It’s all over the news: due to budget problems, NASA puts Spirit into hibernation and cuts back on the activity for Opportunity. Where do I sign the protest list?!

Being fairly new to Cocoa I enjoyed reading O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter’s article on exception handling with Cocoa.

One thing I love about Java development is the ease of finding bugs through stack traces. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Cocoa likes being so verbose about it, it prefers just giving memory addresses to the function. CocoaDev has a nice article about how to add this that’s based on Apple’s documentation, but it requires /usr/bin/atos that I cannot find in the iPhone SDK. That doesn’t mean it’s not installed, but at this time I have no way of knowing that it is. I have no idea how I should let people beta-test my products and sending automatically back intelligent bug reports without this tool. Ok, I have no idea on how Apple plans to allow for betatesting applications if the AppStore is the only application distribution method, and I have no idea how people do this otherwise as atos(1) isn’t included with the default OS X system either. But I would really, really like to include stack traces with bugreports from beta testers.

According to iPhone Atlas, Google has pushed out a new release of its GData Objective-C Client Library that can be used with the iPhone SDK. Yay for Google! Check it out! For my last job I used Google Spreadsheets and Google Documents quite a bit, and it’s great being able to integrate it. Making a little word processor with synchronization to GDocs should be fairly trivial now.

My work with the iPhone SDK continues, working on three clients to our backend services at the moment. I’m very much looking forward to blogging about this as it’s cleared at work. But as you probably have noticed from my posts, working locally and synchronizing with the back-end is what I believe most iPhone applications are about. Do quick and stuff you need to remember on the iPhone, work out the details from your computer, keep everything in sync. That’s why I’m excited about Google’s data integration. That’s why I’m excited about integrating SQLite. That’s why I spend a lot of time working with SOAP integration. And of course, it’s all good fun. I’m tempted to say that working with a back-end is a lot easier than doing everything local. At least the satisfaction of seeing the work you do on the little screen influencing the real world is a lot better than it just influencing that screen.

One thing I’m miffed about, though, is the NDA. They’ve got a 100,000 downloads, and if 1/20t of this is developers, then that’s still 5,000 developers. Where are they all? I can’t find much going on on discussion boards, forums, mailing-lists or whatever. And Apple is only slowly letting them in to their community. I hope they’ll let us in soon, I want to discuss problems I’m having without having people with briefcases coming after me, I want to know what other people are working on, I want the development to be more social. Right now, it’s mostly a one-man game, and that’ll get old very soon