blog.swinden.com

I'm Adam Swinden - an iOS developer, Apple fanboy, tech addict and F1 fan, and this is my place to waffle.

[swinden]

I've decided to move away from Tumblr to a self hosted Wordpress blog that is now available at www.swinden.com.

I've imported all my old posts to the new blog but I'm going to leave this one up and running to preserve any existing permalinks.

I will not be posting to this blog anymore. To find my latest posts, visit the new site.

Thanks for reading!

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I wrote a little blog post for The OTHER Media blog about the iPhone 4S and iOS 5.

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The best thing I took home from WWDC was the music

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Sure, there is no better way of learning what Apple is up to with the next versions of Mac OS and iOS than going to WWDC, but that's not all I got from the awesome week in San Francisco.

It's now been nearly 4 months since WWDC 2011 but I still get so much joy from listening to the music I discovered while chilling out in the Presidio, Pacific Heights or Marina waiting for the start of another session.

I suppose there's a good chance I won't get the opportunity to go to WWDC again as tickets will probably sell out in record time for several years, and none of us will probably ever see Steve Jobs present a keynote again, but at least I have the music that will always remind me of the great time I had, the people I met and the things that I learnt.

In case anyone else is as soppy as me about the music played at WWDC, bogo.giertler has kindly put together a Spotify playlist. It's not all great, but it's more about the memories. As you'd probably expect, almost all of it is available on iTunes.

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Norman Stanley Fletcher

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It looks like one of the guys responsible for writing the Apple Developer docs is a secret fan of 1970s British sitcoms.

I chucked when I saw the reference to Ronnie Barker's character from Porridge hidden in the discussion for the componentsSeparatedByString: method of NSString.

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It's about time I became a morning person

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I wouldn't say I'm the complete opposite of a morning person. After all, I currently wake up at 6:15 three times a week to go to the gym before work - but I always feel rubbish and often sleep past my alarm (especially on Fridays). I feel more like an evening person pretending to be a morning person. It seems just setting your alarm early doesn't make you an early riser.

Yesterday was my first day back at the gym, and therefore my first early morning, after a few weeks of laziness. It really wasn't fun. I felt grumpy, tired and my workout was pretty bad. So I used the rest time between my sets to do some reading around methods of becoming a morning person. Here are my findings:

Most people who want to wake up early tend to just set their alarm at the time they want to wake up, count back about 8 hours and go to bed at that time. But this strategy will usually fail. Instead, you should fix the time that you want to wake up, but let your body figure the rest out. In other words, don't go to bed unless your tired enough to fall asleep. This seems logical to me, as the body is obviously pretty good at dealing with routine - my Dad has told me in the past that he can't get past 10am without his morning "constitutional" (if you get his meaning), and that's certainly only the product of routine. Also, it seems the jury is still out on exactly how much sleep we need with scientific reports varying from 4 - 10 hours, quite a variation. It makes sense that the number or hours you need each night will vary depending on how strenuous your day has been in the same way we don't alway eat the same amount of food each day.

So this is my plan:

My alarm is now set for 6:00 everyday. I used to wake up later on non-gym days, but I need to establish a routine.

I don't have a bedtime anymore. I'm just going to stay awake until I feel I can't stay awake anymore. I'll probably use that last hour of the evening to do some reading and when I get to the point of not being able to read more than a page or two without dropping the book and nodding off, it's time for bed.

Get all the stuff I need to do in the morning done the night before. This includes making lunch, finding clothes for the next day and packing my gym bag. This way, the morning isn't going to be stressed or rushed.

This is probably going to be easier said than done, but I plan to get out of bed as soon as my alarm goes off. Once I'm awake I'm going to find something to do like check Twitter, do some reading or watch the news. This activity should be enough to kick start my day and not be too taxing that I dread waking up.

And that's it! I think it's going to be hard at first as my body establishes it's rhythm - I'm sure there will be a few nights with no more than a few hours sleep. But the plan seems logical and hopefully it'll be worth it in the long run.

After all, I know it's only day 2, but I managed to wake up at 6:00 this morning to right this post, and I'm feeling pretty good.

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Includes my two pennies worth.

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iPhone Tracker - CDMA version

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There is quite a lot of buzz at the moment over the fact that the iPhone 4 tracks user locations. These locations can be viewed on a map using the recently released PhoneTracker.

Verizon users are finding that it isn't showing there locations - don't worry you are being tracked, it just gets stored in a different place.

Here is a tweaked version of the Pete Warden's iPhone Tracker that supports CDMA locations. I can't take too much credit, I really only changed a DB query, Pete did all the work.

Download

GitHub

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Whenever you want to use 3D objects modeled with a software such as Blender, 3ds Max or Cinema 4D in your iPhone Application or any other OpenGL project, you somehow have to make the designed data accessible to you program. Heiko Behrens has created a really nice Perl script that reads a Wavefront OBJ file describing a 3D object and writes a C/C++ include file describing the object in a form suitable for use with OpenGL ES. It even includes texture mapping coordinates, nice!

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This is NOT the reason Apple didn't put a better display in the iPad 2

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Chad Catacchio is clearly not an iOS developer. The following is from his post about why he thinks Apple didn't put a better display in the iPad 2:

Apple’s decision to keep the screen size the same – to me – had very little or nothing at all to do with price, availability or any other hardware consideration – Apple kept that screen resolution for the simple (though I guess not obvious) reason that it in no way wanted to slow down the rapid pace of iPad app development, and wanted to further distance itself from any and all competition.

I think the pace of iPad development would accelerate if Apple has increased the iPad's screen solution, not slowed. It's such a simple alteration to support higher resolutions and it makes developers' apps looks so much better.

He goes on to say:

Also, by increasing the resolution, Apple would have basically left all of those “classic” iPad owners in a bit of a lurch as new apps came out that were built with the new resolution in mind (yes, developers could also provide a 1024 x 768 version, but I suspect many wouldn’t).

Had Chad checked his theory with any iOS developer who is familiar with the iPhone 4's Retina display, he would know supporting the higher resolution would probably just require @2x versions of any graphics. And of course all these apps would work on the original iPad in the same way iPhone apps that support the Retina display work perfectly on the iPhone 3GS and earlier.

...just saying.

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Who approved the Twitter Dick Bar?

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I don't know if the great Loren Brichter IS responsible for the new Quick Bar in the latest update (v3.3) to the Twitter iPhone app, but I find it hard to believe he would suggest such a rubbish idea. Regardless of whether it was him, I find it hard to understand that a company that has produced (or at least recognised) excellent UI features like "Pull-to-refresh" would think that adding an obtrusive banner that displays information that no one is interested in would be a good idea.

So until Twitter recognise their mistake and release an update that allows us to disable the "Dick Bar" (as described by John Gruber) there are a couple of ways to get rid of it:

If you've jailbroken your iPhone you can follow use the Twizzler app by chpwn, or if you haven't but still have the previous version (v3.2.2) in iTunes you can follow these instructions by Dan Wineman:

Uninstall Twitter 3.3. Sync. Drag Twitter 3.2.2.ipa from trash onto iTunes icon. Click Replace. Re-check in Apps tab. Sync. You're welcome.

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RIP Palm

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So it seems that HP have decided to put the Palm name to sleep with all the new products announced at yesterday's event being HP branded.

But I can't help but feel that it was a bit of a stupid decision - I don't think HP really has the best reputation for quality computing products. As an Apple fanboy, it's a bit like my opinion of Microsoft products - I ignorantly turn my nose up at anything Microsoft branded (Xbox excluded) due to my allegiance to Apple. Microsoft would need to truly wow me in order to sway my opinion. I used to work in a PC retail store that sold a good range to manufacturers, but by far the highest number of returns came from HP - there is a reason why they are cheap.

HP might have a reputation for selling a lot of units in the PC market, but if they want to compete with the iPad, the TouchPad needs to ooze quality - and I don't think it can do that with an HP badge on the back.

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In App Purchase and virtual currency

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A recent project has lead me to take my first look at Apple's In App Purchase integration for iOS apps, which incidentally seems a lot less featured than I thought it was - it really is just a payment processing gateway and not much else. All delivery of content has to be implemented by the developer whether that be unlocking of functionality included in the app bundle or downloadable content from a server.

For this reason I find the fact that Apple charges the same 30% fee for IAP as they do for app purchases a little strange. Isn't the point of the 'Apple tax' that it goes towards paying for the running and hosting of the store, and as all of that is down to the developer for IAP, why is the fee so high?

I suppose one of the reasons is that if Apple did reduce the price everyone would move to a 'freemium' model - release a free app and use IAP to unlock features and content - in an attempt to dodge the higher fee.

But they could easily get around this by having different fees for different types of IAP. When you set up your products in iTunes Connect, you already have to choose if the product is a consumable, non-consumable or subscription, so it would be simple to apply different fees to these categories. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that means they could leave the fee at 30% for unlocking functionality (non-consumable) and offer a lower (say 10%) fee for downloadable content (consumable).

But anyway, this is all very off topic - the point of this post was the use of virtual currencies inside iOS apps. The current lowest pricing tier for IAP is £0.59 ($0.99) which, although in the context of app prices may look like a small amount, could in fact be far to high if you want to offer the user a very small piece of functionality, such as a single play of a video.

So the only way to get around this would be to introduce an intermediary "virtual" currency. Where, for example, your £0.59 would get you 100 credits which you can use as you wish in your app. But Apple's iOS Developer Program License Agreement states:

You may not use the In App Purchase API to enable an end user to set up a pre-paid account to be used for subsequent purchases of content, functionality, or services, or otherwise create balances or credits that end users can redeem or use to make purchases at a later time.

...in other words, no virtual currency - well that ruined my plan. But what confuses me the most is, how on earth did Zynga get away with Farm cash in their Farmville app?!

Even if we forget about £0.59 being too high for some purchases, a further problem to not allowing virtual currency concerns the limitations it puts on the number of products you can offer. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is an limit to the number of products you can set up in iTunes Connect (something like 3000). So if you can't create a virtual currency, each purchase needs to be an IAP of a product created in iTunes Connect. How would that work with an app that offers an ever growing inventory of products?

Apple being Apple, I'm sure they have considered this as well, and there is something about the whole IAP ting that feels slightly unfinished. And with the current buzz around subscriptions and the rejection of Sony's Reader app, perhaps we can expect some changes soon.