Steili.com

I’ve been spending a lot of time today going over in my mind if the Kindle might be the right device for me and my ever growing need to read. If you’re wondering why I’m reading… when there’s 200+ pages of Core Data waiting for me to read through, 200+ pages of Core Animation, and another couple hundred pages of Obj-C 2.0 waiting for me. And all of that is sitting in eBook format.

Now, so far I’ve been OK reading a bit here and there on my MacBook. The screen is good, and the text spaces out nicely… but I can’t really take my MacBook with me to my mother-in-laws, to my parents house or to work and fit in a few pages here and there. Not to mention even if I could the MacBook is just too darned heavy and too darned valuable to lug around everywhere I go.

Which leads me to – why not just use the Kindle software on the iPhone and be happy with that? Good question. The price of the books still applies. I have full connectivity everywhere just like the Kindle. I mean, basically it is the Kindle software… on my iPhone. Well, I have it already and the iPHone screen while gorgeous just isn’t the right thing for reading a 300 page book. Its too small and really does hurt the eyes.

Anyway, I’m thinking of a Kindle. I’ve looked at a couple Sony devices – and while I really like the form factor, the lack of content in the Sony store, the prices, and the lack of connectivity is really what are keeping me from going with the prs-505.

I guess I’ll keep racking my brain to see if I can come to a conclusion. I really need a device I can take with me everywhere and squeeze in the tons of reading I have to do. But, until I’ve made a decision – maybe I can win one?

brandon General Kindle

and unfortunately they don’t look so hot. Now to be fair, the ratings/reviews are pretty decent from the folks who have taken the time to write them. They aren’t all positive, and some are downright rude, but unfortunate reality of the App Store is that (as Iliumsoft wrote) Apple really has designed the rating system to make it super simple for those who “hate it to rate it” and those who love it … to not rate it at all.

Now, I’m happy with what gCalWall has done. It has sold a “decent” amount of copies, and the free version has done very well. I’m never going to make it rich off the application (hell I’m never going to buy a broken down Honda off of it), but for being my very first attempt at building anything its done very well. Ultimately I took a lofty goal (capturing data from Google and getting onto the lockscreen) and for the most part I succeeded. I didn’t truly succeed, but the goal was impossible because Apple doesn’t allow access to the lockscreen. Ultimately, the failure of gCalWall is a failure of my own.

What do I mean by that? Well, I mean that the ratings for gCalWall are very low, because I mis-judged that people wouldn’t mind taking a few extra seconds and setting the created image as a wallpaper. The ratings are low not because the application itself doesn’t work – but because of STUPID restrictions placed on the developers, and my own mis-judgement that people wouldn’t mind the extra steps for the much added benefit of having a useful lockscreen.

Keep this in mind. I want to dynamically update the lockscreen when you run gCalWall. There’s nothing I want more. Its been written in the app description and mentioned in every fricking write-up on the web. I WANT TO DO IT. APPLE WON’T LET ME. So please – if you like the app, review it on the App Store. If your only complaint is that it doesn’t set the wallpaper – TELL APPLE, but don’t give it 1 star reviews because of that.

Long story short – the rating system is broken. Go read about the feelings a successful developer has about the process, and imagine how I feel. Not only am I getting my ass kicked by Apple once for limiting functionality, but I’m getting it kicked again by Apple for having a broken rating process.

brandon iPhone gCalWall

It’s a little hard to test when something as simple as a reboot completely hoses the device.

Oh and iTunes won’t restore it either. So, it’s either time to try and use a Dev team app to restore it or time to go to the apple store for a replacement.

Either way – this sucks.

brandon iPhone iphone 3.0

Well, here we are – over a week in the review process (8+ days) and so far I finally have the approval emails for gCalWall and gCalWall Lite version 1.2 but they haven’t shown up on the store. Heck gCalWall still shows “in review” even though it’s been approved.

This is bugging me.

brandon iPhone appstore, gCalWall

Building iPhone Applications without Interface Builder from Troy Mcilvena on Vimeo

Adding this one for my own future reference. The important things to note was really how to remove the references to the NIB files when first building the project.

In the Resouces like locate the info.plist file and right click then go to source view and delete:

key - NSMainNibFile
string - MainWindow

While you’re in he resources list also delete the mainWindow.xib file. Finally open “Other Sources” main.m and you’re going to edit this line:

int retVal = UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, nil);

and make it look like this:

    int retVal = UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, @"Your_App_Delegate_Class");

That pretty well sums up the key points. There’s some good information about UIWindow and UIView in the video as well if you’re not familiar with building your base view without IB. gCalWall was built largely without using Interface Builder at all so I was pretty familiar with most of it.

brandon Coding iphone developement

iphone programming from Joe on Vimeo

Definitely worth the time to watch. Make sure you click on through and say thanks to Joe!

brandon Coding development, iPhone

My first iPhone app just got approved for sale in the AppStore! I’m frickin excited! Talk about a long process though. Longer for me than many others I’m sure because it took a lot of reading and a lot of learning, but I got it done so the goal has been achieved.

More important than just the app, I guess this validates for me that you can teach an old dog new tricks… a couple months ago the closest I’d come to programming in many, many years was some simple VBScript stuff, and the minor bit of PHP/HTML I have to maintain at JAMM. So, naturally I need to send a HUGE thanks out to all the folks who have taken the time to write tutorials for beginners, the folks who’ve written the books (specifically Erica Sadun, Dave Mark/Jeff LaMarche), and everyone whose taken time to reply to noob questions on forums. There’s a serious wealth of information out there for a beginning programmer and its all come to life in a matter of months – so THANKS!

Alright, almost done with my shameless plug. I’m really looking forward to sharing this experience with everybody as its been very exciting, from the learning a whole new language, thinking through how things should work, writing the code, troubleshooting and beta testing… There’s a ton of stuff to cover so keep an eye on the site as I’ll be covering a lot of that stuff very soon.

gCalWall goes on sale on Wednesday the 25th (I’ll post a link when it goes up) … but for now here’s some more information on the app! I’ll be posting a video demo of the app on Wednesday (on that page) as well so you can see how it works. Alright … I’m off to go do a happy dance!

brandon iPhone gCalWall, google calendar iphone

I’m going to let this video speak for itself for the most part. I plan on going over the interface you see for the HP Mini Mi in a video sometime over the next few days, so keep an eye out for that, but for now here’s a couple links:

brandon General HP Mini Mi, HPMiniMi, Touchpad Elite

So last night my daughter goes to make a phonecall. Note she’s standing right on front of me when she does this – and she opens the phone just like anyone else would with a Razr (the little thumb flick open thing they do) and the phone litterally snaps off at the hinge.

So now I’m calling AT&T for the 4th time.

1st time I got hung up on. Why? Because I told the lady I did not want to be transferred to insurance as the phone was not dropped and this was not an insurance issue.

2nd call dropped. Shocker.

3rd call – 20 minutes long and the final person said their systems were updating and they would call me back in 30 minutes. It’s been an hour.

4th call coming up.

Business Customer Service is not fairing well today.

4Th Outcome:

brandon General

Ran into some weirdness earlier which was absolutely killing me. I’m building a project using SQLite Persistent Objects, and this:

NSMutableDictionary *dict = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
	dict = [Commands sortedFieldValuesWithKeysForProperty:@"commandname"];
	self.keyLookup = [dict mutableDeepCopy];

	NSMutableArray *array = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
	array = [[[self.keyLookup allValues] sortedArrayUsingSelector:@selector(compare:)] retain];

was throwing an error about assigning the values from a distinct Objective-C type. I was able to fake my way around it in another viewController I had a similar issue with, but this time it was a show stopper because when I tried to work with the resulting array later (by adding/removing some stuff from it) I would get another error:

exception: *** -[NSCFArray addObject:]: mutating method sent to immutable object

Well, I was pretty dammed sure I hadn’t asked for my array to be immutable, but I’m guessing somewhere in the code for the persistent object (which I’ll be checking into) there’s a copy happening (or something similar) and its turning the returned data into an NSCFArray. To fix it… I needed to make it a mutable array again:

if (self.commandArray != array){
		[self.commandArray release];
		self.commandArray = [array mutableCopy];

Of course this may be simple if you’re the programming type… but it drove me nuts for a while!

brandon Coding