Home Of Serendipity

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.

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For the past two weeks now I’ve been chatting about the applications that come with the iPhone and what I have thought about them. Though the title may be a little misleading now that I’m four weeks along. Today I’m covering the last of the bunch, namely the phone itself, email, Safari web browser and of course the iPod.

First up is the actual phone part of the iPhone. This is a vast improvement over any other phone I’ve ever used and as you can see from the icon, it tells you the number of missed calls, the wife probably.

Along the bottom of the phone is your menu of Favorites, Recents, Contacts, Keypad and Voicemail. Most people have a small list of people or companies that they contact often, I know I do. Storing it here is great and accessed with just a quick tap. If your contacts list or Address book is set up correctly it will even tell you which phone number your trying, i.e. mobile, home, work, etc..

Under recents, it is as it sounds, the most recent people you called or they you. Just tapping your finger on on their name automatically calls them back. You can even tap Missed calls, and only those are displayed. I know other phones can do this, but it’s the way it is presented on screen, just beautiful.

Your contacts list is just a list of everyone you have entered into your phone. Though sometimes you just seem to be flicking your contact list, just to see it scroll. Clicking on the small letters to the right will take you instantly to that section of your contact list. It is possible to organise your list into groups, but in the case of a Mac, you will need the Address Book application to do this. I also have this fixation now of adding little pictures to my contact list, even going out of my way and taking a photo of a business, just to add it, sad I know.

For those times that you need to just key in those numbers then a touch sensitive keyboard is available. It is also nice that you can add the number you just typed as a new contact or add the number to a contact already in your list.

One of Steve Jobs great moments at his Keynote speech at MacWorld was the inclusion of Visual Voicemail. This is actually quite neat. Anyone who phones and leaves a message on your voicemail is displayed as a list on your phone and you can choose who to listen to. Not having to run through all those messages from your kids wondering what time your coming home and to pick up a DVD of SuperSloth Cartoon is just so nice.

Many people have said about the number of keys you have to hit in order to just get to a number and how slow it is. I really don’t think so. The difference between tapping two keys and three can’t be that big of a drag, can it.

Just like the phone application the mail icon tells you the number of new email that you’ve received since you last looked. The email accounts are easily added via the Settings option, or by linking to various email applications./p>

Once up and running getting your mail is really easy You can set it up to regularly check for your emails and inform you of any new ones. I would like some way to send out a mail item to multiple users at the same time and an easier way to remove or empty the trash.

This is one of those applications that looked so cool in the demos that it must have been the first thing I done once set up, and again this is done in the setting option. WiFi access to great and very fast. Most pages load in a matter of seconds, even the more involved ones./p>

Your bookmarks are copied over allowing you easy access to your usual web browsing treat. There is one main problem and that is not being able to see Flash based web sites as this technology hasn’t been included, though many suspect we’ll see it at a later date in some future update.

In last weeks view on the iPhone I covered the first line of icons on the phone itself. These were SMS text messages, calendering, photos and the built in camera. This week I’m looking at the rest of the icons, the calculator, stocks and shares, Google Maps, weather, YouTube, notes, clock, system preferences and the new mobile iTunes. Those icons in the bar at the bottom, the main use of the phone, I’m going to leave till next week.

Using the calculator function on the iPhone brings back the memories of those old Texas Instruments calculators with the green 7 segment displays. There is nothing special about these, simply arithmetic operations with a memory function. I’ve used it several times just to quickly tot up something or other. It would be nice to see a slide down full function calculator being developed for the iPhone with various base settings, or maybe it’s just me.

This has to be something that I quite frankly don’t think I’ll ever use, Though it can be interesting to look at how a company has progressed over the last year. It would, I’m sure be of benefit to those into stocks and sharesor to keep an eye out for market trends quickly.

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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.

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Well there’s just 1 day left till Apples iPhone is released in the U.K., and am I going to purchase on of these. Of course I am.

I’ve been waiting for this since the release of it in America in June of this year. On the run-up to its release over there, there was, as is the case in the UK, a hugh amount of hype surrounding this mobile device. Could the company that brought us the Mac and iPod actually be any good at designing a mobile phone. Well since its release there has been nothing but praise for it. There doesn’t seem to be just one thing that it does well, it does everything well.

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 an object of the 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 ojbect class is created called controller. I can now use this controller object 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 object before leaving the Carbon routine or you could end up with all sort of problems.

- Thanks to Uli Kusterer for pointing out that they are Objects that are created and released and not the Classes themselves.

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.

Had a job interview today in Dublin and wanted to take my laptop with me, but, battery was dead. Decided to take it anyway, there might just be a plug socket somewhere.

On my way from Belfast to Dublin, called into Halfords to purchase a new windscreen wiper and there was the E:Can from Ring. This little wonder container is a power inverter for your car. Plug it into the power outlet of your car and anything up to 150 watt into the other end. It’s shaped, as the name suggests, like a can and fits into the drinks holder of the car. There is even a separate USB connector to charge the likes of Apples ipod.

By the time I’d reached Dublin the MacBook was charged enough for over an hour of usage. This is one great little gadget that I’ll be using quite a bit.