blogitech from Chris Maddern

…technology editorial in a blog-saturated industry.

Browsing Posts in Development Tools

iphone32I realise that the 3.0 Beta was a development Beta; intended for use to test out the iPhone SDK 3.0 and aid in development. However, I am an Apple iPhone developper, I am also an iPhone user. I have one iPhone. This means that I test on my day-to-day phone so I would appreciate that it still remains usable in this capacity with the software I’m asked to install on it.

3.0 is great. It’s a considerable step forward, there are lots of wonderful new features (I’m not going to document them; google iPhone 3.0 beta walkthrough ), instead I’m going to focus on the issues in these features, what I think they’re going to fix, and what they’re in danger of leaving in place!

Copy and Paste: Wonderful feature that’s been missing for a *very* long time. The implimentation is excellent, except that it activates far too often. For example single clicking almost anywhere in the SMS text box will invoke the Select, Select All, Paste bar. It’s often broken in safari and seems to cause you to loose the ability to move the cursor using the single finger hold in multi-line text boxes. continue reading…

promo_sdkCurrently the HTTP servers over at Apple Dev are overloaded however going in over HTTPS is fine.

Change the http:// at the beginning to https:// and the pages will load and provided you have an Apple Developer Membership you can d/l the SDK / Beta :)

so…. https://developer.apple.com/iphone/

Chris

update: this is now going a little slowly too!

update: ‘humbertog’ just posted on Twitter: “By installing iPhone 3.0 beta on your Test Devices, these devices are permanently “locked” into testing mode and cannot be restored!”

Does anyone know if this is true?!

I don’t often talk about my job on here, mainly because it’s not often relevant. But recently I’ve been in a lot of meetings / discussions about creating a system to keep the executives up to date on the progress of various projects.

It was an interesting meeting in which the system changed from a spreadsheet to a full implementation of Microsoft Project, but I left with lots of words in my head like ‘tags’ and ‘categories’. It took days for the association to hit me but it all sounds to me rather like the job for a blog.

Each entry could be an update tagged with a project title among other keywords. Wordpress could even be slightly modified to store progress of each category along with a few other key pieces of information, but essentially it seems like it could work; you could browse by category for a chronological update of the status of projects. It may even be more advantageous for the developers as they gain the scope of explaining any potential issues to a third party (albeit virtually).

I’m not sure if this has been done before / is implemented anywhere but would be very interested to hear any thoughts on the matter or any experiences.

Chris

While trying to see if a peculiarity in the rendering of this site was due to the IE6 install on a machine in my work (eurgh… companies) I stumbled accross a service that will produce a screenshot of your page rendered an any and all browsers available. And what’s best.. it’s free!

Browsershots will render your page on any of hundreds of OS, Browser and Settings configurations and produce you screenshots of the results. This is the easiest tool to test your page on any setup, ever.

Good Work!

BrowserShots