Home Of Serendipity

Now that the new 3G iPhone has been released into the wild, selling over 1 million phones over the weekend, a number of the NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, have been lifted, and we are free to talk about certain aspects of the iPhone and its development.

I am in the process of implementing an educational game for the iPhone, see below, and releasing it to the AppStore on iTunes.

The AppStore is Apples way of controlling how applications are purchased and transferred to your iPhone or iPod Touch. One great advantage of this concept is that you only have one point of call for all your application needs, though does involve the habit of, “Oh look, I like that”, purchase.

Another, slightly more controversial, approach is in Apple takeing all the cash generated from the AppStore and paying the companies once per month, allowing Apple to get interest on any money generated. It does however freely publish shareware applications for, free.

Individuals or companies looking to sell their product must select from a price band and get to keep 70% on the value of their app and Apple takes 30%. This is to help cover the cost of hosting your aplication and credit card transfers. I think it’s a great deal as it helps put the smaller companies and individuals in the same league as larger companies with hugh budgets.

I’ll keep you all posted on the development

Images of my current educational game, more on this later.

This server has been running under beta mode for several months and 2 days ago I took the plunge to update it. We are now running the full Leopard Server 10.5.2. While I was at it I took the opportunity to update WordPress to the latest version and now all is working happily.

Also new with this version I’m trying out backing up the Server with Apples Time Machine and so far it seems to be doing its job.

Will be adding more Virtual Hosts on here soon using Apples wiki and blog posts. Will keep you updated.

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.

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.

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.

A few weeks ago the company I’m involved with, infurious, suggested for me to start a blog, and get involved with the whole blog-a-sphere thing. This is my attempt at doing such a thing.

I’m still trying to figure out what sort of items to blog about, creating a few categories to get the old mind going, and plenty of coffee to help remind the old mind to blog. I think that makes sense.

Okay, keep posted.