So i got bored and made a web app part one

So i woke up this morning knowing that i had to ship a beta to a client tomorrow. Now you can't have a beta without a bug a tracker, so i started to looking around. One of my clients uses mantis, which is ok, but i'm not really a fan. It's a little ugly.

I also looked at lighthouse app and some of the others and thought to myself, these are relatively expensive for what i need, plus i can see this scaling to a large number of users in short order.

And lets not forget most importantly i wanted to stroke my own ego ...

My goals are to make a simple tracking app, with support for multiple projects and maybe even some github support :) Also i want to play around with CakePHP's ARO support for Happy Not Happy, so it's a double edge sword.

Meet my friend Nyika

Yeah ...

Hola Britney, ¿tam bien?

Application wide Fonts

So you get your nice shiny PSD's from the designer and your ready to tear though the new UI for your fantastic Application. However their is one problem. While the designs look great, the designer has chosen to use non default fonts. 

AFAIK there is no way to change the global default font for your app. So this means that have UILabel, and UITextField, and UITextView instance that you create needs to have it's font configured.

Configure each might take a while but what will take longer is if they decide to change their mind! While i'm relatively young, i've had this happened enough times that i know you should always plan for it.

so ....

This category provides you with some simply methods modelled on the existing UIFont class methods. Now if you couple this category with categories on the other text rendering classes, you have a nice short hand way to quickly render text in the font you want.



So as an example you could create a category on UILabel, and create a class method called labelWithAppSettings. This method would do the following

1. Allocate and instantiate a UILabel
2. Set it's font using one of the methods from UIFont+Additions
3. Return a Autoreleased object

This would allow us to create (Outside of IB) UILabel's across our application with the default settings by calling [UILabel labelWithAppSettings].

Now if you want to use IB (and you should, cause it's awesome, seriously), you either swizzle or use a category to override the awakeFromNib  on the text rendering classes and set font there.

While the above is very cool, i generally dislike using swizzling, or overriding methods via categories in production code. This generally causes your fellow programmers to swear at you while your not there.

Happy Coding

BBC News app, It's alrite

Now usually i don't blog about anything, but the BBC's new app provoked me. Fortunately not because it's bad but because it's really good.

Now what would make me stand up and take notice of this app. Well there are a couple of things.

Cross Platform design

I've never seen this grid like layout in a new app on the iPhone. While it works fairly well on this size device it really excels on the larger screen of the iPad. However the fact that both versions of the app share this is fantastic, and i think lends it's self well to the branding of the application.

UITableView

Well i first started making iPhone Apps i found the interface for the UITableViewDataSource annoying. Fast forward a couple of years and i love it. What amazes me even further is how versatile the UITableView class is. As far as i can tell that scrolling pane and it's content is all part of UITableView, with each row of cells being a custom UITableViewCell with a UIScrollView embedded within it, Pretty nifty if you ask me!

For all i know they could be using the mythical AQGridView, however i doubt this because of the nature of the "non-grid" content below the "fold".

Now because i'm the only iPhone developer in the world without an iPhone, i have performance issues on my iPod touch 2 gen. However while the app is a little slow i can still appreciate it.

In closing i think the folks at the beeb did a bang up job, well done

Upgrade your iPhone Simulator to v4

If your building an app your pretty much guaranteed to have to use the iPhone Simulator. However in all the excitement it seems that Apple have forgotten to update the simulator graphics to reflect the fantastic new design.

So i had a little peak in to the iPhone Simulator.app bundle... and then i opened photoshop ... and i ended up with this

Initially the main take away, is that you can upgrade the appearance of your simulator to reflect the device of your choice, however realistically you could replace the image with anything you like.

Incase you want to do this for yourself, follow these steps

1. go to where you have installed xcode, usually /Developer
2. From there goto /Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/
3. Control/Right click on the iPhone Simulator.app and select show package contents
4. Open and edit the frame.png image to your hearts content.

For the image above, i used the iOS4 UI mockup PSD from Geoff Teehan

Getting Annoyed so you don't have too

So your starting a new project, and you want to use some of the fantastic features of the three20 framework. Then you get hit with this

Ok, simple fix to this "there is no SDK with the name or path 'iphoneos3.0'" problem, you obviously forgot to set the SDK to iOS4 ... oh, but it's already set ...

Fortunately i'm here to save you some time and pain. What you actually need to do is navigate to the three20/src folder, and open each and every one of the three20 components and set project base SDK to iOS 4.0 and the deployment target to 3.0/3.1.

Once you do this to all the "dependencies", you should find that the project will compile and run just fine. There are few forks on github where peeps have done this for you, however i like to always pull from the main trunk where possible, so i'd rather do it myself.


Happy coding

IPhone OS 4: The multi-tasking myth

I have nothing against apple, from their overpriced consumer electronics to there world class software. But once in a while they really grind my gears, to quote Peter Griffin.

Recently i had a prospective client who wanted to take advantage of iPhone OS 4 new "multitasking" feature. I had to break the bad news to them that there is no true multi tasking,just apis to allow specific things to be done in the background.

And that is the key phase "multitasking api", real multitasking doesn't require an api it just happens. Sure you might need some events to determine focus, but beyond that you just write code as if your app was the only one in existence.

So heres a quick run down of mulitasking on the iPhone. If your application adheres to any of the following use cases then checkout the new 4.0 sdk

Always on VOIP client 
Receive device location updates
Play music in the background
Send messages to be received after a predetermined interval.
Operate for an addition 5-10 seconds after termination.

For everything else the solution is push notifications, Yay!

You had me going for a sec!

So i'm the Leeds boss, i've just won the Johnstone Paints trophy, and won the league 24 points clear, i then get this message

So i click accept, my chairman is ken bates after all so it's not impossible!

Well apparently it is. Not sure how i'm going to explain that £100 million pound bid for messi. Football's coming home you know!

Trends in iPhone app design

I spend so much time developing iPhone apps that I rarely get time to
appreciate design changes in other developers app. However due to my
recent brush with RSI I suddenly have some more time. So here is list
of my favourites.

Finanical times
I love the fade transition that they use when you change the device
orientation. I mean really love it. And from a development point of
view it has a couple of major wins. Namely that unlike the standard
rotation animation, you have a nice delay between the switching of the
views. Ideal if you want to load some Additional content or an
additional view. Granted you would have to do this quickly as you
don't want you user staring at a blank screen while you parse so e XML
or execute a network operation.

Also I assume it's just a case if Animating the properties of the ui
to change the super view opacity to get the desired effect.

Yahoo finance
Loving the charts btw. The Apple UIG generally tells devs to stay away
from displaying multiple types of content. However this app does a
nice job of making it work. This design should also scale nicely to
the iPad.

I have a fetish for finance apps not only because of my forays into
the markets, but unlike most apps they need to deliver a lot content/
information to their users.

The other neat thing about this app is that it give the user control
over the size of the widgets that are display for each security. You
can also swap the arranged ment of the items. Now I guessing this is a
hell of a lot of interface code. On top of the code they are using to
generate the graphs. But awesome ui.

Mocking Core Location

One of my current project is a location aware iPhone App. It requires the device to "unlock" a location when the user/device is close enough (a couple of hundred meters).

One of the problems with iPhone development is that there is no way to simulate moving around with the device, or to feed it pre made coordinate data.

Anyone that has worked with the iPhone SDK and Core Location knows that CLLocationManager is the primary class that you need to interact with in order to get location updates.

What i wanted to do was to create a Mock Core Location Manager, that would allow me to create a text file full of coordinates, set a update delay, and then call my Core Location delegate methods, so i can manipulate my app as i please.

If your like me you would think that this should be as simple as creating a CLLocationManger category, and overloading some methods, namely startUpdatingLocation/Heading & stopUpdatingLocation/Heading. 

Now this works for most applications, however it doesn't work with the Iphone's native MapKit's MapView. For that we need to use a different callback then the publicly documented method.

There is a little app called Class Dump that generates header files from compiled binaries. Now thanks to the big drive by hackers to develop for jail broken iphones, you can find copies of the headers without having to generate them yourself.

MKMapView uses a class called MKLocationManager as it's CoreLocation Delegate. You notice that it adheres to the CLLocationMangerDelegate as you would suspect, but along with the public callback method 

locationManager:didUpdateToLocation:fromLocation: 

is also has a very similar method called

locationManager:didUpdateToLocation:fromLocation:usingSupportInfo: 

This is the winner. MKLocationManger will not respond to the former, but will respond to the later. I don't yet know what the usingSupportInfo parameter does. But my assumption is that it is a NSDictionary, however in the example i've posted i simply pass it nil.

So time for some code ...

This is fresh out of the oven, i plan to add a timer and exec the sendUpdate method after a set delay and read the locations from a text file. I'll post it up on git hub if i ever get it done


Update 29/03/10
Since writing this post i've put up a working version of the code on GitHub, Fork away

SVG Graphics on the iPhone

A new project came across my desk. The client want to import vector graphics, manipulate them and export vector graphics. No problem i thought.

Well the problem is that there is no native support for SVG graphics. Not one iota! So as a developer you have two choices. Building a JS interface and loading it in a UIWebView or implementing your own SVG parser, and loading the loading the objects as native paths using Core Graphics/ Quartz 2D.

Most smart programmers would go for the former method of course, however if you have complex SVG's you might have a performance problem, as illustrated by this video

Yeah, that performance sucks.


My problem is two fold, my client wants to export the data as a vector. Common sense wil tell you, that importing multiple vectors and then trying to export them again as a vector, in raster/bitmap based container isn't going to work.


So it looks like me and the SVG spec are going to get really cosy. The only blessing here is that SVG's that my client wants to use are fairly simple, so i should need to implement the entire spec.

Non Global Singletons in Obj-C

Everyone seems to hate singletons. Personally i find them really convenient, but then i'm a lazy programmer. On my latest client app i decided to take a swing at making a hybrid singleton.

Generally speaking, Cocoa coventions (at least in all the documentation i've read), recommendation for sharing object instances across multiple controllers is to make it part of the application delegate. Personally i hate this, as it leads to a congested app delegate full of random iVars. Now it could be argued that if you find yourself in this place your doing it wrong, and in all truth you probably are. But considering that apple themselves suggest placing the CoreData ObjectContext in the app delegate, i think we're in good company.

My solution takes advantage of one of objective-c's many unique features, categories. Categories allow you to add methods to a class without modifing or subclassing. To most non cocoa programmers i just blew your mind, just wait to you find out about Swizzling!

Essentially i define a category on the class that i want to use as a singleton. In my scenario i wanted to have a single CLLocationManager In my entire app. This is because i need to access the devices location on a regular basis, and i want a global accuracy configuration ... and i just wanna try out some stuff :).

Code time


What i have done is simulated the typical method that you would expect to see for a singleton instance, but behind the scenes this method calls a property on the app delegate to get the shared instance variable.

In my eyes the positives to this approach are:
No global variable for the instance.
The Share instance is where you would expect it to me, and if required can be serialized on app exit.
Accessing the instance is as easy as [CLLocationManager sharedInstance] vs [[[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate] locationManager]


Lastly, if the internets tell me that this is a wacky idea i can refractor this to classic singleton, without making mass changes to my app. Thoughts and opinions.

Reverse Engineering: Youtube & h.264 for the masses

So a client asked me if he could get a youtube video in their new iPhone app. I replied it should be possbile ... Hence this post

Like any sensible mac user i signed up to the youtube beta as soon as i heard about it. My beloved 2007 macbook is starting to show it's age, and while it can handle 1080p videos without melting (it's sweats a fair bit!), flash videos truly bring it to its knees.

So first thing i did was select a random youtube video, this one happened to be a short about the upcoming indian premier league (i personally hate cricket, but anyways...).

I was immediately disheartened, it wasn't going to be as easy as simply reformatting the link ...


This format is new and exclusive to the HTML 5 beta, from my research the h.264 content delivered to the iphone has a different format, and is served from a different domain.

Domains/SubDomains
Also a quick glance shows that a different series of subdomains are used, and while i haven't tested, i'm guessing these are a series of load balance servers, so there is no guarantee that the video will be on the same server.

Signature(s)
Even more bad news the signature param appears to change on every request, suggesting that it's generated for each session. I tested this, my using the same account to watch the same video, but once in safari and once in chrome, checking the signatures each time.

Signature A
25BF3979A2386835A59AE3DA23076950B6323FB1.670A622C94E87A9192D1CD62885B2589D6EC9A1F


Signature B
B2F0121150A88F697711D19D2F1F8B18EBFC3058.9FE89BCC68B319D255A83A613C84A2040CAF3B2B


Beyond the signature nothing else seems to change. My guess is that youtube will have to open this up when they start to provide video embed tags instead or in addition to the standard object/embed mashup.
Retardation, tells me those are 2 SHA1 hashes separated by a dot, the age old question is whats the plain text?

Conclusion
I'm not kevin Mitnick (Holla at me Kevin ;) ). My minimal security knowledge tells me that the plain text includes a variable that is changing. My assumption is that it user session key, but with no know access to it. (Unless the people aka google are dumb uninformed, which is highly unlikely i assume they encrypt their session cookie).

So for now the h.264 videos are safe :(

CakePHP & User Uploads

The first time i tackled this problem i did the obvious thing, and placed the uploaded files in the webroot folder inside of the app folder. However the key problem with this is that you lose the ability to quickly move the app folder around without fear. This is important for me, as sometimes i'm working with bargin basement hosting, so "cap depoly" isn't always an option. Leaving the quickest way to deploy to simply replace the entire app folder via FTP. (We all have to start somewhere!)

Thankfully cakes media views allow you to specify a folder anywhere on the webserver!

What i decided to do was to make a simple controller called media and route all of my USG images through it.



class MediaController extends AppController {
/**
 *
 * @var string
 * @access public
 */
var $name = 'Media';

var $uses = array();

/**
 * Index action.
 *
 * @access public
 */
function index( $file = null, $size = 's'  ) {

$this->view = 'Media';

$components = split('\.',$file);

$params = array(
'id'=> $components[0],
'name'=> $components[0],
'extension'=> $components[1],
'path' => ROOT . DS. 'media' . DS .'filter'. DS . $size .DS . 'transfer' . DS . 'gen' . DS
);


$this->set($params);

}

}


So the controller looks a little something like this in it's raw form. I'm using the Media plugin, hence the addition folder paths. The key thing to note is the 'Path' key/val pair in the $params array. Notice you can pass an absolute file path! so in theory you could even mount another drive, and serve your media from there, pretty awesome.

This way, i can use a url like this

example.com/media/filename.jpg/l


To get a large image, and

example.com/media/filename.jpg/s


And this to get a small image.

Quite handy!

Its 2010, Time to blog

For one reason or another i haven't done any blogging in ages. While i was at MWC the other week i decided that i ought to change that. While i don't really have time to be airing my thoughts into the ether, i feel as if i really ought too.

I've had an online property called Russian Space Station since late 2001, If for history's sake alone, The show must go on!

MWC 2010

Is huge. While I have little to sell and even less to buy it's been
interesting so far, and a overal good experience. Sadly none of the
folks that I know personally are here. But this is a different type of
event than what I'm used to going to. I mainly went because the ticket
was free, when yo get a 700 euro ticket for free you don't really
complain. So thanks to the folks from vodaphone.

The scale of this thing is crazy, my legs are knackered and I've only
been here for an hour and a half.

Jonathan

Riding down the river

10 tourists are riding down the Yangtze river on a boat. One says to
the other ...

Ok maybe I'll skip the comedy. China is a beautiful country I've seem
so much but I know i've seen so little. I'm not quite sure where this
boat is taking me but part of me doesn't care. In the last few weeks
I've begun to appreciate the romance of traveling the world.

I love work, I especially love my work, and in this day and age of
technology who is to say that I can't pack up my MacBook get on a
plane and become a nomadic programmer sucking down torrents when the
opportunity strikes, war driving in foreign lands...

It's a dream, just like my house in andorra and my grey Aston martin.
However as I'm learning from this trip dreams can come true. Hopefully
I won't wake from this one to find the world doesn't agree with my
plans.

Quote of the week
Tanya "how many Mosquitos are there here?"
Me "12..."

Dreams do come true

At the moment I'm on a train to Shenzhen. The clued up among you will
know that this city borders hong kong.

I've had a fasination with hong kong since I was about 7. The concept
of a far flung British enclave full of skyscrapers amazed me.

I remember watching the hand over ceremony in 97 thinking, I would
love to be there.

More importantly I was watching it with my grandfather. I always told
I wanted to go, and perhaps even live there. While the latter hasn't
happened I would like to think that he is proud of me for achieving my
dream.

Jonathan

Hei se ren zai zhongguo!!

I was thinking to myself yesterday that i haven't blogged about my trip to centre of all of things chinese, china.

I had wanted to blog about my experiences while i was there, but a combination factors, namely i was having to much fun, stopped me from doing so.

My trip lasted 21 days, in that time my perspective and views on the world changed dramatically.

The motif i left China with was:
"Ignorance is dead, long live ignorance". I went to China thinking that i was a fairly open minded person, dismissing all but the most absurd things.

I should preface this by saying that i realise that the china i saw was the watered down westernized version. Any cultured battered by a foreign civilization(US/west) over several decades is going to experience some level of change.

Politics
China (mainland) is very different from anything i've experienced before. First people who call the country a developing nation/3rd world country are misled. Sure there are undeveloped parts of the country, they are called villages. The cities are bigger than anything the west has offer, and in some ways better.

China isn't a developing nation, its developed! It is the new superpower, financially, and strategically. I've admired how the government conducts itself outside of its borders. Slowly buying up resources around the world, in deals that could considered slightly unfair, but are deals not invasions (iraq) backed with questionable events(9/11). This is how the British empire started many moons ago. On the basis of (one-sided) trade, and a mighty navy to protect that trade. The US 'empire' also started like this, and guess who has the biggest naval fleet now?

Having read the above you might think i disagree with this practice. Not really, its the cycle of life, the strong prey on the weak ... The Eagle and the Mouse.

The food
Thanks to china, a new mime emerged in my life, "noodle time". This is basically when my craving for noodles gets to much and i have to statisfy it, with ... Noodles!! Rice noodles, eggs noodles, whatever!

The food is amazing, i would marry a chinese woman, just to get that (the food) on a regular basis. One of my favourites is jian bing which is crepe made with eggs, fried dough (this is the magic), hot sauce, spring onions and some other magic. Best breakfast in the world.

Next up is stir fried noodles, simple, quick and very tasty. If i had to rate the rood, i would give it 10 stars out of 5, i ate like pig.

Shopping
Ever heard of a factory direct store, think of china as one great big one. All of your favourite brands at one tenth of the price if not less. Sadly this doesn't extend to electronics. Well not if you want ones that work, more on that later.

People
Chinese people are really friendly and in general extremely welcoming to westerners. While i was there i was consantly being asked to take pictures with people, and i mean 'with' not 'of'.

Language
i speak chinese right, so that means i should have had no problem communicating right? Not quite, it helped but at first it was awful. The problem with my chinese was that i had a decent vocaburary, but very poor pronouncation. The other problem was that my listening skills were poor, this was highlighted when i conversed with the locals, and they (assuming i was fluent) would reel off something at me! In the latter stages of my trip i could comprehend most of the nouns in the sentence, along with the odd adjective or verb and use common-sense to work out the meaning of the sentence.

The peak of my chinese came in yangshou, where i talked to a rickshaw driver about my iPod Touch, while playing Mahjong. Even got a discount fare out of him, other highlights where drunk bargining with the traders in yangshou and getting a certain polo shirt.

Conclusion
Absolutely awesome. I loved china, and can't wait to go back. God willing i will one day, how long for is just a question of how long they will give me a visa for!

Zaijian