Catch up

Well, been a while. What have we been doing? I've completed a number of projects, but this year has really been dominated by the "day job". I've expanded the MVC framework to the point where it's a very usable chunk of code. This has been something used in production code. As such, I've gotten away with spending a small amount of my day job working through various bugs and throwing out improvements. The code is now at a point where I'd be happy for other parties to use it, though it has little documentation at the moment.

My son and I have started talking about writing a game. This is a subject that has happened a few times. I'd originally played about with Codea (iPad IDE, focused on Games and graphical applications), but that became too hard to find the time for. But recently, after watching Indy Gamer the movies (god, that is an inspiring film, Jonathan Blow, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes are now my pet heroes!) I'm not aiming to write the next Braid or Super Meat Boy, but I have a 9 year old inner me (and, oddly a 9 year old son), who desperately want to write a game. Seriously, from the year I got my first computer (Sinclair Spectrum 16K, circa 1984) my friends and I (one specifically) obsessed about making a game "with moving graphics". I got to the point that I could write the basics in Sinclair Basic, and I was pretty happy. Moving to the 16bit era killed that dream. It became way too much for me to be able to do that (and I found girls and teen aged angst more appealing.) But, somewhere deep down, a game is waiting to be written. My son is my key ally. He loves video games and he is young enough to have no preconceptions and wants to throw lots of ideas at the project. I can then filter these and cherry pick his better ideas and my experience. We might make something cool. It won't be anything "big", but I know it will be cool.

MVC Framework for MS.Net

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

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 :-(

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

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...

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

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 ;-)