2011-09-22T21:39:33+02:00 http://memention.com/blog Edward Patel edward.patel.delete-blog-this@memention.com 2011-08-18T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2011/08/18/Break-what So, I am sitting there following a long trail through the undocumented code base and trying to add a new feature. Going down different paths and back up. If you ever have had the opportunity to work with other peoples code you know that there are a lot of things to keep track of, specially the flow through methods that can be scattered over many files. Once I had an idea to build a special editor that could help to document the steps for certain tasks, maybe by special editor added comments. Then one might be able to get a list... 2011-05-04T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2011/05/04/That-old-thing Sometimes I stumble over a piece of code that makes me smile. When we became a three person company in 2004 the need for some time tracking tool increased. Before we used an excel sheet for this. I had already a small server at home which I had a static ip adress for. So, said and done, I wrote a small tool in C that feed out minimal html pages and that could receive and handle form posts. I just lay the time entries in a simple file with fixed records sizes. I am pretty lazy so all this was written... 2011-01-27T00:00:00+01:00 http://memention.com/blog/2011/01/27/Frameworks-within I have been doing iPhone/iOS development for some time now. But with the new kid on then block, the Mac App Store, I have returned to doing some native Mac programming again. I got to update an old Mac app for the Mac App Store too, Mye . When I’m at it I also got into supporting a great opensource project started by Rasmus Andersson named kod . kod is an editor specifically for programmers. This weekend I started to look into how to bundle frameworks. Working on kod made me think of making an own little program to collect and... 2010-12-28T00:00:00+01:00 http://memention.com/blog/2010/12/28/Printer-on-sale The days after christmas there is the big post-x-mas sales here. I imagine it’s the same everywhere. This year we bought a doll house for my doughter . My wife passed some old doll house furnitures along so it didn’t feel to empty. But then I got the idea that why not print some small paper dolls of the family that Clara could play with in the doll house. One problem though, as I only have a black and white laser printer I thought it would be a little dull. Unless I bought a cheap color inkjet printer on sale. Said... 2010-05-15T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2010/05/15/Removing-a-step No way I was going to wait until the iPad was released to the public here in Sweden. I imagine I would have gladly stood in line for it if I lived in the US. Woz sums it up quite good about waiting in line for Apple products, he said: To me, the waiting in line is like reliving the days you waited in line for concert tickets in college. Yeah, I could easily arrange to get an iPad in different ways. But I like to do this like everybody else. But, this first version did not have the real mobile... 2010-02-28T00:00:00+01:00 http://memention.com/blog/2010/02/28/Bells-and-Whistles The iPhone has a set of nice transition animations which makes the experience using it very pleasant. But after a while one get so used of them that one stop noticing that they are even there. But this is not necessary a bad thing. Often I think that really good things doesn’t show at all, they don’t get in the way. In 3D application really good things make the experience so natural that one afterwards can wonder what the big deal was, really impressive 3D isn’t at all impressive. But, this is not about not noticing. After a while one maybe... 2010-02-22T00:00:00+01:00 http://memention.com/blog/2010/02/22/Make-it-work I read an interesting dev tip by Erica Sadun at TUAW. It was about creating button images with the help of an undocumented class left in the simulator. Neat. Why not try to make a slightly more convenient app to create buttons? Said and done. It wasn’t to hard to whip together a small app that easily saved two images to the /tmp directory. But, now to the reason for this blog entry. I really wanted those images to be opened in Preview to be viewed and saved in another location if I wanted to. First I was hoping that some... 2010-01-31T00:00:00+01:00 http://memention.com/blog/2010/01/31/KISS-server There are so many ways to encode and decode data structures just to send them over a network. Some favor XML, some JSON, some Hessian, some ProtocolBuffers. But as I pretty much use macs for most private development I started to wonder if I just could use NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver for iPhone to Mac communication. My private development projects are mostly aimed at prototyping and not actually implement production level things. (wish more hosting companies would offer macs though) So, how would I do a simple NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver wrapper for some iPhone to Mac communication? I’d like to write as... 2009-12-12T00:00:00+01:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/12/12/tig-on-mac Me and my colleague Tomas are using Subversion for our company source code repository. At our clients we have been using CVS , Perforce and SourceSafe . Lately we have been looking at the new popular scm tools. Tomas has been using Mercurial a while and I have been looking at git . I have also been trying it out against github too. As always with any scm tool there can never be to many diff or viewing tools and today I happened to stumble across a neat little console tool for git, called tig . Named in the humorous unix... 2009-11-22T00:00:00+01:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/11/22/Lightweight-backup I have for some time been using AppSales-Mobile to download and view sales reports from iTunesConnect. Without it is’s a little hazzle to login, click to the right page and download a csv file full with numbers and stuff. With AppSales-Mobile it’s all prepared and the download can be handled on the road, and more important, the reports are presented in a more humane way. But occasionally Apple changes the html pages that are scrapped of information to login and fetch the reports. Every time this happens an update of AppSales-Mobile is needed, and every time there is the risk of... 2009-10-31T00:00:00+01:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/10/31/The-XML-Runner Me and some friends use Nike+ gear to compete against each others with the challenge feature. Competing with your friends is a great motivator to get the out to the track. In an effort not to fall behind too much I also have made a private feature that sends an email every night of the challenge positions. This is done with a small script running on my server. The script made a picture of a small webpage containing widgets from Nike+ using Paparazzi! . The picture is then attached to an email and sent with msmtp . The Nike+ widgets are created in... 2009-10-17T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/10/17/AdHoc-changes Testing is crucial to find bugs but also to get a feel of the user interface for an app, specially iPhone apps which can make it or fail depending how good the user interface is designed. If you want to distribute a pre-release version of an app for the iPhone one should create an Ad Hoc version. Installing Ad Hoc versions into iTunes is very easy, just drag’n’drop the app bundle onto iTunes. But installing updates without updating the bundle version number in the Info.plist opens for some uncertainty of what version actually is installed and run on the iPhone. You... 2009-10-08T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/10/08/Think-deep The project template for creating a simple iPhone OpenGL ES app was very nice in the iPhone SDK up to OS 2.2.1. One just clicked the OpenGL ES template and almost always enabled the depth buffer by changing a 0 to 1 in the EAGLView.m file. //#define USE_DEPTH_BUFFER 0 #define USE_DEPTH_BUFFER 1 After the OS 3.0 was introduced the OpenGL ES template was changed to support OpenGL ES 2.0 and the easy way to enable the depth buffer was removed. Pitty. There are a couple of things that has to be done to enable a depth buffer. When creating the framebuffer... 2009-10-05T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/10/05/Thats-not-normal Debugging can often be very frustrating, but should be embraced as a normal development activity. The frustration often come from some complex entanglement that wont reveal itself. When this happen one need to use all the tricks of the trade. First one need to make sure ones own code is 100% correct. If one believes this to be true one can start to make a minimal demo that also display the same bug. At this time one can pass the demo to the next line of developers, if it may be colleagues or some third party support. But, there also come... 2009-09-19T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/09/19/Wheels-are-turning Once in a while one came across some neat programming trick that makes one smile. A few weeks back I bought a used Smart car, you know the tiny one. Well, as it’s getting colder here in Sweden and I didn’t get any winter tires with the car I started to look for some on the net. The whole point of buying this Smart was to have a cheap transport back and forth to my current work place, so I was also looking for ways to buy some cheap, or rather inexpensive, tires. The Smart has some pretty small tires so... 2009-09-03T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/09/03/Open-Reviews Apple had already made a nice solution for opening AppStore with a list of apps from a developer. I had missed that but managed to find a solution that I wrote about in my first blog post Open AppStore with a search expression . When doing that, before finding the right way to do it, I also found a way to open AppStore in the review page for an iPhone app. It is pretty easy to add a button or let some other event trigger going to the review page for an app. Below is a plain link with the URL... 2009-08-20T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/08/20/How-hard-can-it-be Often one get these small challenges that are easy solved in your mind. But frankly, nothing is really solved until it is shown to work. On August 13, 2009 Jont Olof Lyttkens posted a request on the CocoaHeads Stockholm group for some tutorial to make an EKG curve on the iPhone. As I’m somewhat familiar with OpenGLES on the iPhone I thought it would be a pretty easy task and shouldn’t take that much time. So why not have a go at it. How hard can it be? The OpenGLES template in Xcode is pretty nice. Before the iPhone SDK I’d... 2009-08-15T00:00:00+02:00 http://memention.com/blog/2009/08/15/Open-AppStore Update: Remember always to check stackoverflow first. I found an easier way to accomplish the same thing there. See stackoverflow question 818973 See also the iTunes Link Maker from Apple It has been fairly easy on the desktop to open iTunes with all the iPhone apps from a developer. Doing the same on the iPhone has been practically impossible, but the other day (or rather night) I managed to solve this problem. By using the URL protocol for the AppStore on the iPhone with a specially crafted web search access AppStore will open with a predefined search expression. Neat. After I...