IPhone applications and objective-c
Posted on May 19th, 2009
So I wanted to post a little about the things I’ve found now working with Cocoa and the application I chose to target first was an iPhone application. I haven’t really had much time to dig into a native mac application yet.
Firstly lets talk a little about XCode. This great IDE comes free when you own a mac – pretty cool. Unlike Visual Studio which must be purchased if you want anything besides the free version. XCode is a great IDE, it is fast and simple enough to use. Apple has included everything you need including performance and memory profiling tools.
The extensions to support iPhone development are totally seamless so that was a nice find. Once I started getting into objective-c I thought my eyes were going to bleed :) Really, it is too old. The future is with managed languages and the thought of any form of memory management is pretty lame but right now, I have no choice. If you want an iPhone application you’re going to be using obj-c.
The language did have a couple positive points, at least what I’ve discovered so far. The way it passes around messages is a cool idea. Parameters are named when passing values to a method. (msg) – this makes for more coding but it makes it a hell of a lot easier to read the code later.
I did like Apple’s take on controller and view separation. Even using a separate tool for the interface design is a great way to keep the UI developer out the controller code. Up until Microsoft released the new ASP.NET MVC framework all views and code behind files were tied together. Unfortunately for traditional ASP.NET and WinForm development this is still true.
So right now I’m impressed and enjoying the development process. I think Microsoft could learn a few things from Apple however …. I do feel strongly that Apple need to connect the dots and that their code needs to move to a managed environment. They could adopt Ruby more rather than just supplying the API bridge.
Tags: iPhone, obj-c, xcode
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Let the battery test begin!
Posted on July 15th, 2008
So yes this week might be filled with iPhone related posts. Sorry. How long do you think it takes before you see this little gem
Let me tell you, not very long. If I don’t make too many calls and just read the occasional email then I’m making it a day, just but it needs to be charged as soon as I get home. This isn’t really too surprising since the phone has
- BlueTooth on
- 3G on
- WiFi on
- GPS/LBS on
So today I’m running a little test, since I don’t get a great signal at my home office I generally can’t get a 3G signal here. So I’ve turned that off. Wifi is off too since I’m not going to be browsing while I have my laptop in front of me :) I’ve left data on via Edge and GPS on. So far I’ve noticed a big difference and will post results by the end of today.
Just a note, I also change the pull interval for my Gmail to 30 minutes from 15.
Tags: iPhone
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iPhone 3G So Far ….
Posted on July 14th, 2008
Ok so this is day 3 after getting my new iPhone and this is what I’ve found. To summarize, no real deal killers yet but a couple of close calls. Apple have some explaining to do but anyway, here are the details. Oh I’m watching Season 1 of Heroes so if my post goes off track you can blame that :) If you haven’t watched it then just go get it now – I mean right now. Read this later.
Being that I needed the enterprise features of the iPhone that is where I started. I clicked the mail icon and was presented with a simple list of possible mail services, looks good so far. I picked Microsoft Exchange and entered my email, domain username and password. Done. Yes. That simple. It worked first time and in oh I don’t less time than it took to get back to the main screen my contacts were already synced.
All my email (going back I’m not sure how far yet …) appeared and was super simple to navigate. You have access to all your folders so if you’re used to the extremely limited AND OUTDATED (yes RIM you!) folder structure of the black berry this is a nice relief. A couple odd things now. You can’t mark an email un-read. You can’t add a new account from this screen. You must go into settings to add another account. Edit: I found the un-read option hiding under header details …
I did, if you’re wondering (I know you are) add my gmail account. Worked great and seems to support full sync. If I delete on my gmail via the browser it updates on the phone (via pull not push). Yes! and this was without mobileme which is cool but I don’t need it just yet.
Navigation between mail boxes is a little painful. You need to go back into accounts and pick which one you want to view. They could do with an icon on the main page for each mailbox …. maybe in time.
Overall mail is great, so easy to read, scroll and zoom.
The camera and browser is a couple words work exactly as expected. The camera is good especially on the big screen. The browser is fast on 3G or even faster on Wifi (duh) and supports wide screen.
Now a real pain. Still no MMS – yes its 2008 and v2.0 of the iPhone and yet Apple still believe we don’t need MMS. I can only assume they’re screwing us over somehow or have ads on the site that lets you get the sent pics because unless they explain why this advanced phone can’t do it then it must be money motivated. So boo.
You can’t as yet dial numbers from calendar entries which I hope will be fixed, it is extremely common to do this and I think I read on their site it was possible so maybe that is just a bug.
Overall for phone speed its acceptable. Sometimes it gets sluggish but I just leave it for a second and it gets back to normal “slick”. I’ve noticed emails disappearing and then reappearing later so definitely a few bugs. I’ll let you know how reporting them works out. So far I’d say worth it. I was a big black berry fan but I’m sick of waiting for html email! and I’m even more sick of BES.
Tags: iPhone
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My iPhone 2 experience so far ….
Posted on July 11th, 2008
I guess it was to be expected that stores just wouldn’t get enough stock with a word-wide launch. I went pretty early but if I’d gone at launch time I think I would have made it … boohoo, anyway – I tried a couple of big AT&T stores and was just out of luck each time. Tomorrow is another day and those stores, believe it or not, are already getting more stock in … so …
Maybe I’ll be lucky, of course this time I’m going a lot earlier and with a chair :)
If you follow along with those Engadget guys you can read some good reviews so far – might be worth a couple weeks wait anyway for the madness to calm down but really, who wants to wait.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/11/iphone-3g-review/
Tags: iPhone
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Hurry up July 11th!
Posted on July 3rd, 2008
Yes I want the new iPhone :) It has been a very long wait for me since I need the Exchange Server support and the speed of 3G I didn’t go and get the original. Plus with something like this I’m not a big fan of 1st gen technology especially when it costs so much.
I am a huge blackberry fan or maybe I should say I used to be a fan. Their operating system software has always been flawless but my recent experience with the curve hasn’t been perfect. The fact that html emails still can’t be read just blows my mind – my calculator can read html … and their decision to move the dial to the center with no option for the old way or both just pissed me off. The center dial option has more potential but I also find I make a lot more mistakes and pick the wrong menu options so it is far from perfect. Since RIM decided for me what I wanted, I’ll just buy something else …
It also looks like developing some applications for the iPhone is going to be fun and I’d like to get some of my ecommerce tools and maybe some dotnetmulticore support into the phone. What is dotnetmulitcore you ask … :) wait and see. I’m trying to get the site up in the next few days but I’ll blog here on the open source aspects of that cool projects.
Here is a teaser
Tags: iPhone
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