I’m not quite sure of the state of things, but fact is I’ve had lots of problems with WSMakeStubs, and I’m looking for alternatives. WSMakeStubs makes stubs for webservices in Objective C (and C++, but I haven’t used that). WikiBooks have an excelent article on what to watch out for and tips when using WSMakeStubs, you can check it out here. I’m seriously considering just wrapping the SOAP XML myself and doing some XPath on the result, but come on, Apple, it shouldn’t have to be that hard. My bugreport (#5944524) hasn’t been touched, and I guess for a good reason: Apple must have zillions of them, it seems everywhere I hear about WSMakeStubs I hear how it’s not working. I hope they put this tool into shape quickly, it would be a real benefit, especially with all the iPhone programming going on. Just look at how easy this is in Visual Studio, how easy Axis2 makes it. Even PHP libraries like nusoap are easy to use compared to WSMakeStubs. Apple, I’m sooo looking forward to WSMakeStubs 2.0

I bought my upgrade of Max 5 yesterday, and I’m of course eagerly waiting for my license code. Trying to put Objective-C and Cocoa into all that I do, I found Rémy Muller’s blogpost about writing Objective-C externals for Max. Also, Electrotap has posted ObjectiveMax on Google Code. It’s dual-licensed GPL/Commercial which of course make BSD licensed code and closed-source-but-free a non-option. I’ll probably try out both and port much of my Java stuff over to have it working at greater speed and tested with Max 5

On the same page, Rémy writes about Bonjour for Max/MSP, and with my iPhone development efforts such as Lighting Matrix I’m planning on implementing a Bonjour interface as an option to UDP. (I’d also like to try out bluetooth just like the Wii interface aka.wiiremote, but that’s not a near-future plan as I’m not sure it’s supported through the official SDK yet)

It’s been a while since I wrote about what I’m doing, but nothing much has changed: I’m working with the iPhone SDK making different applications. Today I’d like to demo the application that made me start working with the iPhone: DashBoard. I first got interested with dashboards when I tried to make something userfriendly with Performance Point and found IMA’s dashboard. Now I’ve created a simple, easily customizable dashboard for the iPhone. Because of Apple’s NDA I cannot release it, but I believe I can show it to you, running on the simulator:

In this video you see a logo on top and nine KPI buttons below. Each KPI button has a logo, a number, a unit, a last-updated date and a colour to indicate if it’s as it should be, falling below target or significantly below target (in other words, if there is a problem), using green, yellow and red. When you tap a KPI button, the report is displayed. The report is just a webpage, so I’ve linked up a webpage for every KPI button showing just a normal webpage, but more interestingly I think: PDF reports. As you can see, it works beautiful with 154 page reports, even though I guess for actually using this, you’d use a page or three with lots of graphs.

PS, yes, my conservatory exam preparations are going well

Debugging Autorelease is a great wiki entry at CocoaDev. EXC_BAD_ACCESS, meaning accessing an object you’ve already released (most likely) or have not yet instantiated (it happens) isn’t that fun to debug. Luckily, the NSZombie environment variable works when developing for iPhone as well, and I could find the error that had cost me most of my day. Yay! Other good resources for debugging are Debugging Techniques and Mac OS X Debugging Magic

The mac world is high on expectations because of what is apparently a shortage of iPhones. New version coming up soon? Yes, probably. People hope for a 3G version. I hope for one too. I expect it to be announced in June and available end August. People think of a 32gb version. Sounds logical. But didn’t people notice Intel’s announcement of their Atom processor? Here’s ZDNet’s take on it. I would expect this to mean that an iPhone based on this architecture would be launched, perhaps silently even. Just a bit more horse power, very fitting for iPhone OS 2.0. Perhaps with a 32gb option. But still EDGE, no 3G. Then a 32gb version with 3G could be announced in June and become widely available in august.