So, two days of implementing ideas, trying stuff out, reading discussions, documentation and watching videos have passed since the iPhone SDK was launched. My dayjob has become developing for the platform, which is great. It’s a fun platform to work with and developing for it is quick. I’m really looking forward to Apple delivering those certificates soon so I can try it out on the iPod Touch (no iPhone in Denmark yet).

So that was rant number one, certificates. Why-oh-why do I need them when I do software development? I would also very much like to be able to share my apps with friends, perhaps even beam them wirelessly over to them. And I should be able to do this with a self-signed certificate like with SSL. Self-signed for development, signed by an authority for production, that’s a good scheme.

What’s up with Bluetooth? Has anyone been able to access it through the SDK yet?

I write applications that want to synchronize with a repository of files on the computer. How can I arrange such a synchronization without making a web service that the user first can synchronize with his computer and then with his ipod/iphone?

Multitasking. Sure, I can save and restore my application for most things. But if I have to download the files I need from the network, the user is going to switch applications. (I’m still looking forward to see how I best should work with webservices) Good thing that
ramond has gotten background-running apps to work, but this will break with Apple’s license, so no idea if this would kill the product on the iTunes App store. We’ll have to wait and see for that

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The videos refer to the XCode and Cocoa-dev mailinglists on lists.apple.com, but the moderator on the Cocoa-dev list has made it clear that iPhone development related discussions are not welcome

Funny little thing is the metronome app, clearly made by someone who does not play music. The last beat in the group is the accented one in this app. But it was a nice illustration as some of the first things I want to make are a metronome and a tuner. The tuner is going to be tricky with the floating point instruction set being reduced in the 16-bit Touch set, might have to recompile as ARM. I’m looking forward to seeing it outside the simulator (and finding out if the iPod touch has a microphone )

How do you unit test these apps?

The apps are sandboxed, so no ssh into the phone without a jailbreak I guess. But ssh clients should be trivial now

So, I’m excited about this and working with it. I’m really looking forward to integrating it with our products at work, and I’m looking forward to writing music apps on my spare time (which is going to be limited until my exam June 9th is over). I guess all of these things will be answered shortly after my exam is done.

After yesterdays iPhone SDK release, my boss agreed that we should spend some time making a client for our apps with it and got me an iPod touch to work with. Good stuff. The SDK and tutorials seem very good. Strange thing that many of the samples don’t run in the Aspen Simulator. Especially since I need a certificate to be able to deploy them on the iPod, and that certificate is right now not available outside the US. I didn’t expect to need a certificate to develop, I thought that was just for publishing on iTunes. So not being able to deploy those samples on a device and not being able to run them on the simluator, I’m stuck with guessing. I hope that is soon resolved as developing for it is good fun.

I have been using Webkit nightly for the past few weeks. I was not planning on using it much, just trying it out, but it’s so fast that without really intending to, I’ve stopped using Firefox. I never used Safari much because I like Firefox both speed- and feature-wise, but now I’m probably Webkit only. Until something better comes along, of course. Naturally, I’ve been wanting to use it at work, on the Windows Server 2003 R2 servers that I’m developing on. To start of with something safe, I tried out Safari while installing a Sharepoint server. It crashed when only it and the OS was installed. Jikes. On close inspection, Safari only claims to be XP and Vista compatible, but installed without a problem on WS2003R2. Replacing it with webkit was no hit either, both crashed when entering wikipedia.org in the address bar. Having fully installed the server, none of them run without crashing. So I guess it really is XP or Vista only on the Windows platform.

A food obsessed IT developer writes about setting up visual studio to develop for sharepoint without having sharepoint installed on the development computer. Nice instructions and saved me quite a bit of time.

FixPicture is a nice little site that helped me with converting a PSF file (ArcSoft PhotoStudio format) to JPG. I had received this file as an attachment by a user who couldn’t know this was a nonstandard format, and since I didn’t have any software that could read it (as far as I know), this site was very useful.