Monday 28 September 2009

We are in "review"


So, Saturday evening I made the changes needed to the BETA before submission and threw caution to the wind and submitted the app to the iPhone App store. Fingers crossed that it'll go through without requiring any changes!

Wednesday 23 September 2009

DooDUrls for iPhone is in BETA!!


Well, we are in BETA. Hoping to get a submission in to the App Store on Friday (no idea how that will go?!) Just need to iron out the last few issues and we should be good to go!!

This week has been full of stress in the day job and late nights coding and debugging iPhone/Objective C code. Pretty rewarding, but I'm very much looking forward to my upcoming vacation!!


Sunday 13 September 2009

Progress on the iPhone DoodUrls app

Well, the app now works in the simulator. Loads the feed and then the images in that feed. Unfortunately life is never simple and the device crashed hard with a bus error :-( I don't expect it'll be too hard to fix, but it's too late to look at it tonight. I'm off on a night of Market Research tomorrow evening (IRISH WHISKEY!!!) and so I'll not be able to work on the code again till Tuesday evening. *sigh*. I'm hoping to get it working this week and tested before I leave for Canada in 2 and a bit weeks.

On another note - I set this blog up so that I can post as me - YAY! I suspect I'll just post as me and never using the Rat Cow account. I was going to go off on some overly complex "me posts certain stuff" and "Rat Cow posts other stuff", but to be honest it's just me either way :-) I might use the distinction at some point - but for now we are one and the same.

Saturday 12 September 2009

Source control

I've set up a Subversion server at home, so my source at least gets backed up is some kind of controlled way. I'm using Subversion because I've used it quite a bit at work, and the GoogleCode opensource project attached to Rat Cow Software is Subversion. Keep it all in the same SCM for simplicity!

I set up the repo and imported a couple of projects. All pretty simple. The hardest part was firstly, figuring out how to get Flex Builder 3 to believe in SVN (using the eclipse plugin called Subclipse, as it was simpler to get going for my purposes) and then finding out how XCode handles SCM was entertaining too. Between them they ate my afternoon. 

Enter the iPhone

I have a love/hate relationship with Objective-C. I learnt it quite well enough to write software a few years back, but every time I'm away from it for a spell, I come back feeling confused! Having said that - the DoodUrls iPhone app is underway!! Screenshots to follow.


Thursday 10 September 2009

DoodUrls 1.2 is done!

I've updated the DoodUrls Air app to include all of the functionality I plan to add to version 1.x - anything else is going to be "bug fixing" till I start the 2.x line (which will include more elements from the feed and the ability to add images!) I like Flex a lot, it has an extremely low entry level (as itis pretty straight forward syntax wise) and with Air, it is actually really useful too.

I've opted for PayPal donation in this version - there just doesn't seem to be anyone doing Flex or Air ad serving that I can work with :-(

I'll send to the DooUrls guys, and they can release and I'll post back a link to the official download!

Onwards towards the iPhone version - this will duplicate the current 1.x line. I hope to have a beta by Monday (but that may not happen if I get tied up too badly in real life this weekend..) Fingers crossed!! ;-)

Tuesday 8 September 2009

Doodurls for Adobe Air v1,1


Now running hapily on Mac as well as PC (well, it *is* Air!)


Monday 7 September 2009

First fruits!!

I was Twittering with my friends over at Doodurls the other day, and they asked me if I could create them an iPhone app to showcase their site. I said "sure" and then promptly had my schedule fill up with "real life".

So, this weekend I finally got round to looking at the task at hand. They are using Wordpress and are at the mercy of the plug-ins available. After some debate, the best candidate RSS feed was put in place for me to tinker with. It wasn't perfect - the URL data was Http encoded in line in a "link" tag - but it was parseable. I decided I'd iron out the kinks in their RSS feed before I attempted to go the Zen of Objective-C. I actually wrote a proof of concept app in MS.Net 2.0. I then hit on the idea of Flash and Air, so ported the to NeoSwiff's C# compiler for Flash. This was quite a feet as the compiler's subset of C# is more like MS.Net 1.0 munged with Actionscript. I actually went the route of porting to VS.Net 2003 first which removed a lot of the issues with generics *before* I got on to the problem of missing UI classes! After a long evening, I got the code compiling in NeoSwiff (well, I'd moved to the newer GlobFX version, which supports Flash 9, but essentially it is the same Class library and language implementation!) I got it to work in the debugger, but the Flash plug-in absolutely refused to run the code through a browser or from IIS. I gave up.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have re-factored the code so that it runs in Flex Builder 3.0 and is Actionscript (which was actually pretty simple - I'm impressed with Actionscript!) So, the basics of the Air app are now done and dusted!! I plan to get the remaining features implemented and then I'll get on to porting it to iPhone! Phew! Coding is fun :-)