor or some more involved mutators.

Earlier today, I tweeted a question asking about the correct way to deal with this situation. After a bit of a Who's on First-like back and forth with many smart people, it finally came out that this is a bug in LLVM, not an intentional design decision. Hopefully it will be fixed before too long, but in the meantime, the best answer is probably to just keep using @synthesize.

Thanks to a whole bunch of people on Twitter, many of whom I'm sure I missed!

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Posted in: Clang,LLVM,Objective-C