blogitech from Chris Maddern

I’ve made a few attempts at this before (that have lasted less than a day each!), but for the past week I’ve begun teaching myself Objective-C and working on an App for submission to the App Store.

Objective C isn’t the easiest language to move to, despite what Apple seems to have droves of developers willing to testify – infact, it’s probably the most difficult language to ‘penetrate’ of all the high level languages. That said, the potential benefits and uses of being able to create applications to work on what will likely become one of the most ubiquitous platforms about are enormous.

So, I’ve now gotten to the stage of having a working Application on my iPhone (having payed for the Developer account) with it’s icon etc… It can run a sockets server, and connect to a sockets server. Hurrah.

Over the next 3 weeks (my aim for this app being to a stage where work will be polish and not interesting to write about), I will be posting most days about my progress  and letting you in on how the process of getting an App in to the App Store goes.

Wish me luck!
Chris

Hi Apple,

I love my iPhone. It took a while to ween me away from wanting to actually be able to store and organise my files, control directories, copy files on and off my 16GB £400 memory card, install applications that haven’t been through your ridiculous process, copy and paste (until very recently) data etc.. etc…

None of that really matters though, because the processes that you have put in place to achieve the functionality (for the most part – still annoyed I can’t put files on my 16GB £400 memory card) is sufficiently slick that I forget that I ever had a pictures directory where I could organise my images, or a documents file where I may store items that I consider to be ‘documents’. As did I forget that I liked to be able to copy and paste data because whenever a piece of data was somewhere, and you wanted it to be somewhere else, there was a nice little button that said ‘move this data in some useful way to this other application’. Great.

continue reading…

The 2nd Beta build of 3.0 was released yesterday and is now happily sitting on my iPhone. Build 3.0 Beta 2 is significantly faster and more stable than 3.0 Beta 1 and push notifications actually work.

Most of the bugs listed in my original post are fixed :D.

Also, the folks over at the iPhone Dev Team have released a Jailbreak. This means that we can finally use unofficial tether applications (PDANet being my preferred) on the 3.0 OS.

In order to Jailbreak.. head on over to http://www.quickpwn.com/downloads and download the latest version. If you have an ‘activated’ contract iPhone, do not select ‘Activate’ in quickpwn or it will kill your baseband (you will get no signal).

Hope you guys enjoy as much as I am!

Chris

I 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…

After installing the iPhone 3.0 Beta you’ll find that you’re unable to sync your iPhone without having your iPhone’s UDID listed on an Apple Developer Connection account. The only problem is, if your UDID wasn’t previously listed, there’s no obvious way to find it with the 3.0 Beta software installed on your iPhone.

On OS X you can use XCODE’s iPhone browser window to get the UDID. On Window’s it almost as easy:

Windows XP: Browse to C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Apple Computer\Lockdown

Windows Vista: Browse to C:\Users\%username%\AppData\roaming\Apple Computer\Lockdown

The file found in that folder is entitled with your UDID. Enjoy 3.0 :D

Chris

Update: This can be found on OS X in the following directory: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backups

Currently 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?!

Chris123NT has posted a wonderful guide that proves exactly what I thought would be the case but didn’t get round to trying for lack of an x64 install of Vista on any machine, oh, and time!

In order to install iTunes and the iPhone on x64 Windows 7 you need merely get source the Apple Mobile Device Center files from a Vista x64 install, copy them over and then run a registry script (i.e. the install that fails).

Head over here for the full guide; the files are now available in a rar file in one of the comments so just scroll down and save yourself an x64 Vista install.

That’s now all applications / hardware working fully on Windows 7 6801. Hang on for a production-system review soon!

Chris