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…

Facebook 3.0 for iPhone is out now – and looking good (despite no push ! :( ), but due to caching won’t push out as an update yet.

To download it, uninstall the Facebook App and redownload from the AppStore, whatever it says, it will download the new version.

I have now finished my dissertation! (Some sort of) Freedom is mine! Exams to go yet, but it certainly frees up a lot of time… I have used a little bit of this to start designing the look-and-feel and content management system for one of the sites I want to make; this one is sort of a throw-away, I’ve had about 500 email responses about it so I want to get it up and let the community run it. www.theme7.net

It’s going to host Windows 7 integrated theme packs; a feature in Windows 7 that I really like!

It’s very early stages now, but over the coming days and weeks it should approach completion so… bookmark it!

Thanks a lot; I’ve got a lot of iPhone dev stuff going on as well, I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has experience in developping iPhone applications.

Speak soon,

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?!