Looking at the WWDC, World Wide Developers Conference, section on Apples website you’ll see the logo to the left of this blog post. This, according to MacWorld.com, is the first time that the conference, which is held every year, has actually sold out. I know a number of people have been holding out for a bit and may be so disappointed.

I, on the other hand, am so glad that I managed to get my ticket just shortly after they were released. I have to admit that I’m really looking forward to this, though it seems that if you want to get in and see the Steve Jobs Keynote, you will need to be there queueing from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. I’ll try my best.

I usually try and give a few comments on each of the new iPhone software development kits that are released and was putting something together for the fourth version when all of a sudden they released a new one.

The fourth version fixed a large number of bugs within the development kit and made it a lot more stable and even added a proper Interface Builder for the iPhone, but this new, beta 5 version, cements that even more and then some. It may even be getting close to an actual release candidate.

You now use OpenGL | ES on the iPhone simulator and it works a treat. The main thing to remember is that the simulator runs a lot faster than the actual device. I don’t know why they couldn’t have throttled the speed to match more closely the actual device.

I’ve been running the new version 5 for around a week now and haven’t found any real problems with it. It handles certain things differently than before and you end up having to go through everything re-coding your work just to get it working again, but this is, as they say, still a beta version.

A few days after posting my “Where Fools Fear to Tread” blog a third beta release of the iPhone SDK was released and I have to say that it is a much more stable release than the second. I’ve not had any problems at all with this one. In fact, it seems to compile more quickly and launch faster too.

A friend of mine was so lucky to receive their development certificate. Am I in the least bit jealous, YES. With this little electronic signature I would be able to try out the accelerometers and OpenGL 3D work, but hay, in the meantime I’ll just keep working through the APIs.

Doing a few small projects based on the iSDK just to get my head around the touch interface, Core Animation on such a small screen and a few others. The team at Infurious are hoping to have something ready for the launch of Apples AppStore, or shortly afterwards.

I’ll keep you posted.

It has been a few days now since I downloaded the most recent beta build of Apples iPhone SDK. I would love to say how much of a change there has been and how much more stable it feels, but not so.

It has to be said, that when developing using a beta release of anything, it’s best to use a dedicated machine. Well, taking this advice on board, I installed the original iSDK on my main machine and it worked fine, rather limited, but worked.

The latest beta release arrived with much anticipation. Feeling and expecting this version to be just as stable, it went on my main machine. Oops. A large number of basic functions had stopped working. Then the crashes started happening, just couldn’t figure what went wrong. It just got to the point that I have to wipe my hard drive and reinstall Leopard and the original version of the iSDK.

Two hours later and my problem iPhone app now works without any hitches. Now to clean up the code and find a development machine to work on.

A new version of the iPhone SDK was released today and the strange thing here is, I’m getting about 1 - 1.5Mb/sec download, so the whole process was about 20ish minutes. Others closer to the source in the states were seeing download speeds as low as 90Kb/per second.

Well the new version has the Interface Builder application, needed to create user interfaces for the phone. Will be interesting to see how this pans out. Looking forward to any improved frameworks as a number of key headers are missing from the original beta release.

More updates soon.

Probably one of the most anticipated software releases from Apple happened on Thursday 6th March. Apple released their beta version of the iPhone SDK, software development kit.

Steve Jobs, along with Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall, showed what we can expect with the new version 2.0 iPhone/iTouch firmware to be released in June. Phil Schiller kicked it all off by going through the enterprise additions to the iPhone. Here we see practically everything the was missing and then some. This as far as I can tell is going to make a reasonable sized dent in the Blackbury RIM market.

The real interesting bit of the presentation, well at least for me, was the presentation given by Scott. Here he gave a fairly detailed review of the SDK, I'll cover that in more detail in a later blog post. Let's just say that it was fantastic. Along with Scott was a few companies that were given a two week pre release of the SDK and asked what could be done with it. The results was really amazing.

First up was an Scott himself. Here he showed of a space shooter game in 3D using OpenGL|ES. The movement was very smooth and the shooting action solid enough to be enjoyable. One of the interesting points he made was the fact that it was also using OpenAL for sound. This gives a full 3D sound spectrum.

Electronic Arts was next up showing their iPhone version of Spore. Travis Boatman was responsible for this one.

In Spore you control a micro organism from the early dawn of life in the big soup bowl. You have to control your spore and help keep it safe and grow. The neat aspect of this game is the control mechanism. Spore uses the iPhones 3D axis accelerometers to control movement. At certain points in the game you have the ability to add custom parts to your spore to help it evolve. There are a total of 18 levels in this game and to think that all this was programmed in 2 weeks on an unknown software platform. This looks to be one great looking small game.

Salesforce.com represented the vertical markets. Chuck Dietrich showed what they had managed to accomplish in less than the two week period.

Salesforce are looking to bring their 63,000 plus applications to the iPhone. Chuck showed one of their sales applications. This Sales Force Automation application is used to store sales persons contacts, sales records, target levels, and a whole slew of other sales and marketing information.

Rizwan Sattar from AOL showed of their instant messenger for the iPhone. You have complete access it your buddy lists, check who is online/offline and set your profile. One of the neat features is the ability to change your buddy icon using the image picker built in the iPhone, or even take a picture with the built in camera.

Epocrates was something I wasn't expecting, actually I've never heard of the product in my life, but according to Glenn Keighley, over half a million health care professionals and 1 in 4 physicians in the US use it. Epocrates is a drug encyclopedia containing over 3,300 of the most popular prescribed drugs in the US. This database can be searched and photos available showing what the drug looks like. It can even show the doctor how mixing different drugs can effect the patient.

Last but not least was Sega with an iPhone version of Super Monkey Ball. Ethan Einhorn showed a very playable version of the game using the same control mechanism as EA's Spore above. The big difference here is it's a full 3D visual experience.

According to Ethan, he was totally surprised as to the power of the iPhone and he stated that it wasn't a cell phone game but a console game. They even flew in a graphic artist to help scale up the visuals because of the shear power of the device.

Steve Jobs finished up the presentation by describing how they are going to handle the distribution of iPhone Apps. The only way to get your app in front of every customer will be through their 'App Store'.

Apple will take care of hosting, distribution credit card handling and providing free update service. For this they will be take a 70/30 percent split, which for the most art seems quite reasonable. Other blog posts seem to find this a bit of a take on, but for what your getting I think its a good deal. If however your providing freeware or shareware applications then these will be hosted free of charge.

Well the hoopla surrounding the iPhone is now one week old and yes, I was tenth in line to get my grubby little hands on one.

Since I live in Northern Ireland, just North of Belfast, there are no Apple stores over here, or indeed, any part of Ireland full stop. So I just had to make do with the O2 store in CastleCourt, Belfast. There was a small queue forming outside an hour before opening, and it was enough to worry the shop next door, calling security to get the number of people moved away from their doors.

Getting the iPhone in my hands and getting home was filled with an air of great anticipation, something that I though wasn’t going to happen to me. Actually seeing the screen light up after registration was a great relief, especially reading that some people had difficulties. This boys details went through in under 3 minutes.

Now that I’ve had the iPhone for a week now, I’m still very pleased with it. I can quite safely say that this is the first phone where I can use nearly every aspect of it without needing a manual or just plain giving up. In fact it is so simple, my mum was able to operate it and she can’t even get the DVD player to work.

I’m going to go through each function of the iPhone and tell you what I think of it. First up is the SMS text messaging service.

Anyone who has used the iChat application on the Apple Mac will feel right at home with SMS. Rather than a list of mixed up SMS messages being displayed on your screen you have a list of those you’ve sent or received messages from. Tapping on their name brings up a your current conversation.

This whole concept of seeing your full conversation is great, no more looking through a list of 30, 40 or even more numbers and peoples names to find out what someone was replying to. I love this if nothing else.

I’ve very rarely used a calendaring option on any mobile phone. I’ve tried a number of times but all that fiddling about with small keyboards and multiple button pushes, just simply put me off.

This on the other hand is a breeze to use, a breath of fresh air. Everything is at hand and really intuitive. Entering repeating events couldn’t be easier, short of actually talking to your phone. The amount of calendar information is growing by the day and it even syncs back to your iCal application.

Unfortunately the timing of the iPhone release over here happened to be the same time as I was updating to Leopard, Apple Macs newest operating system, version 10.5. I was looking to install the new range of iLife applications onto my MacBook Pro One of these applications is iPhoto, which help you organise your photograph collection. I currently don’t have iPhoto installed and as such am missing out on the great photograph experience.

I have however created a number of sub folders in my Pictures folder and dumped part of my photographic collection in there. These are synced to the iPhone and any changes automatically taken care of. I’m really, really impressed by the way the iPhone handles these photos. Due to the way the touch sensitive panel works, you are able to use two fingers to enlarge or reduce the photo on screen. Using your finger to simply flip through your collection is amazing, just watch peoples faces when you do it. If a photo is taken in landscape mode, rotate the phone and the photo is automatically rotated and stretched to fill the screen. Absolutely brilliant.

Photos can be used as your wallpaper, or sent via email with simply a touch of the screen. If you like taking quick snaps using the phone, see below, these are instantly available to view.

This has to be one of my disappointments with the iPhone. The camera sensor supplied is a mere 2.1 mega pixels. In this day and age, many ordinary lower end phones are coming out with 3 or 4 mega pixels now, and with the price of the iPhone I half expected for a better built in camera.

If your just after a quick snap, and don;t really care what the quality is like then I guess it will suffice. The quality of the image is not too bad, but being at such a low resolution, graining is very much in evidence, and when moving the camera around the image displayed on screen can get very blurred.

One large omission from the phone is the lack of any form of movie capture facility, although seeing the slow display update this might be why.

That is it for the moment, as this post is getting a little long. I’ll be posting another 3 blogs covering the rest of the current available options on the iPhone.

The title of this blog may take a little explaining.

I was looking to include a Carbon routine within my Cocoa application, but this routine needed to have access to both my instance variables and other Class methods. It is straight forward to use Cocoa commands in your Carbon routine, as long as they’re declared from within the routine itself. You have no access to the object reference “self”. This refers to the object in which your code resides.

In order to achieve this you first need to create a Class method and an instance init method within your Class. Here I have a Class called AppController where my Carbon routine is located. I add the following code;

+ (AppController *) sharedController
{
    return sharedController;
}

- (id) init
{
    self = [super init];
    sharedController = self;

    // Any other initialiser code needed

    return self;
}

Now from within my Carbon routine a new AppController class is created called controller. I can now use this controller class in place of “self”. This gives me access to all my instance variables and methods.

void MyCarbonRoutine
{
    AppController *controller;
    controller = [[AppController alloc] init];
    [controller aCocoaRoutine];

    // Any other coding needed here

    [controller release];
}

Remember to release your controller class before leaving the Carbon routine or you could end up with all sort of problems.

For those that haven’t noticed, this blog is using Wordpress. This is freely available for download from their website. If like me your using it on a Macintosh server and want to use a feature like Permalink, you may be having problems. The Wordpress documentation describes these as:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Especially when they are used to link to individual postings, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence.. permalink.

This is a really nice feature but the Apache server settings on the Mac are overridden. In order for Permalinks to work you need an “.htacces” file which is a “distributed configuration file”. This provides a way to make configuration changes in each directory. A file, containing one or more configuration directives, is placed in a particular document directory, and the directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof. This is needed for these fancy links to work but the Mac Server overrides them.

To fix this problem simply go to the Web option in your ServerAdmin application. Select the website that’s using Wordpress under the Sites toolbar and select Options.

Under the Apache options list, ensure that “Allow All Overrides” tick box is checked. This will allow Apache to use your “.htaccess” files and the Permalinks will run as they should.

There’s been a lot of traffic on the MacSB mailing list and on various blogs (e.g. Panic and Atomicbird) about how Apple is handling the release of Leopard in the same way as they did with Tiger, and about how indie developers get the short end of the stick because we don’t see Leopard until our customers do.

I think this is all just jitters.  The people who rush out and by Leopard on day 1 are all early adopters - they have the “bleeding edge” gene anyway, and will understand if it takes a week or two for their favourite app to work correctly.  Sure, things will change between the last seed and what’s shipped, but it’s not going to be anything major.  And yes, your apps might break within the first few days of Leopard being released.  But realistically, if you’ve run your app on the seed at all, I find it hard to believe that it will take long to get it working against the release version.

The other main concern is that developers who get the software as part of their ADC membership don’t get it the same day the general public gets it.  Yeah, that’s a bummer but it’s not really that big a deal.  Chances are good your software will work as intended, and if it doesn’t, it’s only a few weeks’ wait.