iApi

A Case For Siri - 'er ... something

2011-12-12T12:52:00.000-08:00

This is a great article from usercentric.com with some pretty even minded reasons why voice command might not be as silly as I tend to think it is.
It also speaks to a topic that I think we need to be talking A LOT MORE about: Namely how our technology is going to REALLY and honestly improve things. Not just for us but for others as well; or at least how we can make our technology *not* take away from others just so we can excel ... or enjoy. Not sure which is a better idea.
There are also these great articles from theroadtothehorizon.org (1 and 2). That make me wonder how we should be thinking about our fancy shiny interface ideas.

And Tufte Speaks

2011-12-03T19:10:00.001-08:00

When Tufte speaks, people listen ... or they should.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003qM&topic_id=1

UITextField setFrame ... DUMMY!

2011-11-29T08:50:00.001-08:00

This is a little post that came about because of two reasons:

First: The Google-Fu required to get to a Stackoverflow thread on this is beyond me somehow.

And

Second: BECAUSE I CAN'T SEEM TO REMEMBER THIS SIMPLE STUPID RULE!

IF you create a textfield in Interface builder and you want it to be taller than normal, don't bother searching (for a half hour) for the magic box to check. You CAN NOT change that attribute in IB! (YET another reason I would rather write code than drag widgets!)

But you can set the height in code (code is good, code is your friend) with one simple line in your viewDidLoad method (or somewhere fancier should you feel the need).

That line will look something like this:

[[self myTextField] setFrame:CGRectMake(20, 125, 280, 45)];

Remember your bracket/dot notation rules and your property rules (and try not to get too religious about them) and be well.

Pictures Under Glass

2011-11-22T04:47:00.001-08:00

A good friend of mine linked me a rant from Bret Victortoday. Truth is I had read therant before and it really made me think – a lot. If you don’t know who Bret Victor is you REALLY need tocheck him out. He is a turn of thecentury, think-beyond-our-times kind of guy. He does and says things that we will be scratching out headsabout for a long time. So what I’mabout to say is not a rant-back and it is not meant to be negative about him inany way; I just think there is another perspective here.

Pictures under glass.

The point Mr. Victor (how informal are you allowed to be ina blog?) is making is that the range of tactile possibilities available to thehuman hand (not to mention the entire human body) is significantly deeper thancurrent devices take advantage of. And I think that it’s not inaccurate to say that his point goes fartherto say that we are limiting ourselves by limiting our ‘allowed’ experience withnew technology.

And all of that is true.

But – and this feels a bit like doubting the Oracle to me -BUT, to say that the “Picture Under Glass” (PUG) experience is “not tactile” or“not enough,” I think, is going a little too far. It’s an approximation of real world gestures and senses inorder to provide a familiar interface. Very few of the user interface experiences that could be labeled PUG areactually meant to mimic real-world tactile experiences in a convincingway. Again, they areapproximations to make a task easier and more pleasant to accomplish.

But what are those tasks?

Just what do you think your doing here!?

Technology is about expanding our capabilities(generally). The removal ofphysical objects as interfaces -and the responsibilities that goes with them - has the specific purpose of freeingthe mind in order to advance to another level of thought; or, if done well, toperform a task that is needed but not germane to what we are trying toaccomplish with our own bodies and minds.

But this means that we have to ask a significant questionhere: are we trying to be more or less purposed with our bodies?

Is the purpose of technology to replace real-world tasks,objects, responsibilities, etc? Oris the purpose of technology to aid us while we continue to do those tasks,manipulate those objects, etc?

My guess would be – with a healthy dose of self-examination– both!

Kinecting in public.

There’s a lot of problems to solve once we start down theroad of merging human behavior with technologically aided/supplanted work. What about people who don’t havehands? What about people who haveproblems controlling their gestures?

But what is really interesting to me are the answers thatthe Tangible User Interface – only (TUI) people give to these questions. And the answer that is most interestingto me goes something like this:

We’ve spent 25 million years building these skills andgestures – just look at the way we move about doing common tasks! Why wouldn’t we use those sameintricate and meaningful gestures and expressions to control our technology!?

David Merrill put it this way, he said we need to, “bringinformation into our world on our terms.”

The problem with that thinking is that we have spent 25MILLION years developing how we move and express ourselves and we still havevery little understanding of the significance of our expressions and ourmovements. How are we going toeffectively put that into an interface? Tiny insignificant gestures mean everything some times and we are notused to controlling our bodies like an interface. Still, eventually, we can probably do it and fairlyeffectively. But when our gesturesbecome interfaces, how does that change the meaning that the gestures alreadyhave?

As for “bringing information into our world on our terms”where did the information come from? When was it ever out of our control? If we are talking about new technology to get at somethingbeyond our abilities that’s one thing. However, if we are talking about teaching a child addition or any othertask short of that, I’m pretty sure that the most effective technology to bringinformation into our world on our terms has been being developed for 25 millionyears already. So what we need is help from technology. We need it to help and then get out ofthe way.

Another side to all this but closely related, is the idea ofour societal behavior. The thing Iheard most often when the iPhone 4s recently came out was, “Just think howfunny it’s gonna be to hear people in line at Starbucks!”

“New appointment. Call mom. Thursday 9 o’ …no I said no foam WITH room … NO! CANCEL SIRI! DO NOT SEND ‘A FOAM ROOM’ TO MOM! WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?No I don’t want a Wolfram explanation of the square feet of a room!” A lot of people with iPhone 4ses are,right now!, trying to figure out how to use Siri in a crowded subway withoutdrawing attention to themselves.

Can you imagine if we had Kinect-like gestures as ourinterface for everything instead of PUG interfaces? Ordering coffee would look like The Ministry of Silly Walks!

Wait … what?

So my friend that linked me Bret Victor’s rant is probablyreading this and thinking I’m a luddite. I say that so you don’t feel bad if you think that because all of this so far does soundvery much like luddite-speak. Butit’s not.

I think technology is needed. I think that we are not developing it fast enough. I think we need to fund technologicaladvances much more. But I thinkthat we need a healthy dose of self-examination when applying thattechnology. Not to limittechnology but so that we don’t create excuses to limit ourselves.

Hummers and Toyotas.

So, there is a place for re-representing actions and ideasfrom the physical world in the cyber world. The latest Kinect commercial has very little to do withgames. Microsoft seems to belending legitimacy to what hackers have been doing for a while now.

The commercial shows many cool ideas for the Kinectinterface. The one that hit memost was an OR doctor paging through his patient’s xrays (about 30 seconds in on that vid). But because he was in the OR hecouldn’t touch anything so, while fully gloved and gowned (I asked my wifewho’s a nurse and those are technical terms thank you!) he just gestured hisway through the images. Now THAT’S a great idea! But when I’m doing most other things I would rather have aquick PUG interface and get back to my life.

Mind you, getting back to my life doesn’t mean without technology either. The trendtoward pervasiveness in technology should lead to the unobtrusive presence oftechnology as helper. See thatearlier bit about helping us do what we do better.

So we are left with the choice: Do we try to approximate thephysical world, or do we create tools that help us do what we already do in thephysical world, just better. Theimplication there is that then WE CAN do more. If we decide the latter then simple "pictures underglass" interfaces are probably the norm: they are the interfaces that helpand inspire us to set the device down and then go and do something.

But we have to be careful. While technology should supplement our minds and not replaceour bodies in most cases, there are applications for technology being manipulated in atangible way and, at time, supplanting our physical selves.

I think a lot of the argument comes from the idea that weneed one interface to fit all applications. I think that we need to examine ourselves and our technologypaths here though. Just like there are manypeople who want a Hummer but really most of them just need a Toyota, manypeople might want a Tangible User Interface (for instance) but really, for a lot of purposes, aPicture Under Glass interface is all you need. But by the same token when more is needed it should beavailable and it should be great. Sometimes you really do need a Hummer.

I suspect that at the heart of the argument is also the factthat it’s hard to do any of this without money (after all what started this rant was a video from Microsoft). And it’s pretty hard to get any money unless it’s the nextbig thing. So we kind of subconsciouslycompromise and say, “Let’s make this the one size fits all solution so we canget funding.” But the evils of ourcurrent implementation of venture capital and funding-based decisions is atopic for another personal rant.

Maybe it's the difference between tools and helpers. There are a lot of great ideas outthere for tools: Topobo, Jive, Siftables, Projection Augmented model, Touchable Holography. But they are not, any of them, idealfor every situation. When we needa “helper” to help us accomplish something ourselves, that’s when somethinglike an iPad or a Galaxy Tab (A PUG interface) is just right.

He who dies with the most toys …

Mixing the two metaphors can be troublesome. A helper interface needs to besomething that consolidates many different tasks into a simple usabilitymodel. That principal, consolidation,is one of the things at the heart of technology that helps . Using proper Tangible User Interfaces isthe opposite of consolidation. Youhave devices to keep track of, or holographic generating tools, or little dataaware pieces of hardware, or a camera to pickup your motion ... All of those things would be great insome situations. But in a lot ofsituations a series of gestures that may or may not come down to different kindsof swipes will work just fine.

I could be wrong. Still …

So I could be wrong and this is the future. We could all be headed for movingprojected objects around in 3d space instead of a touch pad. But even if we are, the technology isnot there yet for us. So in themean time why not use PUG interfaces? I think that the Dynamically ChangeablePhysical Buttons that Chris Harrison is working on is promising for a morephysical approach. But it's stillonly touching and swiping not rotating and actuating.

At the heart of what I think is the four (-ish) letter work“responsibility.” I think that wereally hate that word sometimes. But being responsible and examining our lives and motives not only leadsto better technology (and better funding for better technology!) but it alsoleads to better evolution of ourselves, which, if I’m understanding thingsright, is the goal everyone is saying we’re after in the first place.

Another World: Just Behind The GUI

2010-10-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

So I love linux/BSD/Unix ( 1, 2, 3 ). One of the best things about 2002 was that Apple released a unix based operating system.
But I have to confess that as an iPhone developer I have gotten used to the IDE world. Gasps and leering should begin ... now.
There was a time when if I couldn't do it in Emacs/vi/command line then it was not worth doing. I scoffed at people using eclipse with its false promise of ease of use. But, let's face it, XCode is so very very good. It helps just enough and doesn't help where you don't want it to. It gives you this warm feeling of command line ++. It really is a great product.
It's also a bit like freezing to death: you kind of just start not caring why things are happening and ... just ... fall ... asleep ...
BUT NOT TODAY!
I needed a new plist today for country codes - the mix of ITU and ISO country codes with international calling codes when not using the native iPhone dialer (don't ask) will keep you up at night. So there I was with 3 different sources that each had some of the info I needed and none of which had all the info I needed. And I needed it all in a plist - but only what I needed not what I didn't ... right.
The XCode way would be to type the info I needed into a new plist. That's 4642 keys and strings to add to the plist before I was done (NOTE: This is NOT a complete list just the ones we are concerned about). That's more typing than I want to do with a deadline to meet.
Then my old ways started to kick in. An awk script would be perfect for this. It would be like 4 lines of code!

ctrl space (bring up spotlight)
term (to get the terminal application)
cd to the dir
vi script.awk
write some code to gather info and put it into a plist file with the and around the right parts
awk -f script.awk file1 file2 file ...
Write a quick blog post encouraging iPhone devs to remember/learn command line.

Time to execute. Minimal.

Time to drink more coffee? Priceless.

If you don't know command line and shell scripts and even some perl or python or ruby even, you really need to learn some. It's a crazy good time saver and it opens you up to another world just behind the GUI. And that can only make you a more valuable employee/contractor/service provider.
If you know this stuff but have let it go, pick it up again, learn it again, teach it to someone else. This stuff is still just as powerful and needed as before.
Command line makes a good day.

Undeniable Usability - Part 1

2010-10-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

Usability. Human factors Engineering. User Interface Design (also). Human-Machine Interaction. These are concepts that have long been ignored but whose time - whether you like it or not - has come.

The greatest thing about the Smart Device Revolution is not that we can do our most frequent computing tasks from something that fits in our pocket or under our arm.

The greatest thing about the Smart Device Revolution is that these things are so very small that every pixel counts. Every action is important. There is ZERO room for things that are not needed. There is no room for things that are done in less than the most efficient way. The screens are too small and the input methods are refined to enable as little interference between the user and the data. That fact should make us stop and re-assess out motives for how we design an application or app.

All of this has some interesting implications though. And it challenges a lot ideas that we have held since 1990.

Microsoft did an amazing thing by putting a user interface concept in front of almost every person who has every used a computer. They are undeniably top dog in the market and there are many things they do better than anyone. But interface design is not one of them. Almost all of the concepts that we have gotten used to in the last 20 years are not because they are good but because they are what was available, they were advertised the most, they were what was given to us by the top dog. It was easy to ignore the people who were putting effort into understanding how we think and how an interface should reflect that.

As a result we have been acclimated to what is the central concept behind most Windows applications and all Windows interfaces since 3.0. That concept is "Give the user every possible option and don't make them think about what they want to do."

It seems like we are doing the right thing. Put it all out there! They are busy! They don't have time to think about what they are doing! It's bad design to NOT give them every possible solution and option.

But we can see that the result of that thinking is bloat and confusion.

Think about it.

Most interfaces have always had the "File Edit View … Help" menus at the top. Most operating systems have similar menus. The difference between the OSes is the content and the number of those menus. Most users have no idea how many things lurk in the menus of their favorite Windows programs. There can be hundreds of options and dialogs and who knows what. In the latest versions of Windows programs such as Office the menus actually increased in number but they became more clever - more stealthy. They were made into tabs or little pop-out tool boxes, or sub views that expand and contract, or they retreated into the little shiny circle with the office logo on it called the "Office Button". Is it decoration? No one knows until you need something that ONLY exists in that menu like save. But when you expand that button/menu there are options in there that you would expect to be somewhere else. Once in a while there is a friendly popup that explains what that "Office Button" actually does. But when you think about it what does it say about the design that you need a pop up to explain an element of the UI that is integral to the users ability to get a job done?

Around the time Windows Vista was a year old I became a full-time iPhone Developer. I had been doing a little IT on the side and I stopped doing it all together at that time. However, since Windows Vista the number of calls I get for help has roughly doubled. These are not calls for server issues or enterprise solution help. These are people just trying to understand how to use Windows applications like Office. These people are baffled by the sheer number of choices. They are equally baffled by that fact that almost none of those choices apply to what they are trying to do. By contrast they look at my Mac and say, "Ooo that looks easy!"

I've noticed that the people that are happy with their Windows boxen tend to fall into one of two camps: those that are power users and do more than the average user and those that ignore 90% of their operating system because they have fallen into a pattern that they can sustain.

I have had the opportunity to help a few people "switch" in the last couple of years. It has always gone the same way. There is the initial panic because there is no start button. Then there is the unsettled relenting to the fact that they spent money on a Mac so they are stuck. Then there is the acceptance. Then there is the incredibly loud phone call saying, "I CAN NOT BELIEVE HOW MUCH EASIER THIS IS! I NEVER KNEW THAT I COULD UNDERSTAND MY COMPUTER!"

OK. Let's stop for a minute. I don't for one single second want to be suggesting that Windows should be stricken from the earth. Nor do I want to be suggesting that everyone should be on a Mac. Neither am I suggesting that everyone use an iPhone, or that all smart devices should run iOS.

What I am saying is that there is something going on here people! And everyone who is designing applications and apps for the foreseeable future should be taking a full stop and asking, "are my governing concepts of usability actually based on how humans work? Or are they based on de facto standards from an era of computing that was all runs and whiskey?"

Humans do not need applications that give them every possible answer and every possible option. That can only lead to bloat and confusion. But when you move to the small form factor of smart devices it's even worse. We have to start asking ourselves, "what am I trying to do with this app?" Then we have to build an app that only does that thing. Do not give into the temptation to make your app a one stop shop for your users.

There are many ideas out there that should be split into a suit of apps or possibly add-ons. The concept of one application to do everything is, and should be, dead.

But what about UI design elements? What about offering choices when we have to? Well I guess I'm gonna put some of my thoughts down and Hope that some of you comment on them.

SBFormatPhoneNumber is a LIE!

2009-12-14T15:14:00.000-08:00

STOP!
To the one person that has read the previous post ... yes besides me! ... STOP USING SBFORMATTEDPHONENUMBER. SBFormattedPhoneNumber is evil and wrong. If you use SBFormattedPhoneNumber Apple has the right to refer you to the seventh level of Sandbox hell! DO NOT USE SBFormattedPhoneNumber!
There. I think that I got Google's attention with all that.
Earlier I was bemoaning the fact that using SBFormattedPhoneNumber was soooooooooo difficult. Weeeeeeeeeeellllllllllll that's because we weren't supposed to be using it in the first place. It belongs to that special category of API calls that are just far too useful for us to be trusted with. SBFormattedPhoneNumber is the sort of thing that I imagine caused Jay Freeman to lead the charge for the Jail Broken movement.
Here's the story. Officially Apple does not want your app to have access to things that are fundamental and personal on the iPhone. There have been a lot of cases of misuse so you can't really blame them - there have even been some law suits. So now that the platform is maturing Apple is tightening the seals around possible issue leaks. The word has come down as of the latest SDK agreement that use of undocumented APIs will be grounds for rejection - no exceptions or questions. People are starting to get rejected for using it. Here's an example of actual text from a rejection letter:

"'For security reasons, iPhone OS restricts an application (including its preferences and data) to a unique location in the file system. This restriction is part of the security feature known as the application's "sandbox." The sandbox is a set of fine-grained controls limiting an application's access to files, preferences, network resources, hardware, and so on.'"

The device's phone number is not available within your application's container. You will need to revise your application to read only within your directory container and resubmit your binary to iTunes Connect in order for your application to be reconsidered for the App Store."

So, having access to the iPhone's default phone number is both in the "Fundamental and personal" camp and in the "undocumented API" camp.
It's fundamental and personal because it's information that can be exploited both accidentally and maliciously. But it's the undocumented part that I wonder about.
What was it doing there in the first place? Why can't we find a way to use that info in a safe way for those times when it really does make the user's experience better?
A little guesswork
SBFormattedPhoneNumber seems to be part of the Scripting Bridge framework. I know; you are immediately saying, "Wait! Scripting!? iP*!?" What can I say? I'm wondering if at one time it was really useful to have that functionality on the iP* and it didn't get taken out because ... well, it's just too useful.
The Scripting Bridge framework was introduced in 10.5 which is also where iP* OS has its origins so they share a commonality there. The framework enables Objective C in OS X to talk to common scripting languages in order to fire off Apple Events. Sounds pretty useful no? No!
Or at least not on the iP*. No scripting on the iP*! Bad developer! No donut! Seriously it makes sense though. We are a couple revs at least from really having the power to handle that kind of thing on the iP*. But it does seem to suggest that Apple at least agrees that it would be pretty cool if we could ... maybe on some new device ... maybe one with a little more power ... maybe one with a little more space to hold that power ... maybe rhymes with shmiShmablet?
But for now ignore my last post. Just don't use the phone number for anything. Forget that API call is there. Don't think about the user-friendly apps you could make with it. And most of all don't think about the possibility that there will be scripting on the iTablet ... I mean smiShmablet.

SBFormattedPhoneNumber and the iP* Simulator

2009-10-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

So there are a metric ton of sites out there on the triple-Us that talk about how easy it is to pull the iPhone's number programmatically. And to be fair it is easy. A simple "NSString *thePhone = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@"SBFormattedPhoneNumber"];" will get the number (and calling code) just fine for you. It's what you do with it after you have it that is difficult.
If you are running in the simulator that value you get back will not be suitable to use with all objects. Such as tables and dictionaries - two of the biggest objects one uses in an iP* app.
As a result you will need to put some dummy data in to cover the times when the simulator wants more then (null) for a value.
I was doing a dictionary and this is how I solved it. Lemme know if you have a better way.
- (NSDictionary *) getTheSettings {
    /*
     getting settings from various places in the app domain
     */

    // set up a dummy value for the phone # if we are tesing on the simulator
    // the dictionary doesn't like the null value from the SBFormattedPhoneNumber
    NSString *phoneName = [[UIDevice currentDevice] name];
    NSString *thePhone;

    if([phoneName isEqual:@"iPhone Simulator"]) {
        thePhone = @"iPhone Simulator";
        NSLog(@"You are running the simulator; setting phone number to something the dictionary will like.");
    } else {
        thePhone = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@"SBFormattedPhoneNumber"];
        NSLog(@"Running on an actual iP* with the #: %@",thePhone);
    }

    // now create your dictionary
    NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath];
    NSString *finalPath = [path stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Info.plist"];
    NSDictionary *plistData = [[NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:finalPath] retain];

    NSArray *keys = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"uName", @"uNumber", @"UDID", @"dModel", @"sName",
                                              @"sVer", @"gateway", @"password", @"appVersion", nil];
    NSArray *objects = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:[[UIDevice currentDevice] name],
                       thePhone,
                       [[UIDevice currentDevice] uniqueIdentifier],
                       [[UIDevice currentDevice] model],
                       [[UIDevice currentDevice] systemName],
                       [[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion],
                       [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", [plistData objectForKey:@"gateway"]],
                       [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", [plistData objectForKey:@"password"]],
                       [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@", [plistData objectForKey:@"app version"]],
                       nil];
    NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjects:objects forKeys:keys];

    return dictionary;
}

360 iDev is better than working for Alice In Chains

2009-09-28T22:13:00.000-07:00

Gather ‘round children and I’ll tell you a story about the good old days of music before the internet. Yes that’s right kids and John Lennon and Paul McCartney were in a band together once!

Once in another life I was a musician in the glory days of the Seattle music scene. I was lucky enough to also be an audio engineer so I got to run sound for bands and record demos for bands when I wasn’t playing my own music.

One night I got a gig doing sound for Alice In Chains. The long and the short of it is that this gig was the night before Facelift was coming out and everyone already knew that Alice In Chains would be the final word in Seattle Grunge forever after that.

Now you need to take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt. I hear that in the years that followed the boyz in Alice In Chains were actually really great. But that night it was clear that they were pretty full of themselves. This story involves Jerry bringing in his new Marshall stack that was so loud it overpowered the mains in that little club; their sound guy showing up in a suit that looked like the one Jack Nicholson wore in Batman; said sound guy not knowing what he was doing and leaving to get – more – drunk; and finally Jerry and I in a screaming match that would have ended in fisticuffs if it weren’t for my mentor who was in charge of the place that night. And that’s not the half of it.

What’s my point?

Pearl Jam and Sound Garden are second only to Mudhoney and The Fastbacks in the battle for being representative of the true Seattle sound and you should NEVER believe anything good about Nirvana.

Oh. Wait. Wrong blog.

The real point is this: that night I thought that I was meeting and working for legends. I thought that I was going to be telling my grandkids about the night that I worked for the great Seattle Group Alice In Chains. Instead I was disappointed. They were jerks and a disappointment. Again all apologies because we were all young and stupid and everyone says they are awesome after that – God rest Lane’s tortured soul.

But 360 iDev is like a backstage pass to Phoneapolooza and when you get there everyone is EXACTLY as awesome as you imagined!

I talked with people who are shaping the mobile industry like Bill Dudney, Jay Freeman, Julio Barros, sat next to people like Tony Hillerson (who you all should be paying attention to!), sat next to and attended sessions by people like Kendall Helmstetter Gelner, had lunch with people like PJ Cabrera, Dan Grigsby, and Kendall again! Not to mention the scores of other people who are there who you WILL be hearing about in the near future because they are clever people!

And each and everyone of them were so cool and so willing to banter about anything. They are industry shapers and they are just there to be one of the community; and they are encouraging everyone to be industry shapers too.

The information in the sessions is at worst really useful and at best paradigm shifting. You get more than you paid for with this conference.

In every interaction there is the strong feeling that the speakers didn’t consider themselves as Oracles we were there to consult … even if we felt that way. They were there to facilitate the shaping of the mobile industry together with all of us.

Awesome.

The 360 iDev people do a fantastic job and deserve to be commended and deserve your patronage at the next event. If you own your own business this is an expense worth putting on the books. If you don’t and you want to do any kind of iPhone dev or, dare I say, any mobile development, you need to spend the money. It’s cheap by comparison and it is worth every penny.

Rock on.

Drinkin' The Coolaid!

2009-09-27T17:23:00.000-07:00

So when I became an iPhone developer I drank the coolaid. I was so happy to be totally in a Mac environment; to be developing for a cutting edge mobile platform that had all the usability and smarts that an Apple product could have; I kind of slipped into a fructose comma I think.

I had kind of forgotten my Linux open source roots. I read about people jailbreaking their iphones and about how there were applications that Apple wouldn’t sell available. But I just thought, “Well, why would I want anything to do with that? Apple gives me everything I cold want!”

Then I sat through this session today with Jay Freeman (saurik). The hacker urge was born in me again! There seems to be an uneasy but holding de taunt between Apple and the members of the jail break community that take measures to insure that they are not violating Apple secrets and patents AND are not publishing apps that would be deemed irresponsible or unsavory. App devs who pass around Apple secrets or who do unsavory things are a totally different thing apparently.

Case in point Cydia. They go to great pains to be sure they are not violating Apple’s de taunt and in fact many apps that started on Cydia ended up on the app store after Apple changed some policy or another. Additionally, some apps – even “featured” Apple favs – were done on jailbroken phones first and then brought over when Apple saw that they were wrong in one way or another.

We had a rip roaring session from Jay this afternoon. It was full of assembly code and code insertion from his vista machine PuTTY’d into his 3 or 4 linux boxen back at his place and tethered to his pwned iPhone 3gs all compiling and sending to said pwned iPhone. AH! THE INCREDIBLE THRILL OF THE HACK!

“I hate that the map rotates when it’s showing you the direction you are facing! Let’s change that so that the direction indicator rotates instead!”

Sure.

OK.

I’ll go learn brain surgery while you are doing that – was what I thought. But then I remembered that this is the Linux hacker mentality. I remember that sense of wonder and the excitement of the chase. It’s almost feral.

Pretty soon he was digging into the assembly and doing class-dump on classes and saying things like, “Oh yeah. Apple calls these base classes that are undocumented and there’s no way you would know that unless you reverse engineer these apps.” Sure. I knew that. I just wanted to see if you did.

So basically, at the end he had the map app obeying his wish: when you moved the map no longer rotated. The map stayed with north being up and the little blue dot, shading and the blue funnel rotated to show your direction. And in true open source form he posted the code right there for all of us to see with a promise of improving and adding to it.

I almost missed the final build because I was on craig’s list searching for iphones that I can unlock!

Hack on!

Debugging the Community

2009-09-27T15:20:00.000-07:00

Made it to the 360 iDev in downtown Denver. I’ve been through one session so far and it was intense and awesome. Of course my iPhone decided to pick THAT moment to have a hissy fit about something so I have to reformat apparently. That aside it was a great first session.

This first session was on advanced debugging. Debugging is SUCH a geek joy. I see a lot of people these days who don’t appreciate good debugging tools and techniques. But good debugging can save your bacon in many cases.

Xcode, (really it’s Instruments) gives you some really good tools for debugging and performance analysis. True they can be a little run-by-the-seat-of-your-pants at times, but Apple has done a great job of making these tools pretty solid now.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner ran us through the paces very aptly in 4 hours and there still was not enough time to cover everything that could have been covered. It was the sort of talk I love: like a hundred or so developers just happened by his desk and said, "Hey Kendall. What's up?" He dug deep into the reasons as well as the tips and tricks. And the emphasis was on what a dev really needs to knwo to be productive. It wasn't a hash of features and "Look how cool this is." We came away with knowledge that we can use our very next day back at the office.

I seriously recommend looking into all the incredible tools in Instruments if you are a budding mac developer. If you are an iPhone dev these tools are going to be more and more necessary as the platform gets more and more sophisticated. It’s just a part of developing on one platform (OS X) FOR another platform (OS X iPhone).

A quick aside. I am finding that I like the iPhone dev community a great deal. There is this early-adopter inner-source/open source feel to everything. Everyone is interested in helping each other and being in it because it’s exciting. People don't seem to be interesting in crushing their competition and ruling the space or the other stupidities that have taken over other platforms - at least not yet.
For instance, I’m nobody. Totally unknown in the iPhone world and the instructor I was just telling you about, Kendall Helmstetter Gelner just sat down next to me in this new session and is all about interacting with me and is just as excited about this session as I am. I hope it that attitude stays around a long time in the iPhone community.

Off the Ranch and on the Range

2009-04-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

Big Nerd Ranch was amazing. I guess I'm not as brilliant as others who went there before me because at the end of the day, it felt like I had been standing in front of an information cannon all day. Every night when I rolled up the hill to my cabin at about 10, all I could think about was going back over the still sizzling lead balls of Objective-C that Joe Conway had fired at us all day.
So I didn't update the blog every night.
But now I've been back and building apps for a little more than a month. Looking back, I guess how I really feel about boot camps is that going to one of them is great because it immerses you into a new world. Mac and iPhone dev is a totally different thing than other types of dev. There is a mindset that goes with it that is beyond convention; it's like you have to really get to know Apple's way of doing things to really understand all the nuances. And a boot camp is great for that. Sure, you can learn everything from reading books and staying up late, but this was like iPhone college really: everyone staying up together, exchanging ideas, joking and chiding, and getting somewhere faster and better than they could on their own.
It also let's you wrestle with the silver-back gorilla I now affectionately call Objective-C! iPhone Boot Camp was a better environment to learn Objective-C for me because I was not familiar with it at all and it was nice to have someone around who understands it so they could pat me on the head and say “There there. It's all just messages.”
So should you go to an iPhone Boot Camp? If you have the money, there is no way you will walk away without learning something and it's a great experience. Can you learn all this on your own? Yes but if you need to do it fast brace yourself.
At the end of iPhone Boot Camp at the Big Nerd Ranch your diploma reads, “I [your name here] have successfully crammed as much Objective-C and iPhone learning into my head as I possibly could in 5 days.” And that's just about right.

My First Trip To The Rodeo

2009-03-10T11:07:00.000-07:00

So the company I work for has decided that they want a greater presence in the mobile world. I am thinking that this is a thinly veiled step toward entering the Unified Communications world ... I hope.
I have ALWAYS wanted to travel for work. I have ALWAYS wanted to develop for/on a Mac. Thanks to my brother who was my first teacher in all things tech, I started on Mac (System 7.1.2 baby!). I was only vaguely aware of Windows until I was forced to use it at my job ("Wait. You click what to turn off the computer?"). I have also been a believer in the iPhone - though not a zealot. And I have always wanted to go to some cool training place like The Big Nerd Ranch.
Which is where I am going in 2 weeks! For iPhone boot camp!
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So this blog is for all my adventures into the jungles of iDevelopment - which I am actually going to get to do!
The Big Nerd Ranch is the stuff of legends. Great atmosphere and great fast-and-furious learning. Two work mates and I will be attending their week-long iPhone boot camp and I will be trying to blog about it every day here.
Then I will try to continue blogging on all things iPhone and Cocoa and Objective C here.
Should be fun!