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Xcode 4

Jun 15, 2010

In Austria we have a saying “Big things throw their shadows way ahead of them”. While the rest of home-staying iPhone … pardon iOS developers has only seen the Stevenote, a couple of lucky attendees where able to get their hands on a pre-BETA version of Xcode. They are still under NDA when it comes to discussing it, but you know how it is with Twitter, it’s not really possible to keep those things under wraps if people are excited and connected.

And also, since these details are now on the internet and thus public domain, wannabe journalists can scrape the few available details together and summarize them for you, my dear reader.

Generally developers love that Xcode 4 appears to be a total refresh, lots of thought is apparently being put in, all the more reason to look forward to it. Attendees of the WWDC got a download link on the Apple Developer Forums, but us regular folk only gets an error message. Some People think it was changed too much (T, T) for comfort, but a revolution is never easy.

But for the most part you find only happy tweets (T) and comments.  Here’s my rundown on the features we have heard about:

  • Interface Builder becoming part of Xcode for a combined IDE. T T
  • There is a new Counterparts View that is really convenient. T
  • There is a Code Snippet feature, possibly similar to Dashcode. T T
  • LLDB will replace the current GDB debugger. T
  • New LLVM compiler. (2x compile speed improvement. up to 25% runtime speed improvement. On iphone up to 60% faster apps!) T
  • There will be Tabs. T
  • MDI (Multi Document Interface) where you see multiple source files within the same Xcode window. T
  • Great GIT Support. Improved Subversion Support, too. T T
  • You will be able to choose different skins for the IDE. T
  • Revamped project and target settings for choosing build configurations, localizations, deployment target,etc.

Installation will takes about one hour (T). Because of the amount of things you can have on screen at the same time, you might want to get a monitor of at least 27″ in size (T).

Several people (T T) mentioned June 21st as possible avilability date of Xcode 4 as preview version. But I’m sure your buddies who made it to WWDC will let you take their Xcode 4 for a spin. 😉

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How to make your Hybrid-App crash for sure

Jun 13, 2010

I was quite happy finally getting the new polished 1.1 version of SpeakerClock approved. But there was one problem: people who tried to run it on iPhones with iOS 3.1.3 started tweeting me that it crashes. I was astonished, I was not aware of using anything from 4.0, I just had to set the base SDK to 3.2 to support hybrid mode.

Then I tried out the update on my wife’s iPhone which I kept at the latest released iOS version, 3.1.3. And it crashed. So I hooked it up and had a look at the crash report. There’s something about “doesNotRecognizeSelector”. This means I am calling a method that the receiving object does not recognize. Uh Oh.

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Dr. Touch #17 – “This Changes Everything, Again”

Jun 07, 2010

What the Stevenote means for us developers.

Podcast: Download (15.9MB)

The Show Notes aka Script after the break

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SteveNote (Quasi) Live

Jun 07, 2010

Like every good follower I shall be glued to my big iMac to listen read the latest news from Steve Jobs when he takes the stage at the WWDC 2010 keynote. Somebody called my a “FanBoi”. But I’d rather be a FanBoy than a Fan of a Boygroup. 😉

Apple is always extremely protective of their resources. So they just won’t exert any efforts in streaming the event but rather post a stream a couple of hours later on apple.com and add it to the Apple Keynotes Podcast even a few hours after that. But that does not mean that you have to wait for the info. The web is your friend.

UPDATE: Send me your Skype name. We’ve established a skype chat channel and there’s already a lively conversation in progress.

Here are some sites that have a proven track record (for me) of relaying what’s going on. I will plaster my 27″ iMac and my 15″ MacBook Pro with these.

  • Engadget live – Great Live Blog with Photos
  • Gizmodo Live – Usually head to head with Engadget on the frequency of updates and photos
  • TWIT Live – Leo Laporte is broadcasting live and if there’s any live video or audio then he’ll get it
  • MacRumors.com Live – they formatted their live bloggingsite ideally for iPhone/iPad

Other Liveblogs (as recommended by Gizmodo) to take your pick from: gdgt, Ars Technica, Wired, Technologizer,NYT, Mac Life, and Apple Insider.

I won’t be making an effort to relay the info, because so many other people are doing that. But I’ll be making notes as to which things are of especial interest and importance to us iPhone developers.

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Newly published: iOdometer

Jun 07, 2010

Previously I explained how I am approaching iPhone development in a broad spectrum. The vehicle for my business is a company called Drobnik KG, or as I refer to it in IT context: drobnik.com.

We have a publishing contract with young Laurens whose apps are already making up a major portion of our daily sales. The agreement works like this: I’m taking care of the stresses with dealing with Apple, submitting the app and maintaining the SVN-server where the apps are being developed. For this convenience Laurens is sharing part of the profits with us.

And profits they are! Over the last half year this arrangement netted Laurens sufficient funds to buy a Mac. Thus invigorated he sat down and developed a distance measuring app: iOdometer. This, too, is selling far better than I might have guessed. So I refrain from making any future predictions concerning Laurens’ success. For some strange reason he seems to exactly hit the nerve of what people are willing to pay for.

Maybe that’s because of the high quality components from Dr. Touch’s Parts Store he implemented: DTLEDNumberView and DTMenuController. Being able to rely on their sturdiness and ease of implementation he was able to focus on the app’s main feature set and bring it to market in record time.

iOdometer is available on the app store. Version 1.1 has been submitted to Apple, it features better accuracy and a new icon. Other successful apps by Laurens are Frequency Annoyer and Full Screen Browser.

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SpeakerClock 1.1

Jun 06, 2010

My previous article covering an iPhone-to-Universal migration inspired me so much that I spent two days on getting the HD-upgrade for SpeakerClock ready to ship.

Changes

  • Universal app, runs on iPhone and on iPad in native resolution
  • Portrait Mode, now all orientations are supported
  • Now screen flashes in the appropriate color when threshold to yellow or red is passed
  • In-App Purchase for 5 presets instead of one
  • Lot’s of minor usability improvements

I didn’t know if Apple would approve an iPad-ready app if it did not support all orientations. So I implemented a mode for portrait orientations for iPad and retrofitted it for iPhone as well.

A big thank you goes to Erica Sadun who inspired me to take on these changes. When I met her on the Voices That Matter Conference in Seattle she played around with SpeakerClock as if it where the coolest of all toys, making me really proud of it. But I cringed seeing the iPhone-app on her iPad so I definitely had to make a HD-version. I dedicate this one to Erica.

I also added the information on how to start and stop the timer to the instructions. Some people did not understand that you can do so by simply tapping the screen.

Also this version marks the end of the “free trial” for SpeakerClock 1.0. As soon as it goes live I will raise the price. So if you want to get it for free, then better get it now. If you liked 1.0 then the new + button is your chance to show your appreciation, it will give you 5 instead of 1 preset. A preset saves the timer starting value, the yellow and the red threshold values.

Personally I use SpeakerClock whenever I’m recording YouTube videos. A couple of times I went over the maximum of 10 minutes and my handy timer prevents this for good. Here’s a demo of the old and new features.

SpeakerClock 1.1. has been submitted to Apple for approval.

UPDATE: … has been approved.

UPDATE 2: … has a nasty bug where it would crash on all iPhones with an OS Version less than 4.0. So I already submitted an 1.1.1 update.

UPDATE 3: The 1.1.1 hotfix is now available on the app store.

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From iPhone to Hybrid

Jun 04, 2010

I started out with a simple project of mine, the demo I made for DTNotepadViewController. This is a navigation stack which has a UITableView. From there you can select an entry to get a detail view looking like note paper.

The goal is to convert this iPhone-only app into a hybrid app that uses a split view on iPad.

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DTCustomSwitch

Jun 02, 2010

I wanted to use a UISwitch in iWoman to select between Celsius and Fahrenheit for the temperature scale. UISwitch being in my humble opinion the quickest method to switch between two values. Unfortunately Apple does not give us any kind of customization capability.

Homick tried to fill this need by making a custom view and providing a photoshop file that you could change. But that’s not how we do things in Dr. Touchistan. I totally revamped Homick’s code and brought it up to snuff to what I needed. Most importantly the color and labels needed to be fully customizable IN CODE.

DTCustomSwitch is almost entirely written from ground up as a UIControl where you can customize the text and looks of of both labels as you please. Even set the background color. That so far fulfills my needs for iWoman 2.0, but if you have any ideas on how to even more customize it, let me know.

Peter Steinberger informed me that you can also drag the knob for sort of a “slow switching”, something I had not thought about initially. But so I spent a couple of hours honing the animation behavior to get as close to the original as possible. Now DTCustomSwitch even does that.

DTCustomSwitch will available via the Dr. Touch’s Parts Store for 50 Euros.

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Candid Steve Jobs at D8

Jun 02, 2010

Steve Jobs is one of the most interesting guests of Malt Mossberg at his All Things Digital D8 Conference. There is a summary of his Q&A session available, but the most interesting parts are the videos they posted. I compiled them into one overview here so that you don’t have to search for them and provided a summary for each.

iPhone

Steve had the idea for a tablet without keyboard first and ordered his engineers to develop a glass multi-touch display. When they came back to him and showed him the inertial scrolling and rubberbanding he got the inspiration to do a phone first. So they shelved the iPad and later “when they got their wind back” returned to it and used what they learned on the iPhone.


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Saturday Morning, Breakfast, Wired eMag

May 29, 2010

I’ve always loved to read glossy tech magazines. In fact I feared that I would like them too much to be unable to throw them away. When I was young I had an extensive collection of P.M. (a German popular science mag) that came right to fill the hole that selling my Mickey Mouse collection had left. So I wend cold turkey, no subscription only buying on vacations, as to avoid assembling high towering stacks of paper.

With the iPad I fulfilled my first dream of having a PADD like Jean Luc Piccard, so it was no question that I had to purchase the first digital WIRED app/magazine that came out last week. Many people rambled about the price tag, $4, but I think that’s fair, because you get way more value than you would in paper. Let me share my impressions and let’s peek under the hood of the first eMag that deserves to be called that.

Sipping a fresh espresso with a bit of cream, browsing through the Wired eMagazine. Let’s have a look at how it is to read it and look behind the scenes to see what we can learn from it as iPhone/iPad developers. Maybe there’s an eMagazine of our own in our future?

UPDATE: Here’s Adobe’s Promo for the Magazine. Adobe has announced that soon there will be software on Adobe Labs to do do what they did for WIRED for any InDesign publication.

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