Cocoanetics

3 Tools for Better Mobile Coding Endurance

Mar 26, 2009

Control your Fans

We trainers and programmers might have many geek groupies, but this time I am not talking about those. 😉 The second thing to take control of is the fans that keep your CPU cool. Those rotating fans have motors that are putting a small but constant load on your battery.

Using the “About this Mac” page I was able to determine the difference between full fan speed and lowest fan speed to be up to 100 mA. Compared to the regular energy use of around 1300 mA this gives you up to 15 minutes more working time.

Fan Control

My favorite tool to help you take control has the obvious name “Fan Control” and is available for free from Lobotomo. With this you don’t set the speed directly but with three sliders you adjust the red line which determines the RPM to use for a given CPU temperature.

Real Geeks Undervolt

While playing with settings like fan speed might have an impact on available idle time there is little you can (usually) do to extend battery time when doing something useful. Typing code lets your CPU idle most of the time anyway.

The last bastion to tackle if you posess the strong determination of geeks is undervolting your CPU. We all know that Watt = Volt times Ampere. So if we can manage to decrease the Volts necessary for the CPU then also the energy usage under load will decrease.

The tool for this purpose is CoolBook Controller which gives you such control for the price of $10. At the maximum load the CPU is using 1.1375 Volts default. CoolBook Controller has a built in testing facility that allows you to decrease the Volts for a given frequency. This way I found that my MBP can also work with 2500 MHz with as low as 1.01V, but then it would get unstable.

CoolBook Controller

In real life you would only decrease the voltage by two or three steps to not risk the system becoming unstable under stress. The makers have achieved up to 14 degrees of difference in temperature under stress. Less temperature also equals less cooling required.

But like all things concerning over-clocking or under-volting this is not for the faint of heart.

Warranty Replacement Battery Tool

According to Apple the 15″ MacBook Pro Battery is designed to retain 80% of its factory capacity after 300 loading cycles. If you are using your MBP daily and constantly like me then this number equates to approximately 6 months.

The original capacity of my (early 2008 model) MacBook Pro Battery was 5400 mAh but as of this writing it is decreased to 3112 mAh. This is way less than the 80% (4320 mAh) that are normal.

Ordinarily it would be difficult to prove to Apple that you get much less than the 3 hours of working time advertised. If it weren’t for the fabulous and free tool Coconut Battery which makes it crystal clear.
Coconut Battery Tool

Having only slightly more than half the original capacity starts to cause me problems because this means that my two hour train rides are no longer fully covered. Obviously I am going to go to my Apple authorized dealer later and send it in for warranty exchange.

Finally a Piece of Advice

Once you have gotten a new battery then you should try to discharge it fully before fully loading it. This helps to retain the maximum possible capacity. These days many people use a MacBook as Desktop replacement keeping it constantly connected to the power adapter.

The jury is still out whether such practise is good or harmful for the battery. Modern battery management should be able to minimize impact and the latest models of MacBooks don’t even allow for removal of the battery out of paranoia.

But what you should do in any case is this: at least once a week is to fully discharge your battery before fully loading at again. This “battery training” exercise allows the battery management system to calibrate and “keeps the battery juices flowing” (Apple lingo, not mine)

And all of this will increase your mobile coding stamina to its maximum, pumping those heavy Cocoa objects. Maybe just enough to have a syntax orgasm the next time you are coding on a train or plane. Good Luck!

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LuckyWheel 1.0.2

Mar 24, 2009

New Version out now!! Get it before the success goes to our heads and we decide to raise the price.

added Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian proverbs
added Spanish, Dutch Localization
minor fixes

Also, Crazy Mike’s Apps graciously reviewed LuckyWheel and seems to like it, too!

He says:

“A Cool Game for the Price”.

“[…]found the puzzles to be quite challenging”

“A cool twist to this game is that it can be played in the English or German languages. You must change the language in your iPhone settings to do this, but this is a nice international option. The next Lucky Wheel version will have language options for English, German, Italian, Spanish, French, and Dutch (very cool).”

Also as of this version there is a LuckyWheel Lite that lets you play 10 word puzzles in every supported language.

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Getting Standard Paths

Mar 23, 2009

These are the standard methods of getting the app directory and the documents directory. Remember that on the iPhone the app as well as the documents directory are “sandboxed” i.e. each app has it’s own two directories.

Here’s how you can get the path for files in your app bundle/directory:

// a regular file
NSString *plistPath = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath] stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"File.plist"];
 
// this works also for localized files, gets the best matching localized variant
NSBundle *thisBundle = [NSBundle bundleForClass:[self class]]; // alternate method to get bundle
NSString *path = [thisBundle pathForResource:@"File" ofType:@"plist"];

One common mistake is to pass a file name including extension in the first parameter of the pathForResource method. This won’t work, pass only the name without extension as first parameter and only the extension as second parameter.

And to get something from the documents directory you can do it like this:

NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *plistPath = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"File.plist"];

You’ll find yourself copy/pasting these lines all the time basically for every file that you are reading or writing.

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How to Start Developing

Mar 21, 2009

I keep getting questions about how to best get into coding apps for the iPhone. Do I recommend books? How should one go about this?

I have one recommendation: Only steel good stuff. Download all the samples you can find on the Apple site and look them through. For most of the basic tasks you can find code to steal there, well commented.

But most importantly I recommend you get a mentor. Somebody who is slightly ahead of you in the objC programming game. But not too far ahead to feel annoyed by your questions… 😉

And that’s the last recommendation: learn to ask the right questions. Because if you ask the right questions you will find that …

40% get answered by Apple documentation
40% get answered by Google: somebody has answered the question in his blog or in a forum
15% get answered by somebody more experienced than you directly if you ask
4% you have to discover for yourself … and then hopefully you document your discovery on your blog
1% are bugs that you have discovered by accident 🙂 Those you please submit to Apple for them to fix.

When I got started with coding objC for iPhone there was next to no useful literature. And now that I have written half a dozen apps and managed to get 4 into the store I don’t think I would ever need a book. Once you know how to read and understand objC code there is nothing really that you need for reference except the sources I mentioned above.

One more thing: try to develop a network of friends who all are sharing coding for iPhone as the same hobby. Of 10 questions I asked in various forums I only got around 3-5 answered usefully. If you remember the SDK 3.0 presentation, you know that more than half of current iPhone developers are new to the platform! So you are in the same boat as most of us. Be strong! Don’t give up!

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Key-Value-Coding

Mar 20, 2009

Simon asks:

I would like to loop through variables whose names end with numbers 0 to 5. What is the correct syntax for the i? I have tried variable[i], variable + i, without success

I know two methods to achieve this:

1. Put your objects into an array and then enumerate or for-loop over those

// e.g. in awakeFromNib
playerNameLabels = [[NSArray arrayWithObjects:player1NameLabel, player2NameLabel, player3NameLabel, nil] retain];
 
for (i=0;i&lt;3;i++)
{
     UILabel *nameLabel = [playerNameLabels objectAtIndex:i];
     // do something the the nameLabel
}

2. Use the Key-Value-Coding approach.

// in this object's header the strings are defined, here we intialize them
string1 = @"string1";
string2 = @"string2";
string3 = @"string3";
 
int i;
 
for (i=1;i&lt;3;i++)
{
     NSString *aName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@&quot;string%d&quot;, i];
     NSString *oneString = [self valueForKey:aName];
     NSLog(@&quot;string %d is &#039;%@&#039; and has length %d&quot;, i, oneString, [oneString length]);
}

The dangerous thing about the latter might be that you have construct precisely the right name for the value. Or else you will get an exception:

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSUnknownKeyException’, reason: ‘[<selectortestAppDelegate 0x524e80> valueForUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key string0.’

But actually the second approach is how Cocoa does most KVC internally.

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LuckyWheel Garners Favorable Reviews

Mar 20, 2009

It’s only a couple of days since LuckyWheel was approved for sale on the App Store.

The first few sites that linked to the store where clearly automatic robots. iTunes gets its information in XML plist format and a couple of sites came into existence that do nothing but parse this information

I don’t know what effect those will have on sales. They might just be a modern form of spam blogs.

But what really made my day was finding a review on FingerGaming. LuckyWheel went public on the same day as “Wheel of Fortune” by Sony which aims to mimic the mechanics of the TV show by the same name. In contrast we did not try to copy something, but create a unique approach. Make a game that uses the strength of the touch interface and fill it up to the brim with proverbs in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch.

They say:

“LuckyWheel additionally boasts a feature that Wheel of Fortune doesn’t include in any capacity — a fully fledged German-language option, complete with a localized puzzle selection full of German proverbs.”

“[…] LuckyWheel offers gameplay variety that Wheel of Fortune could never dream of.”

“LuckyWheel is a good protest purchase if you want to voice your disappointment in Wheel of Fortune[…]”

Next up in mostly positive feedback was iPhone App Reviews.net. This was the only site that actually also allowed for giving away a couple of free promo codes to their mostly US-based readers.

They say:

[…] LuckyWheel can really be pretty fun when you’re with a friend or two and having a little pass-n-play competition.

[…] Drobnik is committed to developing LuckyWheel to be as good as (or better than?) Sony’s game

Everyone who likes this kind of word puzzle but isn’t married to the TV format, get LuckyWheel. Despite its shortcomings, LuckyWheel is decent for $1.99 and hopefully it’ll grow into something that can really compete with an established franchise.

Just as welcome as professional reviews are comments by the users themselves

Chris: “I like the game. I have also tried Wheel of Fortune from Sony and have more fun playing LuckyWheel. Not because it is now free. I hope that there are more people who think the same.”

Peter: “I have also tested both games and have come to the result that LuckyWheel is the better one. Surely the graphics are not as beautiful, but why spend $4.99. So why not support LuckyWheel. Maybe a spin button would be nice, but I like spinning the wheel rather.”

We still have some promo codes available, valid on the US app store which we’ll happily provide to anyone who would like to write a review about any of our applications.

Also note that the next version has already been submitted to Apple and increases the guessing fun to all of these languages: English, German, Italian, Spanish, French and Dutch.

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Drawing Text in Graphics Contexts

Mar 20, 2009

Sometimes you might need to draw text instead of just using a comfortable UILabel. For example if you want to show it a a specific angle. This takes a lot of code, but once you understand it, it’s just copy and paste.

- (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect {
	CGContextRef ctx = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
 
	CGContextSetRGBFillColor(ctx, 1, 0, 0, 1);   // inside red
	CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(ctx, 0, 1, 0, 1);  // outline green
	double text_angle = -M_PI/4.0;  // 45 Degrees counterclockwise
 
	CGAffineTransform xform = CGAffineTransformMake(
		cos(text_angle),  sin(text_angle),
		sin(text_angle), -cos(text_angle),
		0.0,  0.0);
 
	CGContextSetTextMatrix(ctx, xform);
	CGContextSelectFont(ctx, "Helvetica", 20.f, kCGEncodingMacRoman);
	CGContextSetTextDrawingMode(ctx, kCGTextFillStroke);
	CGContextShowTextAtPoint(ctx, 100, 100, "Test Text", 9);
}

Of special importance is the application of a tranformation matrix via CGContextSetTextMatrix. Without it, your text will be drawn upside down. This is a feature, not a bug, because internally the iPhone still wishes that (0,0) is in the lower lefthand corner, but for most UIView-releated uses this is the “right way around”, i.e. (0,0) in the upper lefthand corner.

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Angle of a Vector

Mar 19, 2009

When dealing with a multi-touch rotation I was searching for a simple method to calculate the angle of two fingers. Well, actually more precisely the angle between the vector from one finger to the second finger and the horizontal X Axis.

While I was still searching my friend Christian Pfandler came up with this function:

- (CGFloat)angleFromPoints:(CGPoint)pos1 otherPoint:(CGPoint)pos2
{
    CGPoint vector = CGPointMake(pos1.x-pos2.x, pos1.y - pos2.y);
    double angleCalc;
    if (vector.y &lt; 0)
    {
        // upper Half
        angleCalc = atan2(-vector.y,vector.x);
    }
    else
    {
        angleCalc = atan2(vector.y,-vector.x)+M_PI;
    }
 
    return angleCalc;
}

The regular atan(x) function seem to have a limitation by only returning values between 0 and +/- PI. Because of this there is also the atan2(y,x) function which is orders of magnitude more useful. To get a continuos angle for the full circle we have to treat the upper half and the lower half seperately though. I found this here.

I don’t quite understand it, but it seems to work. 🙂 Please keep in mind though that like all angles in Cocoa Touch this is in radians as well. So not 0…360, but 0…2*PI. If you know an even simpler method, please let me know.

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iPhone OS 3.0 for Developers

Mar 17, 2009

Today the typical dev-geek was glued in front of his web browser to get as much information as possible on the pending release of the next version of the operating system that powers all touch-enabled devices under the Apple brand. I stuck with the major two, Gizmodo and Engadget, especially because those two by now have mastered the art of interspersing illustrative photographs amongst concise journalistic commentary.

Apple claims that there are 1000 new API’s coming in 3.0 that they have been busily developing over the last year. An impressive number of news by any rate and it was put to the test by the scrutiny of many an iPhone user who threatens to leave the platform for Android because of the lack of cut&paste, stereo bluetooth, tethering, background processes and the like.

Most of those deficits will be remedied in OS 3.0, or so it seems. With an Apple twist. Background processes, no way. But amazing notification infrastructure, that is nicer to stand-by times anyway, yes. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Just watch and be amazed at the magic with the Apple.

As a developer I paid really close attention to what new features might work in my existing or future apps. The single most important thing I found was cut&paste. As simple as this might sound, even “standard”, as numerous are the uses I can imagine for it.

The guys on stage kept dealing out new APIs and features as if they where handing out candy.

Turn-based navigation will be possible … if the creator brings his own maps. Garmin, where are you?
“Stereo Bluetooth” aka. A2DP. Finally wireless music to my ears.
MMS, send voice memos, locations, vCards to other phones
“Spotlight” a seperate screen that searches everything on the device, even apps
Multiple Calendars with synching, especially noteworthy: CalDAV
Voice Memos, also with an external Microphone
Cut and Past, Shake to Undo. Copy full paragraphs e.g. from Safari
Push Notifications will finally enable a slew of multi-system IMs
Much improved Video Streaming capability with automatic best rate adaption

Lots of new APIs in OS 3.0

The bits that I thought most interesting to developers:

in-app e-mail support, maybe the end of the attachment shortcoming?
Shake API, no longer do I have to code this myself?
access to the users music library on the phone, probably also the voice memos
use the push notification API to invite other people to activites, e.g.games
USB/Bluetooth external-device API might allow for interesting add-on hardware possibilities
In-App Purchaes (iAP)! From within the app you can sell new game levels or other content
Access to the Proximity Sensor
Battery information API – maybe apps can now be smarter about how much CPU and energy they use
In-Game Voice – wow, about an online-multiplayer LuckyWheel that lets people talk to each other?
And many minor tweaks to existing classes UIAlertView, UITableView, table cells, etc.

Still there were so many more buzzwords that did not get treated with an explanation. Or do you know that those are?

Core Data – a new API for handling data? A nicer way to interact with Sqlite?
Localized Collation – Digital Alphabet Soup?
GPS Lingo – are they going to put even cooler GPS buzzwords into the SDK?

"We'll be back soon" says Apple while the update the developer site.

It still remains to be seen behind all these cool announcements how much liberty and creativity Apple will actually permit it’s developers to have. All these new features are really quite overwhelming for us small-time developers and it remains to be seen who of us can embrace them quickly.

Did anybody get to 1000 counting new announcements? I did not, but I am still excited.

It was also announced today that there would be a BETA available for paying developers. So far I cannot report anything about that because we are greeted with the usual “We’ll be back soon” because most likely the developer site is totally overrun by people hungry for more info.

In summary I am glad that Apple today showed that they are taking the touch platform seriously and they are willing to put in extra work to catch up to other platforms that boast many features where the iPhone fell behind. I feel reassured that I can relax and stick to developing for the iPhone because with all those shortcomings finally getting remedied the market of my potential customers will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

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