Archive for the 'Programming' Category

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22
Jul

WordPress for iPhone released!

By Alex 2 Comments
Categories: Programming and iPhone

The official WordPress for iPhone blogging application is up at the App Store now! If, like us, you have a WordPress blog — and really, who doesn’t, these days? — grab it and check out that mobile blogging goodness.

But wait! There’s more! Not only have these good fellows created an notably useful application, and given it away for free, they’re also making it Open Source — the first complete and shipping iPhone application to be so, as far as we’re aware. Now isn’t that just an awesome sandwich on bread of awesome? At the moment it says “We’ll have more information about the project and how you can contribute soon”; we’ll be certain to update you with the exact details soon as they’re out, as we are for sure going to be jumping on that just as soon as we find something we want that’s missing. And if any of you find features you want are missing from the main release — hey, just convince us that we want them too, and they’ll be there in very short order!

h/t: appSafari.com!

20
Jul

iphone-universal for webdev

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Mobile Safari, Programming and iPhone

And now for the non-native community, here’s the CSS3/HTML iphone-universal at Google Code for your iPhone Web UI developing goodness:

This is my personal project, dedicated to anyone who wants to develop web applications for the iPhone. It all began when Apple launched a few examples of iPhone UI made with CSS and HTML examples which I found them mediocre and incomplete.

This toolkit has lot of well coded, standarized HTML, CSS3 based, iPhone UI examples. Every example was made aiming to get the same pixel quality look of the standard iPhone compiled apps. You will find examples of normal lists, forms, and other UI godness and, for the delight of all, this project is licensed under GPL3.

Initial reaction to the announcement appears favorable,

I just played around with the framework, and I think it looks fantastic! I’ve been developing an iPhone site with the iUI toolkit, but at first glance, iphone-universal’s code looks *much* cleaner and easier to understand (and iUI is pretty simple…). 

so check it out for your next iPhone web app!

h/t: iPhoneWebDev!

 

18
Jul

UIKitPlus for iPhone

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Programming and iPhone

Here’s a new project at Google Code for all you iPhone programmers to check out: UIKitPlus — ‘a set of additions to Apple’s UIKit framework, aimed to make creating first-class iPhone and iPod touch applications much easier and faster.’ As described by the creator:

I have created a BSD-licensed Google Code project called “UIKitPlus”
to host useful UI code for iPhone OS development. Currently, it hosts
L0EntryTable, which is an “intelligent” table view (the basis of all
future data entry table views in Coinpurse) in an early stage of
development. “Data entry” table views are similar to those used in the
Settings application, where data is presented and the user can alter
it. It already supports the following: …

… Anyone who wants to leech the code/help with it is welcome. And if you
have other goodies of this kind you’re willing to license with BSD,
I’ll be happy to host them in the repository.

Share and enjoy!

h/t: iPhoneSDK!

14
Jul

OpenGL ES tutorials

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Programming and iPhone

Here’s a heads up for any of you that are thinking of getting into writing games on the iPhone: the good folks at www.play3D.net who previously focused on tutorials for building OpenGL ES programs on other, lesser, devices have started switching over to The One True Phone™ — an excellent decision on their part.

Their tutorials on EAGL, models, textures, and so forth can be found here. Read, learn, and write awesome games!

13
Jul

DMG Canvas 1.0 final

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Programming

That slick new DMG Canvas tool for making .dmg installers we mentioned a while back is now out of beta. We’ve been using it as a scripted part of the release build process in Xcode ever since the beta was released, and it’s been working just fine for us, so we thoroughly recommend you go get it and use it too; it’s still free but they suggest $15 donationware, which is still a good deal compared to other solutions, we figure.

h/t: MacNN!

29
Jun

Apple buys Coherent

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Programming

I’m sure you all remember back on May 1st we posted here about Coherent, a JavaScript effort to bring Cocoa Bindings to the web? In a post that Coherent’s author showed up to comment on no less? And no doubt you headed over to check it out immediately?

Well, if you didn’t … now it’s too late.

If you go to the Coherent site now, you will see:

I’ve long felt Apple would provide the best environment for Coherent, and since I joined the company last year, I’ve been thrilled that we’ve been able to use Coherent in a number of projects.

Today, I am delighted to announce that I have assigned ownership of the Coherent library to Apple. Naturally, I can’t speak for my employer regarding what future products might include this library, but I can say my hope is that this will ultimately make Coherent a better tool for Web developers.

Or, is it not too late at all, perhaps? There’s some speculation over on Ajaxian that this is something deeper than Apple simply picking up a piece of useful code for themselves:

I heard from a little birdy that Apple is going to be doing some interesting things with respect to JavaScript libraries.

Recently there has been a lot of buzz around SproutCore / Mobile Me, Objective-J / 280 Slides and remember the Coherent Cocoa Databinding framework?

I think that Apple took note of the recent buzz, and it was at that point (not before) that execs suddenly saw that they really had. They have taken control of Coherent where “it could become the Cocoa library for JavaScript and is made available under a similar license to Cocoa and Cocoa-Touch…”

Interesting, no?

26
Jun

Home stretch!

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Programming and iPhone

w00t! Eighth AND FINAL-TESTING QUALIFIED iPhone SDK is out now! Grab it, polish up, and list your goodies on the Apps Store!

24
Jun

Jobs: MacProVideo.com!

By Alex 0 Comments
Categories: Programming

Here’s another heads up for all of you whom might be looking for a job in Vancouver, The Best Place In The World To Live™  – five years running now! — the good folks at macProVideo.com apparently are on a roll, and are looking for inhouse programmers for both Mac and Windows that have experience creating multimedia applications.

If you’re still old school enough to not be solely devoted to the iPhone yet, we definitely recommend you consider them seriously; hey, we would if we still did desktop stuff — the publisher there is the fellow who had the stunningly great idea to write the book on LiveStage back in the day, which struck us as pretty seriously cool, as there’d never been a book written about a program we’d designed ever before. A rather flattering development, that!

There’s no official posting, but anyone with the good sense to be reading this blog counts as a personal referral no doubt, so fill in the contact form here, and good luck!

16
Jun

Sproutcore Grows!

By Alex 1 Comment
Categories: Mobile Safari, Programming and iPhone

So, if you’ve been following the last few posts, you’ve no doubt got the idea that SproutCore is intended to fulfill the destiny of the YellowBox APIs in bringing Mac development to the rest of the world. Here’s a supporting link to demonstrate that emerging realization:

Apple formally adopted a new web design framework at the end of last week’s WWDC conference, accounts say … The technology is in fact said to form a key component of its MobileMe service, allowing basic online apps that function across multiple platforms. This may eventually expand to more complex programs, however, including iWork software that would substitute for local copies. It is speculated that third-party companies may be invited to build their own MobileMe apps, whether as a default part of the service, or for a separate fee.

Interesting, no?

h/t: MacNN!

14
Jun

WWDC Reflections

By Alex 1 Comment
Categories: Mobile Safari and Programming

So, after going through WWDC this year, it’s quite clear that my wild speculations that “Snow Leopard” might actually refer to the return of Yellow Box for Windows were completely wrong. Moreover, it’s pretty much certain that there will never ever be a Yellow Box in its historical form as a Windows-hosted runtime, for a variety of reasons.

However, we weren’t completely nonsensical in our thinking; it looks like we did, in our fumbling way, correctly identify Apple’s interests and goals — we just weren’t thinking outside the box enough in figuring that the resurrection of Yellow Box was the way Apple would choose to achieve them.

Unfortunately, the direct evidence that we have to support this new thinking is all under NDA, although most of it can be pieced together from publicly available tidbits; however, the basic reasoning can all be found in the latest piece up at the always-invaluable RoughlyDrafted Magazine. Money quotes:

Instead, Apple is refining Cocoa for deployment within the web browser to enable developers to build those so called “Rich Internet Applications” that Adobe wants users to build in Flash/Flex/AIR, Microsoft in Silverlight, Sun in Java, and so on…

If you were waiting for the resurrection of Yellow Box or Cocoa for Windows, stop waiting and start coding. SproutCore brings the values of Leopard’s Cocoa to the web, domesticating JavaScript into a functional application platform with lots of free built-in support for desktop features…

Yep … I think Messr. Dilger is pretty much spot on with his various prognostications and recommendations in this article, and when I casually dismissed the idea that MobileMe was the Big Unexpected Thing™ I’d heard hints would be announced, I was completely overlooking the possibility (and most people still are!) that it wasn’t just a rebranding of the .mac web services, it actually does presage a fundamental shift in the capabilities of cloud computing paired with a blurring of the line between native and web applications.

The next couple of years are going to be very interesting indeed!

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