Cocoanetics

Setting Pre-Compiler Defines

Aug 23, 2009

Once you get smart enough to build multiple apps from the same project you probably have to wrap your head around the concept of #define and #ifdef to conditionally activate and deactivate portions of your code. What is somewhat unnerving is that the target build settings change their appearance seemingly uncontrollably and I took a while to work out what triggers this morphing.

The difference lies in what settings you choose in the upper left hand corner of XCode. Only if you select the “Base SDK” setting then the dialog is the most user-friendly.

The build settings for the active target can no be reached by right-click on target, Get Info, build tab. Or alternatively menu option “Project”, “Edit Active Target”. I discovered three places where #define statements can be placed. I am going to show them to you and make a recommendation as well.

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AntiCrack 2.0

Aug 22, 2009

I am extremely pleased to announce a major new release of AntiCrack. While the implementation details have changed very little our new lead developer Fabian Kreiser has rewritten AntiCrack from ground up to obfuscate it to the extreme. Also he researched and developed two additional technologies which should immediately make your mouth water:

Denial of Debuggers. This makes it impossible for Crackulous to remove encryption.
Checking of binary encryption. The encrypted envelope put on by Apple in the review process is now checked for integrity.

Previously existing AntiCrack 1.x users are getting the update for free, for everybody else the minimum donation has been increased to 30 Euros. I switched from Dollars to Euros because the increasing weakness of the Dollar started to get on my nerves.

1.x versions of AntiCrack did not really prevent cracking of apps but provided a comprehensive and easy to implement toolset allowing users to dynamically adapt their app’s featureset to “Lite” once a crack was detected. The groundbreaking 2.0 release also prevents cracking in the first place. This again makes it on par with the professional Kaliap copy protection service offered by Ripdev.

Personally I believe it’s now even superior because you get full source code for AntiCrack, don’t have to pay recurring charges and you don’t have to register all new apps and app versions with an online service. I’ve updated the AntiCrack product description page if you would like to read more.

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LuckyWheel 1.1.1

Aug 22, 2009

The version with three ones is always something special for me. That’s why I added several features to LuckyWheel 1.1.1 that have long been requested.

ADDED: Button to turn on/off sound effects, so you can now listen your your music without disturbance
ADDED: End-Of-Round Screen which shows total standings so far
CHANGED: You no longer loose all your previous points when hitting “bankrupt” but just the current round ones
CHANGED: Game state is always being saved even when on the End-Of-Round screen. Continue then starts with the next round. If this already was the last round then no continue is possible.
CHANGED: A new design for the buttons to replace the previously used blue standard buttons
FIXED: 2 minor spelling mistakes corrected in proverbs
ADDED: Lite Version now showing ad banner whenever a computer opponent has his turn.
ADDED: End-Of-Round screen also shows an unobtrusive ad.

Since the Lite version is constantly being downloaded around 400 times per day I gave in to the temptation and added AdMob advertisements. I think they will make waiting for an AI opponent to finish less boring. When it’s your turn they always make room.

And to say “Thank you” to all those people who are downloading the Lite version we have doubled the number of available proverbs to guess for free!

Both versions have been submitted to Apple. Hopefully it can get approved soon so that you can reap all those benefits.

Update September 4th: After 13 days both updates have been approved and are now in the app store.

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Understanding Autoreleasing

Aug 18, 2009

Do you really understand when you need to retain and release some object? And what about autorelease? It took me around 3 months before I grasped when to use autorelease and now it’s second nature to me. But when I needed to explain to a coding buddy I was stumped. I found that my approach was one of feeling rather than knowledge.

So I decided it was time to do an experiment to visualize what happens to the retain count and when an instance is really released. So see what’s happening to our crash test dummy class I made a TestClass that overrides all the important methods so that we get an output to NSLog what is happening.

First I want to demonstrate how the retain counter – present in all Objective-C classes – is used to automatically determine when the instance can be freed from memory. Then I am going to show how to use a factory method which returns an autoreleased instance to make your life easier.

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MyAppSales 1.0.5

Aug 17, 2009

First day back from vacation I chose an easy thing to do to get back into the saddle. Nothing too complicated because I don’t want to relapse into needing another vacation right away. I fixed a bug in MyAppSales and ~~bragged~~ blogged about it. This formal release contains these updates:

CHANGE: All __MyCompanyName__ now changed to drobnik.com
FIXED: Login problems after Apple updated iTunes Connect (quick-fixed previously)
FIXED: Password not getting properly URLencoded

The last part is especially necessary for you if you have a plus sign or other characters in your password which are not safe in URLs. If you previously experienced such problems please accept my apologies if you managed to lock your iTunes account. This update should fix this problem for you.

The changes which had been necessary to deal with Apple’s update for iTunes Connect had previously been in the repository but now they have a formal version number. As usual you can update your copy from the SVN customer-only repository.

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URL Encoding

Aug 17, 2009

When transmitting data in the context of the HTTP protocol you often need to encode text in a way that does not interfere with special characters used in URLs. This is of importance if you want to put unicode characters into an URL query but also for simple things like constructing a body for a HTTP POST request. A form post also takes the form fields and puts them into the form that you know from an URL: field=text&another=more. That’s what the HTML content type “application/x-www-form-urlencoded” means.

The first thing that jumps out of the documentation when looking for a standard function to achieve such “URL Encoding” is stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding. So that is what I was using for encoding the password for my iTunes Connect class which drives MyAppSales. And until now this worked without a hitch until customer #113 who was the first to use a plus character in his password. The poor guy ended up locking his iTunes account. Sorry!

It turns out that + is an anachronistic special character substitution for a space. I would have expected for it to be encoded properly by the above mentioned method as %20, but this is not the case.

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MyAppSales – Quick Fix

Jul 31, 2009

On the very first day of my vacation Apple updated the iTunes Connect site breaking all existing report downloaders.

My hero is Lukas Matablewski who figured out the necessary changes. Stefan Sorin Nicolin, who is hosting the MyAppSales svn repo commited the changes to the trunk. So please update your working copy now.

All of this while I am in a beautiful NO SIGNAL region of Austria…

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Out of Office

Jul 29, 2009

I’m out of office while I am on summer vacation with my wife catching up on some honeymooning. I will be back mid August.

Until then I will only be able to sporadically check my e-mails and/or respond.

If you have donated for MyAppSales: after the PayPal payment you see a link that takes you back to drobnik.com where you can read the instructions on how to get it. If you missed that then e-mail me, but it will take a while until I respond.

If you have donated for AntiCrack is: Please be patient, I’ll mail it to you as quickly as I get a chance.

All other questions: Please ask them again mid of August when I am back in office.

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Crashed MacBook Gets New Lease of Life

Jul 29, 2009

I previously reported on the unfortunate encounter of my first MacBook Pro with stone floor. Those alu guys are sturdy little bastards I can now say from experience because it continued to work flawlessly.

Then came my birthday and a new unibody MacBook Pro to replace it. This is two unibody generations newer. This one has an SD-Card slot, dual GPU, 2.8 GHz and 500 GB Harddisk. No SSD yet because for me 128 GB turned out to be too small and larger quantities are not yet financially viable.

Almost as long as I had the old MBP I also had provided a MacMini to my partner Christian whose been learning to code Cocoa on it. Turns out besides of being a Photoshop guru Christian also is well equipped with all screw drivers there are and with the patience and precision necessary to refurbish devices which are usually considered to be “beyond repair”.

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Can Retro Survive the App Store?

Jul 25, 2009

Many of the typical iPhone users of today can remember the infancy of video games. First we went to arcades to play simple games made up of sprites or vectors. Many coins went into the slots that allowed you to play. Later companies like Nintendo started to make “Game&Watch” games which you could take with you. Their technical basis would always be an LCD screen where otherwise translucent areas would be made black opaque by electronics to manifest game characters. Movement would consist of several such on/off graphics switched in succession.

The iPhone and iPod Touch devices from today have orders of magnitude more computational power and for a modern game to be successful it has to feature fancy graphics, action and 3D. Or does it? I had a look at two games that like to be correlated to the “Retro” category while at the same time claiming to add “a new twist”. I was intrigued by such a bold statement and thus I am reviewing both apps in this article.

Have a look at those two candidate games and let me know if you think that Retro can be a viable category of games on the store. Or is it the past and should we be glad that it’s over?

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