The Rat Cow Software blog

MVC Framework for MS.Net

2010-09-17T02:14:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded a little part baked MVC style framework for Winforms. It's in an early state, but it does what I need to do at the moment. Plan is to progress it over the next year. I'm going to start using it for serious projects, and so progress will be dictated by how frequently I hit issues I need to fix or workaround!

iPhone dev - iOS4 breaks things

2010-08-02T07:36:00.001-07:00

Okay, I'll admit it. I've been slack. The last version of DoodUrls for iPhone is reeeealy old now. It doesn't work under iOS 4. It's a sad day ;-(

I have not had any time to fix the app. It's not just a simple case of bashing out a few tweaks too. I had a long look at why it was crashing and came to the conclusion that the iOS 4 SDK was not giving me any useful answers! I will have another look in the upcoming weeks, but at the moment I'm very snowed under with real life.

My theory now is, do a complete iOS 4 re-write, using my "all I learned" experience. This is the route I'll travel, I'm not sure when that'll be though. As it stands, DoodUrls seems to have pretty much dried up through lack of content. I might put plan B in to action - plan B is to create my own feed via a group Twitter account. Call it something comparable and have at it.

Watch this space. I suspect it'll all be pie in the sky for the foreseeable future anyway :-(

2010-08-02T07:27:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded a tiny bit of Opensource - a very basic outliner.

The code is designed to be very simple and to create a minimalist outliner - pretty much a one trick pony. What it does it opens up with a "default" outline. There is nothing to do but add items to this outliner. When you open the outliner by double clicking, this outline is opened. When you close the outliner, it is saved. To create a new outliner file, create a new text document and change the file extension to ".meo" The file can happily be empty. The outliner will then open this file when double clicked.

All of this was inspired by the spiffing BeMail client from BeOS. BeMail used the entire file system as an inbox, and messages were just specially formatted files. Double clicking on a file opened the client and loaded the message. This simplistic approach is what I went for.

I'll add new features as I need them, but as it stands - enjoy!

Props to the couple of opensource projects I borrowed some of the code from - nothing I couldn't have got through myself, but I was having a bit of a brain fart this morning.

iPhone app is now in BETA

2010-01-28T12:32:00.000-08:00

The DoodUrls app is now in the hands of our crack BETA testers!! This is an early BETA and I believe there is about 2-3 weeks work remaining (that is not including stoppages due to "real life" getting in the way..)

Watch this space!

More features...

2010-01-13T04:54:00.000-08:00

Well, I spent time reorganising the layout of the photo view and made it make more sense. The view now either gives picture loading options *or* shows the twitter prompt and "send" button. It also asks the user if they actually want to post the update :-)

Last night I decided to look at one of the most essential features in an iPhone picture displaying app - multi-touch zooming and pinching! I borrowed some code, which sort of works quite well after some tweaking, so I'll leave it as is for now. It's a little quirky, so I'll revisit it again after I get the off line storage completed. This might not happen till a future release, depends on time. I want to get the camera feature out asap, and the lack of off-line storage is one of the things that really bugs me about the app, as it is next to useless if the feed goes down.

Oh, and there's a pic - the image *is* zoomed, but you can't really tell obviously without looking at the original image ;-)

New DoodUrls iPhone App nearing beta

2010-01-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

Well, it's only taken, what, 3 or so months, but I just began implementing new features in to the iPhone DoodUrls App. We now have picture submission!!! This is pretty exciting as I believe that one of the things that will boost DoodUrls popularity is a simple way to submit pictures.

Implementation is dead simple, but wasn't easy to get to! Adding the Camera to the app proved to be fairly straight forward. I needed to mess about with views to get the second view containing the camera to appear, but that was more a lesson going with my gut instinct rather than following examples in books.

The TwitPic submission was very simple. The author of the open source Twitter App, Canary, had already created a class called "ORSTwitPicDispatcher", which handled the TwitPic API call "upload", so I simply implemented the "uploadAndPost" call by adding an extra param and passing that as the message in the http request. All worked well in the Simulator, but the device didn't want to know at all! I googled the issue - it seems the NSXml* classes are somewhat lacking on the iPhone device, but present for the simulator (aka GAH!) Luckily, some nice developers have created an almost drop in replacement (well, in my circumstances it was a drop in), called TouchXML (Google it!) After making sure libxml2 was being referenced and the headers for it were being found, we were down to 2 errors!! I had taken the liberty to update AdMob to the latest version, and they now require more frameworks. After clocking this I added the MediaViewer framework and AudioToolBox and it all compiled!!

Everything then worked, except the Camera!! It seems that you now need to implement both

- (void)imagePickerController: (UIImagePickerController *)picker didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo: (NSDictionary *)info;

*and*

- (void)imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)picker didFinishPickingImage:(UIImage *)image editingInfo:(NSDictionary *)editingInfo;

GAH!! The Camera Roll and Library use the second callback, but the camera now uses the former!! Without both my code only worked one way or the other, but with both everything was happy!

So it is down to tinkering now. Hopefully a submission in the next 7 days ;-)

Doodurls feed is back!

2009-10-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, a Wordpress upgrade decided to stomp all over the custom RSS feed that Steph from Doodurls.com kindly supplied us for our apps! It was a little sticky, but I managed to hack the Wordpress feed to work again for the Doodurls guys ;-) All should now be as before!!

Feed outage over at Doodurls!

2009-10-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

My friends over at Doodurls are experiencing an outage in the RSS feed that we use in our iPhone and Adobe Air apps!! Sorry for the loss of pictures - normal service will resume soon!

Released!!

2009-10-20T05:27:00.001-07:00

Well, whilst I was visiting my family in Canada - IT GOT APPROVED!!

So far, quite a few downloads - well, for what it is!!

Next stop - version 2.0 needs to roll out!

We are in "review"

2009-09-28T05:46:00.000-07:00

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!

DooDUrls for iPhone is in BETA!!

2009-09-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

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!!

Progress on the iPhone DoodUrls app

2009-09-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Source control

2009-09-12T14:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

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.

DoodUrls 1.2 is done!

2009-09-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

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!! ;-)

Doodurls for Adobe Air v1,1

2009-09-08T15:11:00.000-07:00

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

First fruits!!

2009-09-07T06:27:00.000-07:00

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 :-)

Mobile!!

2009-08-29T04:34:00.001-07:00

Set up a client to update this blog pn my iPhone! This ensures more musing :-)

Beginning

2009-08-29T03:59:00.000-07:00

Rat Cow Software is a little "company" I've been pondering setting up for a while. It is more of an informal arrangement, rather than hard and fast factual company. I hope to publish useful software development thingies on this blog, post links to stuff I've written (free, Free/Libre, and stuff that will cost money..) There will be the option to buy my software here, links to a repository for software than I've developed and open sourced and probably a lot of little demo projects and things I'll shove up to give more flesh to my articles. I'll also put up a PayPal donate link.

I'm also going to set up a Google Code repository for my free software, a link to which will follow!

Phew! Feels good to "arrive" at this point, and lets see what transpires :-)