September 2010
1 post
July 2010
3 posts
OAuthConsumer on GitHub
rentzsch:
I extracted mostly-Jon-Crosby’s Obj-C 2 OAuth implementation into its own GitHub project and rolled in my various fixes.
Patches welcome.
H264: cannot locate bundle...
Here’s another hair-puller for future Google searches. My brand-new MacBook Pro inherited a problem from my old MacBook Pro: videos shot on my iPhone would lock up QuickTime Pro. No quicklook previews. No iPhoto. Trying to watch would play audio and then show the Rainbow Spinning Wheel of Doom.
A quick look at the Console logs showed messages like this:
7/4/10 4:05:33 PM...
June 2010
2 posts
“A valid signing identity matching this profile...
Once a year your iPhone Development Certificate expires and you have to to the Certificate Hamster Dance. It’s easy to request and install a new certificate (“developer_identity.cer”), but you must edit your existing provisioning profiles on the program portal to refer to the new certificate, then update and download each provisioning profile as well.
In hindsight, it makes...
Working your heart by Mark Allen →
“Over time, however, you will get the maximum benefit possible from doing just aerobic training. At that point, after several months of seeing your pace get faster at your maximum aerobic heart rate,…
May 2010
4 posts
InAppSettingsKit →
InAppSettingsKit is an open source solution to to easily add in-app settings to your iPhone apps. It uses a hybrid approach by maintaining the Settings.app pane. So the user has the CHOICE where to…
Add git branch to bash prompt
I’ve had this on my work laptop for over a year, but never got around to adding it to my home machine. Edit your .profile to add these:
function parse_git_branch{ ref=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return echo "("${ref#refs/heads/}")" } # path prompt export PS1="\w \$(parse_git_branch)\$ "
Now your prompt will look like this if you’re inside a git repository:...
A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong Opinion on...
Mike Rundle asked on Twitter “If iPhone comes to Verizon at a good price, who would still buy an Android phone besides open source geeks?”
My first answer is the current iPhone will never come to Verizon at any price. Verizon uses CDMA, which limits a device to at most 100 million subscribers in the United States. That sounds like a lot. But GSM devices, like the current iPhone models, can be...
How To Convert a SIM to a MicroSIM with a Meat... →
iPhone works fine without a 3G sim.. *cough*
April 2010
2 posts
Taking screenshots with Android →
There are lots of tutorials around the ‘net to take screenshots using DDMS. Unfortunately using DDMS makes it difficult to take automated screenshots for testing purposes.
Fortunately Android uses…
March 2010
4 posts
0xced: Booting from a dmg →
./makebootfolder /Path/to/OperatingSystem.dmg
sudo ./blessbootfolder /Path/to/OperatingSystem.bootfolder
But beware: you better not have a space in the path to the dmg or in the dmg itself.
Minimal mindset in de Yummygum office →
Nice touches.
iPhone Simulator Screen Captures
Grab? No. Sceen capture? Ugh, no. control-command-C. Did I say this already? I always forget. I usually use Preview “New from clipboard” and save the result as a PNG. Pasting screencaps from the clipboard gives you TIFFs or something nasty otherwise.
Props to stroughtonsmith for bringing this gem to our attention awhile back.
2009 iPhone Tech Talks on iTunes
That didn’t take too long. The videos from the 2009 iPhone Tech Talks are now available on iTunes if you are an ADC member.
Does that link work for you?
February 2010
3 posts
Joke haiku considered harmful
Alas, this is all that remains of a not-so-old diatribe against joke haiku.
From sneakums at zork.net Sat Jun 16 08:29:25 2001
From: sneakums at zork.net (Sean Neakums)
Date: Fri Jul 8 18:51:14 2005
Subject: [CrackMonkey] Joke haiku considered harmful
Message-ID: <6ud784xx2i.fsf@zork.zork.net>
http://phenry.org/junkdrawer/haiku/
> For starters, the vast majority of joke haiku writers...
Seth Godin: The Truth About Shipping →
Keep your team small. Smaller than that. No team at all if you can help it.
Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly.
Skip meetings. Often. Skip them with impunity. Ship.
2 tags
git + eclipse = AnyEdit
The battle of whitespace continues, this time on the Android front.
“AnyEdit allows you automatically remove trailing whitespaces and/or perform tabs<->spaces conversion on a “save” action in all text- based Eclipse editors. It can automatically create a new line at the end of the file if the last line was not terminated by a new line.”
I had to install manually,...
January 2010
16 posts
Fontcase →
Nearly $60 USD, but beautiful: “Fontcase is a font management application that provides an elegant and powerful workflow to help you organise the fonts you have installed on your system. Designed to…
Revealing Mac OS X's Hidden Single-Application... →
defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true
killall Dock
Charles Web Debugging Proxy →
Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests,…
Ultra Mountain Runner Circles the Globe Twice →
“When I’m out on a run and I try hard to concentrate on something other than the run, I never can. My mind continually wanders and if someone asked me what I was just thinking about I wouldn’t be able to tell them. I was running. I wasn’t thinking. However—and this is the tricky part—the moment I realize that I’m not thinking about anything, then I am thinking about the fact that I’m not...
A successful Git branching model →
“Next to the main branches master and develop, our development model uses a variety of supporting branches to aid parallel development between team members, ease tracking of features, prepare for production releases and to assist in quickly fixing live production problems. Unlike the main branches, these branches always have a limited life time, since they will be removed eventually. The...
3 tags
The Sure Thing
Malcom Gladwell has an interesting article in this week’s New Yorker. Unfortunately it is unavailable online, which is probably why nobody is talking about it. Here is a quote I feel is relevant to Indie software developers, and people who want to stop working for The Man:
The economist Scott Shane, in his book “The Illusions of Entrepreneurship,” makes a similar argument …...
1 tag
Our records indicate that you belong to more than...
I recently clicked a link to become an administrator for a new iPhone project on the iPhone Developer Program Portal. I’m familiar with the website, but was now surprised to discover I could no longer see my personal developer site. How would I manage all my existing certificates and provisions? How could I add people to the current ad-hoc distribution program? All I could see now was this...
Flicking the iPhone →
Dan Sinclair wanted to let the user of the application flick between views to see different detailed view screens. Each flick should take the user either forward or back in the list. The transitions…
Unison 2 Color & Contrast | 下手の横好き世界４ →
“The medium-gray top and bottom bars of administrative chrome encapsulate the lighter inner areas of content.”
Training A 'Flip-Flop Army' →
“I pull over the Humvee door expecting to see one of my teammates, and there’s this guy. He’s big. He’s burly. I had no idea who he was. And I go, who the hell are you? And he introduces himself, he…
EasyGlyph Updated – Kerning Fixed + Drop shadows →
Alexi White released a font system for the iPhone called EasyGlyph. He looked into switching over to a native true-type-font loader but came back to this because it still seems like the cleanest…
Cocoa Is My Girlfriend » Git and XCode: A git... →
various scripts and suggestions for tagging your builds so they can be reproduced from field reports
This device is busy or otherwise unusable by...
When the Xcode Organizer says, “This device is busy or otherwise unusable by Xcode.” Don’t bother rebooting our Mac or futzing with your certificates. Unplug the offending device. Restart it by holding down the lock button on top until prompted to “slide to power off”. Then plug it back into the USB port. When it has rebooted far enough Xcode will say,...
Taskbar 2010
What does your taskbar look like this year?
New Year's Resolutions
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to start blogging.
I know, in the new age of Twitter, blogging has become something of a dying art. The days when I would scrub through my RSS feeds daily, if not hourly, are long gone. But when I’m working on something and get stuck or have a problem, I search for a clue, and the answer is often on somebody’s blog.
So in the spirit of...
December 2009
21 posts
5 tags
Fluid as Xcode Documentation Viewer
A standalone Documentation Viewer for Xcode with tabs, bitches.
The Fluid part was easy. But every tab looked like this:
“Oh, C’mon!” …the redundant “iPhone Dev Center: ” was wasting my precious tab real estate. Fortunately they’re just HTML, albeit hidden away inside a bundle.
Enter TextWrangler. It’s free, it’s awesome. I buy BBEdit,...
3 tags
Google Toolbox For Mac Xcode Plugin
If you use git with Xcode, you quickly realize Xcode has a habit of inserting trailing whitespace (e.g. spaces or tabs before the end of line.) Git complains about trailing whitespaces.
So go grab http://bit.ly/GTMXcodePlugin to remove trailing whitespace (adds “Correct Whitespace On Save” option to preference pane.)
Oh, and it helps with unit testing. But for now I’m glad to...
Use UIHardware
phonedev:
Don’t assume that the size of the screen is 320x480 (who’s to say that the next version of the iPhone won’t have a 480x640 screen?) Also the status bar can be more than 20 pixels high (like during a phone call.)
Do this:
CGRect contentRect = [UIHardware fullScreenApplicationContentRect];
UINavigationBar *navigationBar = [[[UINavigationBar alloc]...
3 tags
Parse a Rails timestamp in Cocoa
A quick snippet to parse a timestamp string that might be emitted from a Rails application.
Cocoa is very good at producing human-readable dates according to a user’s preferences and locale, but I was not impressed with the default parsing. And the documentation from Apple doesn’t come out and list the format rules. I was going to resort to class-dumping NSDateTimeFormatter but...
Let's DISQUS
I’m going to try enabling DISQUS so people can comment on my posts. By default Tumblr doesn’t allow comments. Let’s see how this works.
3 tags
Notes on Mastering OpenGL ES for iPhone
Continuing my iPhone Tech Talks Toronto notes with “Part One” of Allan Schaffer’s talk, Mastering OpenGL ES for iPhone. Schaffer is the Graphics Technology Evangelist at Apple.
Side note: if you’re not familiar with Jeff LaMarche’s excellent OpenGL ES From the Ground Up series on his blog, bookmark it now.
Schaffer opened the talk with a high level overview.
...
1 tag
git: revert (reset) a single file →
“If you have an uncommitted change (its only in your working copy) that you wish to revert (in SVN terms) to the copy in your latest commit, do the following:
git checkout filename
This will checkout the file from HEAD, overwriting your change.
The rest of the Internet will tell you to use git reset --hard, but this resets all uncommitted changes you’ve made in your working copy. Type...
2 tags
Keep Drobo from sleeping
My Drobo keeps falling asleep. It’s not in standby mode, but whenever Snow Leopard opens a file dialog, there is this huge pause while the drives in the Drobo spin up. I’m blocked. I listen to the four drives spin up and click into action. Then, finally, I’m allowed to use the file dialog. The process repeats throughout the day.
So here’s what I’m going to try. A...
2 tags
Running Apple sample code on your device
Just a quick note about getting Apple sample code (or other people’s examples in general) to run on your device. Let’s take LazyTableImages as an example.
I’ll assume when you write and build your own code, it works fine. Starting new projects in Xcode from scratch usually results in something that will run on your device.
There is a nice summary of things to check if nothing...
2 tags
Where to find Xcode Screenshots
I love screen captures. But where are Xcode Screenshots saved?
~/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Screenshots
From Finder, you can shift-command-G and paste that path
You can also drag screenshots from the Xcode Organizer to your desktop.
In preparation for my UI review, I took iPhone screenshots of the website I was working from. Then I simply swiped through the camera roll...
Notes on Effective iPhone App Development
Senior Apple Engineer Larry Coopet spoke on Effective iPhone App Development at the Toronto iPhone Tech Talks.
I attended the “Part Two” of this talk after Eric Hope’s iPhone User Interface Design Essentials.
And I took some notes.
“Did you know we have a single function call that does that for you already?”
Coopet opened with a story of a developer who had...
1 tag
Undocumented rgb2565 options
A quick note for Android hackers. If you’ve tried to customize the “boot image” displayed when you first power on an Android device, you’ve probably used the rgb2565 command-line tool at some point.
Out of curiosity, I checked the source, available from android.git.kernel.org. It’s pretty short and sweet. There are two undocumented options:
int main(int argc, char...
Notes sur le iPhone Tech Talk Toronto (en...
Found on Twitter: iPhone Tech Talk Toronto - par Christian Legault “Je me suis déplacé de Québec à Toronto pour le “iPhone Tech Talk World Tour” cette année, et j’ai pris des notes!” I overheard more French at the tech talk in one day than I have in a very long time. There was in iPhone Tech Talk in Beijing on the same day, which makes me wonder what Mandarin-speaking staff Apple employs. Or was...
2 tags
Does OAuth make sense for iPhone clients?
Ben Gottleib doesn’t think so. For web services you don’t trust, maybe. But “If the user doesn’t want you using their credentials, they can simply not launch or delete you.” (I had asked him about this after the Chicago CocoaHeads meeting last Tuesday.) I find this ironic since I am using his Twitter+OAuth Source and Example for iPhone.
I also stayed up late one evening with Karl...