Goldchest Avenue

Apple <3

kerusan@me.com — 2011-10-16T10:03:22+02:00

No one in my surrounding had any interest in what I discovered in the magazine I found at the press center in my home town back in 1977. The magazine had the name Byte and it where filled with interesting articles about computers and a new industry growing. Computing at that time was only for big companies who created lots of invoices and did other boring administrative tasks with them. But in Byte there were stories about microprocessors and boxed systems affordable for hobbyists. The first one that catch my interest was an Altair computer with lots of switches on the front with which it could be programed. Each switch represented a bit inside the computers memory, one row for the address and one for the content in that address.

At that time I was a dropout that made my living driving a cab one or two nights a week and all the money I earned went to buy food and pay my little apartments rent. So buying a computer was just a dream. Most computers where also to technical to make any one excited, but I remember I spent lots of time planning what I would do with it if I had one. My experience with programming was, at that time, only making calculating programs that figured out my earnings after a night driving around in the cab. My mother had been kind enough to buy me a Texas Instruments TI58 and it had some programming functions that I used.

I read every article over and over again, especially about two guys in a garage selling a computer board that could be connected via a RF-converter to a TV. It still was way out of my budget but my dream started to materialize, some day I would buy one. My interest only grow stronger so I decided to pick up some studies again and go to a local high school to learn some more. Since I started study again my mother, who probably had lost her faith in me for some years, told me that she wanted to support my studies if I needed anything. She probably meant money for food ond cloths but I suddenly saw a fantastic chance getting the founding to buy me one of the boxes that tickled my fantasy.

I had to read not only the articles one more time but also the ads. And there was lots of ads in Byte. After some time I felt that the only one that fitted my desire was the two Steve's next product, the Apple ][. It was a flat, nicely looking beige box with a keyboard in the front. It had all the functions I at that time felt I needed and it fitted my mothers budget, well almost. Since I already had a 17 inch color TV, which I had bought five years before, and a cassette player the system was complete. The TV had gathered all my friends at my flat every evening since i bought it, but now it served a new purpose and it fitted perfectly to my computer dreams.

Why did this Apple ][ computer fit me so perfect it did not know at that time, it was just a strong feeling. I just thought it was perfect. Years later I realized that it was many things that made my feelings for it so strong, but at that time I just knew it was put together for me with some kind of love. Love for the product and love for the one that should use it.

Eagerly awaiting reading

kerusan@me.com — 2011-07-04T07:36:24+02:00

Always when the end of a month is approaching I find myself eagerly awaiting the moment when Ole Begeman’s first blogpost of the month is out. With this post he summarize the month that has passed on Twitter and other peoples blogs regarding programming, iOS, Mac, components, design and even patent issues. He manages to find most of the interesting (for me anyway) topics that has been discussed since last month.

Show me if it works

kerusan@me.com — 2011-06-25T10:32:16+02:00

In my current project I needed to use a SearchBar. The standard UISearchBar in UIKit is working fine but it lacks some user feedback. When a search is performed the user ought to have some kind of feedback. Especially when the search is performed over the internet and the mobile net. So including an UIActivityView in the search bar was a natural extension.

Fortunately someone on ‘StackOverflow’ had asked for this before. The answer on the question pointed out how to get hold of the UITextField inside the UISearchBar, because there isn’t any property for it.

The only problem I had with this was a UX one: Should the UIActivityIndicator sit on the left or the right side in the textfield? On the left there is an icon showing a magnifying glass and on the right is the clear button and if needed the bookmark button. So which of these icons is to be gone hidden during the actual search. Since the left one wasn’t a button I choose that side, but if the Magnifying glass is a search option popup maybe it would maybe be better having it on the other side. Please let me know what you think.

I have put the simple subclass of UISearchBar on GitHub here. It’s named OOSearchBar and has two methods startAnimating: and stopAnimating:, use them in the UISearchBarDelegate methods.

I dont know where to go (at compile time)

kerusan@me.com — 2011-05-24T19:53:39+02:00

I have used Objective-C for a long time and I love it. After using Clascal, ObjectPascal and Smalltalk for some years I bought a NeXT Cube some 20+ years ago and found a language that almost gave me the dynamic of Smalltalk and the power of C. ;-)
The Objective-C language has something that most other compiled language lacks, a runtime engine. This engine gives the program the ability to communicate with the ‘language’ at runtime, and make the language do many things the compiler does. So even if the compiler is not actually there when the program runs, the program can still ask about how it’s components and it’s even able to make changes and extensions to itself. This may at first seems unneeded but after working with Objective-C for a time you will see the benefits and even become addicted.

There are many new users of Objective-C now, because iOS have grown so popular and they using the blog media is writing tons of tips and tricks how to do wonders with the AppKit and the UI. Fortunately there are also some blogs written by wizards that has been digging deep into the language and is sharing their wisdom about this runtime engine. Here comes some of my favorite blogs I read in this subject:

At first - Martin Pilkinton - and his blog Pilky.me, has an article on the basics of the Runtime and how the object model of Objective-C is constructed. This is a good start.

Next, - Mike Ash’s NSBlog (@mikeash), here you will find your main source of C and Objective-C inner workings. The Objective-C runtime has an API of C functions but most of us thinks it is easier with messages. Mike has encapsulated the runtime in Objective-C classes and with those we don’t have to handle pointers and functions. His little kit is found on GitHub, clone it.

Switching and adding methods at runtime seems a little ‘Look what I have done!’ but in the comments section of this blog entry made by Scott Stevenson (@scottstevenson) about adding methods there is a discussion about its usefulness.

Also at the NSConference 2010 Jeff LaMarche (@jeff_lamarche) made a speech about how he uses the runtime’s abilities. Pat Zearfoss wrote about and linked it here, watch it.

Some years ago on WWDC Steve Naroff asked the crowd what we liked to see in a new version of Objective-C, some of us shouted instance variables added with categories. This was one of my most longed for feature in the old NeXT times Objective-C implementation even if I found a hack reusing some pointer in the class to add an NSDictionary.
So, last (but not least) one of my favorite blogger Ole Begemann (@elo) has now pointed out a trick to add instance variables, sort of, to categories. He uses a new feature in Objective-C 2.0 using the runtime (thank you Mr. Naroff) to do this. So, Ole’s has now found a nicer and cleaner solution than my old one and writes about it here.

There are many more links about this subject and I will try to link to and write about them in another entry.

Trolls run !!!

kerusan@me.com — 2011-05-18T08:56:28+02:00

The whole iOS indie community is talking about the troll, and its letters claiming they want 0.575% of every “in app purchases” of iOS apps. Many bloggers shout out loud and Loadsys, this particular troll’s name, have but up a blog trying to defend its rights.

Since this is a legal issue and most people know little or nothing about it, me included, I found an informative blog FOSS Patents that tries to give some facts and another ThisIsMyNext gives background on the subject. So what Lodsys wants is maybe not indie money but may aim at something bigger.
I have voted against the Software Patents here in Europa before and mur.mu.rs concludes rather well my opinion.

And I can’t but end this entry with Ray Wendelich’s tweet: “And my personal thoughts: Software patents need to be abolished, and in the meantime: trolls, leave indie devs alone!”

So, run trolls run!!!

UPDATE: If Apple takes 30% and there is say 50 patent trolls with some obscure generalized patent claim taking the rest there will not be any software industry. Here is another one.

UPDATE2 2011-06-01: Loadsys have now sued the first companies and two of them are Swedish, IconFactory and IllusionLabs. In a conversation with @FOSSpatents Florian Muller is the Lodsys patents US only and therefor only counts for the income made on the AppStore’s US market. Here is the FOSSpatent blog about it.

I'm into controls

kerusan@me.com — 2011-05-06T15:51:58+02:00

While writing a long blog entry that never gets finished I thought I’d share a website where lots of public Cocoa controls are gathered. The site is named CocoaControls and contains most of the more usable controls out there. No need to crawl the web to find them, just go there. It has not been easier to find, download and try them out. New ones are coming in daily!

Go with the flow

kerusan@me.com — 2011-04-24T19:58:27+02:00

I was just about to convert our Mac CoverFlow classes (my partner Martin Carlberg wrote them in our GIS project) to iPhone, when I realized that there is a nice implementation already written by Devin Ross at DevinsHeaven. It is part of a library called Tapku library that can be found at GitHub. I found it while reading the excellent blog Applausible who also has a little tutorial how to use the Tapku classes.

Another implementation I also found on GitHub was Alex Fajkowskij’s OpenFlow. But based on a simple test and run I will try the Tapku library in my first CoverFlow app.

Releasetime any day now

kerusan@me.com — 2011-04-16T09:23:42+02:00

... and you are a bit worried about the current review time on AppStore. Look no further than this site. It is made by @daveverwer on Shiny Development. He made a blog entry where he explains a little about the webpage.

And do not forget so submit your own times to him!

Tools of choice

kerusan@me.com — 2011-04-10T17:17:13+02:00

When developing iOS and MacOSX apps I have a toolset that I been using for a while now and I wish to share them for others that might not be aware of some of them.

I have gone from XCode3 to XCode4 now and even if the new one still have a lot of bugs I like the workflow and the editors a lot better than in XCode3. Xcode comes with a fantastic set of profiling and analyzing tools called Instruments. Without it I feel completely lost and insecure. Really difficult bugs are traced down in minutes with Instruments like the Zombies, Alloc and Leaks. Also Apple gives us tools for analyzing OpenGL code like the Performance Detective.

To design and make graphic resources I use Pixelmator (I’m not a Photoshop lover). Pixelmator has the strength I need and can handle, also I like the UI.

As a compliment to image tweaking with Pixelmator I use Opacity for making icons and buttons. It is a marvelous tools and not only does it jpg:s and png:s from vectors, it converts the vector graphics to code. UIView/NSView, CoreAnimation and Quartz code. This is really nice, since you can hide the graphic in code and icons and other graphic resources then goes smoothly into static libraries without distributing folders at the side with graphic files.This tool comes in two versions one standard and one pro. It costs not much money and I will assure you that you will benefit from it. You can even learn how to write the graphic code by just looking at the code it generates.

Another tool I use is Accessorizer, a code generator for snippets like servers and getter, dealloc and such. It its latest version it integrates nicely with XCode. It may not save that much code but to those of you that are quite new to ObjectiveC and iOS it makes the memory handling a lot easier because it knows the rules about alloc, retaining and releasing objects. I think this is the most common problem newcomers have when starting to make a iPhone app.

Since most Apple code and frameworks comes without code it is not that easy to find out how it works internally. I use an old tool that where made in the good old NeXTStep days. It is a command line tool called classdump and it creates header declarations out of Mach-O files. Not a decompiler but good enough to get a clue how the inner workings of a closed framework is built. Classdump is the brainchild of Steve Nygard , a longtime Objective-C guru who also have an interesting blog.

Where did I put my framework

kerusan@me.com — 2011-04-10T09:32:50+02:00

After working with AppKit since 1989 (yes, I’m that old, even older than @johaneltes) I am so used to package my ideas in frameworks so when I started to develop for the iOS platform I almost gave up. Why the .... have Apple only granted themselves to use this fantastic concept. Well, it turned out that there are other solutions and I might understand Apple for that paranoid security concern of theirs.

There are other solutions to the problem even though the best parts of the .frameworks are capsulation and the ability to include resources of different kinds.

One approach is to have your classes in groups that are created from folder that you drop into your different projects. But this don’t get you the freedom to write stuff without sharing the code. It is possible to have the code and the resources in the same or in subgroups.

Another way is to write static libraries with the classes you wish to share between projects. How to do this is explained in the iCodeBlog, excellent reading. The drawback with this solution is of cause that the static library can’t contain resources.

The akwardness of code signing

kerusan@me.com — 2011-04-05T20:15:51+02:00

In this post I will share a link to a site written by Ray Wenderlich - http://www.raywenderlich.com/ . He is a programmer / gamer on the iOS platform. In his latest post he explains something that most iOS developers hates - Codesigning, a subject driving almost everybody insane. If it has disturbed you, please read it. He has even made an object model over the entities Apple has used.

Restarting my blog

kerusan@me.com — 2011-04-05T19:51:53+02:00

I decided to restart my blog. Some years has gone since I wrote something on www.kerusan.org, and I lost track of where I have put all my entries. So here is a complete new site with an empty archive. Last time I got inspired by RapidWeaver’s ability to create a nice blog without breaking my neck. In those days it was RapidWeaver 3 and 4, now I have version 5 and I will continue to use it. But it was not RapidWeaver who inspired me this time, it was all the nice people out on the internet that has started to share programming skills to everybody. I hope I can share a little myself and also give some links to blogs that I follow. Many of them are totally awesome and shares insights about programming on iOS and MacOSX, design and life. They make my day and my work a real joy. Thanks to all of you!