ResonanceDesign

Xcode 4′s Project template page does not recognize touchpad double taps. So any laptopping iPhone devs out there, just use the good old touchpad button and voila. Njoy!

Breakfast talks at Albion Society. Notes:

Speakers:
Clive Dickens, Simon Andrews, Mark Curtis, Raam Thakrar
From my perspective 3 salesmen and one with a critical mind.

Too much bizspeak with ‘we invented that word’ ‘make our clients money’ and ‘engaging markets’, however a few utterings that are worth mentioning. Square is a new iPhone hardware/service to enable the iPhone to act as a swipe card reader. Neat. The main component is this card reader for iPhone and iPad and it looks so far like the smallest and cheapest available. Wonder what else one could do with that.

Clive Dickens phrases the term ‘time-wasting apps’, by which he means finding opportunities for people to spend waiting time using apps and finding app ideas for this. I am not sure how much I agree with the term wasting time, when I wait for people or in a queue or are by myself. One part of me doesn’t want to define a market like that, the other sees the term as a superficial interpretation of reality, which is easily destined to misinterpret situations in people’s lifes and their needs of actual services. But maybe that’s just me being grumpy again.

Mark Curtis had by far the best insights, by telling us what facebook found out that ‘(mobile) virals don’t work for them’. Given that especially mobiles have digital content split up in a thousand apps that can’t share data, viral becomes a bit impossible. There is a niche for a data standard right there… SharedXML? You heard it here first.

What he also points out is integration and multi-platform. Where multi-platform is still a cost and maintenance point and therefore a challenge, integration is what is easier available and everyone ‘gets’. If you can’t get your servic eon facebook or twitter, you will have a hard time gathering, reaching and maintaining users.

Mark is CEO of Handmade Mobile, who currently have 3.5 mill users for their dating service Flirtomatic. Which he describes is a service, which let’s you ‘find people you don’t know yet’. Which is what I see a huge market: Find people you don’t know yet. And I am not just talking dating, I am talking networking in general, geographical understanding, tourism, etc. Few people have understood this fact yet that the easiest way to grow a market and community is to break the network behaviour of constant easy indulgence of conversing with people who already agree with you and who you already know. I predict, if facebook doesn’t get that at some point, they will struggle in 5 years.(sorry early caffeine trip). Do I want my own project’s like Urban Eyes and 80Days’ theory not just be a theory, maybe.

What’s interesting about Flirtmatic that it is not a dating, but flirting service. Given the faster, shorter scenario of mobile communication, Handmade Mobile realised that the activity of flirting fits the platform and community better than the old dating frame.

The last comment on Mark’s talk was that he sees mobile being the only platform which can escape it’s own frame. Like cinema, radio and tv, had tried before to go into other areas, they eventually failed, even though leaving interesting exprimentation in it’s path, yet essentially kept within their boundaries. Mobile with AR and other technologies can escape that and will.

Now I would argue that mobile’s frame was never just mobile browsers and phone calls. These were only frames from classic platforms(web and phone) that first appeared on the mobile platform. I would rather argue that mobile is still finding it’s frame, it is just escaping it’s web andphone ancestry, just like web is still trying to escape it’s print ancestry.

An interesting thought nevertheless.

If you want to explore the same thinking, check out his book, Distraction. Its about from 2005 old but the approach is timeless.

And the coffee was very nice.

You are planning on parsing and XML string/structure in your iPhone application? The obvious choice would be to use NSXMLParser out-of-the-box. I recommend having a look at Phil Nash’s solution, which should make your life even easier. He wrote a nice extensive piece on it.

Great tutorial on stackoverflow.

I struggled on this one for a while, needed to learn how to build the frameworks and .a statics and import them, etc. However XCode’s latest SDK seems to make that easier than it looks.

The SoundCloudAPI comes a bit incomplete, but that is in order to keep the OAuth2Client that it uses flexible and easy to update.

So first download the github project here in the Source section to get the latest version.

Once downloaded open the project in XCode and you will see that

- libSoundCloudAPI.a

- SoundCloudAPI.framework

are red, meaning that the project can’t find them(cause they don’t exist yet).

You can find the OAuth2Client project here. This link is also provided in the SoundCloudAPI introduction.

Download and open in XCode.

Now this one also comes with

- OAuthClient.framework

- libOAuthClient2.a

not build yet. So let’s build them.

Look at the Targets folder in your project.

Right-click and build each of the listed targets and you will see the .framework and .a will go black in the Products folder after a few seconds.

Save the project.

Now go back to the SoundCloudAPI project.

Take the OAuth2Client.xcodeproj file and drag and drop it into your SoundCloudAPI project. Use the pre-made ‘Outsourced’ folder.

It will ask you as usual if you want to copy everything into your project. Tick that box.

AND tick all boxes in the Target list on the bottom of the pop-up to add dependencies to all your targets.

Go through all your targets, right-click and build.

- libSoundCloudAPI.a

- SoundCloudAPI.framework

Should turn black (see Products folder again).

Now when building the .framework, there are still errors coming up , yet it builds it.

So far I am assuming this is okay as it still builds the .framework and that’s all it needs to do, but watch this space as I haven’t added the API to a project yet.

To be continued…

Based on the stackoverflow question, I tought I post this as a reference for myself and adding hopefully to the search results for beginners to find this. Xcode can be a bit complex sometimes…

When are we doing this?

When we want to use a wrapper or framework or static library to our project and to keep the additional code flexible. This means it is likely the added code is frequently updated by other coders(GitHub, etc.)

Steps to add a project (and it’s custom framworks or static libraries) to your project:

• Drag the .xcodeproj file to your open project
• Tick the copy folders, etc. and also make sure all the targets in the bottom list have it checked to have the project added

This one works for projects like the SoundCloudAPI, which need the OAuth2Client added to it.

I will see to post another one which goes through the SoundCloudAPI wrapper a bit.

It is amazing how many of those projects are all to be found. During my research on all things AR, I have been coming across the following so far:

5 way sound editor (markers) : here

KitKat Music Video on package : here

Nude it – very elaborate app ; : here

Guerilla tactics at MOMA New York : here

Coca-Cola digital twin app(it is more facial recoq rather than AR though) : here

So far my most favourite: Word Lens iPhone app:

I attended the ‘Meet the Playbook’ event in London yesterday to have a first peek at RIM/Adobe’s effort to create an iPad killer.

Blackberry Playbook

After a general presentation, which I mainly missed, the second part of the show was split between business and tech, me joining the tech aspects session. We heard about the big opportunity and awesome apps this device will create and inspire followed by a presentation about how to create an app for the device. Both presentations were fairly unimpressive to confusing given that it’s not the first touchpad on the market. I think what was mainly missing was a WOW! effect or any type of slick presentation that competition Apple so professionally pulls off. It was a rather small event, so some of this might be forgiven.

After the presentations, we could test the device itself, with a couple of apps and to be told about it’s further features.

So what stuck?

Adobe/RIM have seemingly done a good job accelerating the processor intensive and issue ladden Flash VM to run well on the device and to make the OS features like sensors, etc. very accessible to developers to be used in the apps. We saw some HD video demo that played well in front and background and everything moved and behaved smoothly.

How easy it really is to develop using the webworks/SDK I can’t say as I haven’t tried it yet, but given Apple’s example and Flash’s previous improvements with their iPhone renderer, they surely took steps to make sure they can catch up quickly by making it easy to use new and existing code for apps.

The most stunning feature of the device is it’s size. Its smaller than the iPad, more like an HD 15:9 pad really, which I assume also fits neatly into a women’s slim bag.

The touch and swipe reactions on it weren’t always as responsive, as expected, which sounds more alarming than it was, however, as a first impression, not good.

Even though everything was running smooth on the device itself, the interface design approach was awful. The color-coding, the way the apps pop up, which sometimes lead to not even the demonstrator being able to find where the app is on the screen, etc. Overall just not consistent in terms of look n feel and what the design wants from you in terms of interaction. It just makes Apple’s design and guidelines stand out and make sense for both developer and user.

End of line:

I am happy for the Flash community to have a pad device to play with. The integration of OS and Flash is seemingly close, which is how it should be. However, no outstanding features as far as I could see that would make me buy this instead of the iPad from a consumer’s point of view. How long the glamor of a fast 1GB processor will last is to be seen. On a second thought, I rather think the (mass)market doesn’t care. Specs like that are for the hardcore gamer community to bicker about. And given the quick turn around of faster and more HD hardware, an approach like that is completely outdated.

It’s not about the insides of the box anymore. It’s about ease-of-use for the users and ease-of-development for the producers, so that the community and third parties can create the consistent stream of content and have a market to evolve on. Google and Apple know this, RIM still seems to only deliver one part of that equation.

I have been have been a Natwest customer for over 10 years now, and I have been a software designer for even longer. For the least, I count myself to the group of people that aquired common sense at some point in their lifes.
I am also happened to be married to a colombian woman, which is one of the many reasons, why I get to travel far far away just a little short of once per year to south america.

However everytime I travel to Colombia, my card is getting blocked pretty much after my first trip to the cash machine, arriving in Colombia.
The bank’s explanation for this is, that it is unusual to have 2 or more transactions in different countries within 24 hours. So everytime, I after I find out I can’t get access to my own money, I have to make an international call and unlock my card. This time, I went for 5 weeks and I actually had to unlock my card twice!
Why? I assumed that after the first time, they knew I am in Colombia and the system would know that too. Seems it ain’t that clever. SO what lead to my second blocking? Amazon and Tesco! Foolish me ordered some duvets for the new flat we will be moving in on arrival back in London and ordered some Tesco delivery for sunday to have the food at my doorstep when we are arriving back home. Hooray to the interweb age! Well not so fast hotshot, let’s get your card blocked, says daddy Natwest. Calling up the bank again they said it is unusual to have a Tesco and Amazon transaction(in the UK) and at the same day take out some money in Colombia. I get their (limited) point but subtle me had to lecture them by reminding them of the year 2010 when people can order stuff internationally(which helps the economy you know). I am not sure he got my point as he only responded “So you don’t want any protection of your card at all, Sir?”

No David, it’s a bit more complex. I rather think that an anti-fraud system that raises a bell every time a person makes purchases in multiple countries is neither clever nor contemporary. Funnily enough, a lot of my work is about the connection and dis-connection of digital and real space. So it comes with a bit of a smile from me, that I have to ask, why have you security people, who supply Natwest’s anti-fraud software not found out that there is a disconnection between where digital transactions are made on a server and the location someone uses a browser to use amazon.co.uk?
You just managed to get suspicious about every holiday maker, who dares to shop something back home. Do I hear generation gap thinking pattern here?
So unless I find out the company who is responsible for that software, I leave this one out here and have to ask, anyone else having had this one? And security world, please take this as a un-proofing of a concept. It wastes time and money of bank and customer.

for a nerd that is.

The naming convention in objective-c is something to adore. Depending on the parameters handed over, a function method can look very complex and different. ( As I was told as there is no overloading in objective-c). But look at this

- (NSMutableArray *)getBusStops:(NSString *)myBusStop
                        forTime:(NSTimeInterval *),myTimeInterval
                        atMonths:(NSString *)myMonth; 

Isnt that cool? First it looked very alien to me. Why is a function made up of sub-functions? Well they are not. Basically you could write the same function like this:

- (NSMutableArray *)getBusStops:(NSString *)myBusStop
                 : (NSTimeInterval *)myTimeInterval
                 : (NSString *)myMonth; 

So now it looks more like AS3, if you just take the : for ,’s. But there is something else wonderous going on here. Adding these extra elements of naming/describing the parameters aids two issues: It describes the function a bit more and it also makes the order of parameters clearer. Neat, eh?

Find a better description than my ramblings here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/722651/how-do-i-pass-multiple-parameters-in-objective-c