Mark's World » Apple

iPhone Developer Meetup

Mark Lise — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:21:28 +0000

Well, I just got back from the event and I’m now I’m sitting on my couch about to sum it all up.

About 14 people showed up to the event and everyone was contributing and the discussion never got stale. We talked about a lot of things: IUI, provisioning codes, 3-inches of love (don’t ask), appstore – and two ways of getting into it, disk IO, and even went through an exmaple app in objc.

An interesting thing to note came up which I wasn’t aware of; When filling out the tax information on your app store application, choose ITIN and use “nine zeroes” as the number. Apparently Canadian citizens are exempt and don’t need to fill out the huge forms asking you almost everything, stopping short of your blood type.

There was talk about how to deploy your app. App store or ad hoc method? If you go through the app store method, there were some obvious benefits – however if you’re just wanting to hack and release to a few (hundred) people or so, ad hoc was the way to go. Why? App store has a huge amount of gates (review process, etc) and Apple can essentially reject your application for a variety of reasons – “We don’t like it” might just be valid enough. If you go ad-hoc, you can deploy onto anyone’s iPhone, but you’ll need their iPhone GUID and bake it into your app first, creating a new binary for that user to download and only then will it install.

Something that irked me, interpreted languages are NOT supported on the iPhone! Now, I don’t know if this is something that will change in the future, but I have to think that it must. I can’t see, and I’ll loosely call it, “fun integration” with web API’s etc consumable by objc alone. I could do a lot of things really fast in script (fast as in development time), it would be laborious to code up equivalent in straight objc. I dare not speak about my work on an “unnamed” browser platform in C++.. linking times is absolutely killing me, but I digress.

Last note is the book of choice was “iPhone SDK Development
by Bill Dudney, Chris Adamson, Marcel Molina”. I haven’t seen it myself, but I might have to get myself a copy (currently available as a betaPDF). First time I’ve heard of a book being in “Beta”…

Mac Battery Life

Mark Lise — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:20:33 +0000

I was suggested to try out this program to determine my battery life on my MBP. It’s quite cool! I am looking for something similar for Linux/Win but nothing very interesting yet.

Excerpt from http://www.macupdate.com/:

“coconutBattery is a tool that reads out the data of your notebook-battery (iBook/Powerbook). It gives you live feedback, what’s going on in your battery (not only a snapshot like other tools).

It shows the current charge of your battery as well as the current maximum capacity related to its original. If coconutBattery detects that you have connected the wrong charger (i.e. an ibook-charger plugged in a powerbook) it will warn you! That’s a cool feature!”

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19085

Blogged with the Flock Browser

iPhone in Canada

Mark Lise — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:02:57 +0000

So there’s been a lot of talk on twitter and other blogs about the iPhone finally coming to Canada via Rogers. At least in an official sense. Lots of people already have the iPhone in Canada, but they miss out on some of the enhanced features that the AT&T subscribers down south have (along with data plan etc).

I’m indifferent on my feeling towards the announcement. It’s cool yeah, I’ve had requests from non-techies asking me “where do I get one?!” of which my reply is to direct them towards a $500 unlocked phone in the U.S. Some say that the iPhone in the U.S. is in part responsible for the data rates becoming affordable, I wonder if the same will hold true in Canada? I would think Apple wants us to believe that because it all goes towards a positive reflection on their brand.

The fact is, HTC and Bell have already beaten them to the punch but I don’t think their marketing to date has been successful. I currently have an HTC Touch from Bell on a $7/mth unlimited data plan and am loving it. Web, gmail, twitter, google maps, texting, camera.. it’s got it all. However, It seems as though I’m the only person in my town that knows about it! My only beef is they charge me roaming data when I travel to Vancouver. I suppose they gotta mess with you one way or another.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll be switching just for the sake of having one. Monthly data rates mean more to me than saying “I have an iPhone”. So dear Telus and Rogers: I’ll consider switching if you change your pricing, $15/MB is ridiculous. It’s not just about having an iPhone, the monthly costs have to be justifiable as well.

I look forward to the day where data rates are no longer the dealbreaker. Just like broadband cable did back in the day. Wow, was that only last decade?

Adventures moving to a Macbook Pro

Mark Lise — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:08:40 +0000

One of the reasons why I wanted a Mac was so that I didn’t need to VNC into a Mini to do development of Flock. My previous machine was an IBM TP60 – a decent machine which I had setup for dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu. Originally Linux was Edgy then I dist-upgraded to Gutsy – big mistake as dual-head screens no longer worked, but I digress.

It was a love-hate relationship with that machine. It had a docking station which is something that I think is missing from the Macs. Then again all I really need is just a few more USB ports so a hub will suffice. The 4:3 screen sucked, however IBM has a new version that has a wide screen so it’s a bit better. Linux was absolutely awesome – super fast, snappy response, no crashing… developing Flock was a breeze.

Windows was a whole different set of apples! The performance was absolute garbage, taking anywhere from 1-2 hours for an fbuild_all (neat little script that automatically updates subversion and builds from the root source dir). Linux was no more than 45 minutes. Now this is largely due to ccache being broken under cygwin, but even loading Thunderbird/Flock/Firefox/Pidgin/Skype makes the machine crawl. I stayed mostly in Linux because I wanted to actually get *some* work done. This created problems tho every time I booted into Windows because inevitably the tree would be so out of sync that I’d be spending a minimum of 1.5 hours just building before I could do anything. Occasionally during the build my machine would hang when it was linking large object files.

Enter the new intel Macbook Pro: As soon as I got it I immediately got my hands on a Gutsy and WinXP disc. I got my machine triple booting in probably less time than it took to do a full rebuild of Flock under my old machine. I still needed to setup the build environments on each OS, but that wouldn’t be so bad. I spend most of my time in OSX and I love it. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for all these years – nice eye candy with standardized installation of software (read: drag program into Applications folder) and a shell to interact with. Performance of WinXP is actually better than what I was getting about of the IBM – so I’m happy there.

Having triple boot on the Mac is great – I think anyone developing cross-platform software targeting the big-3 definitely need to consider Mac.