1.1 Other Features

Apple took too long to publish Current Postcards 1.1, so I went ahead and included some other tweaks I completed and re-uploaded the app. This means you may not see the app till next week. In addition to the fixes in my previous post, it also supports font selection and adds a photo border.

Click on the sample above for a better view...

Current Postcards 1.1

Current Postcards 1.1 should be released to the iTunes store shortly. It fixes two issues:

1. Firmware as old as 2.1 is supported now.

I really screwed up with the initial release so let this be a lesson to other people developing applications. When you target your distribution build, make sure you target an OLDER firmware. If you don't, people who are using older firmware will not be able to install it. While everyone should upgrade their device, not everyone remembers or knows it is important.

In some cases, you have to target a newer firmware, but for most apps you should NOT have to go older than 2.1. 2.1 added a an easier API for playing sound files which many apps may be using.

2. Fixed a weird bug that caused the Facebook "authorization uploads" screen to flip back to the theme selection instead of going to the facebook upload screen.

The facebook connect API gives you functions to present the user with a dialog to get extended permissions. In my case, this allows the application to upload a postcard to your facebook wall. The dialog that confirms this automatically disappears if you do nothing, but the user can also touch "Okay". I was forcing the screen to flip if they pressed "Okay" but it would flip automatically anyway. This resulted in it flipping to the upload screen then flipping back. The user might think something was wrong. Simple fix. I did not notice it when testing because I always waited for it to dissappear.

I'm working on font selection next since that is tougher to implement. Twitter support should be cake.

Twitter

I am now on twitter. I'll use it to publish quick updates about changes to Current Postcards or iSkyGaze.

You can follow me here:

http://www.twitter.com/yarsrvenge

Current Postcards

Long time no write. I just finished up a native iPhone application for the App Store. It is a free program that allows you to create postcards and greeting cards from photos and save, email or upload to Facebook.

I created this for my company in my spare time for a lot of reasons, but the biggest was to generate some excitement across our various departments and get the business to open up to new ideas and directions. There are a lot of people doing exactly the same thing, and Apple has made developing for their platform a lot of fun.

It was nice to work on something that was NOT Microsoft related for a change. No offense against Microsoft, but they simply aren't innovative anymore. Most of their time seems to be spent copying what other people do. I do think highly of their development tools, but when it comes to their desktop and mobile operating systems...they really are not in nearly as robust as what I've seen from Apple and others.

Anyway, here is a link to a youtube video for the new iPhone application.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0C18rXCxEs

I have other apps planned. Sorry this is not astronomy related. I had to make a choice when working on a native app whether to do something for myself or something to help out my company. Given the tough economic times and doing more with less, I think it was the right choice. It has provided a fun project for several people and helped people realize that we want to grow and 'think different'. From that perspective, I consider it a success already.

There are some great astronomy apps in the app store, I would check them out. iSkyGaze simply does not have all the great features of a native app because I do not have the kind of hardware control in a web app. Keep in mind, it was written before there was even an SDK :) That being said, people still use it and I get emails all the time.

Thanks for the support!

iSkyGaze Back Up!!

iSkyGaze should now be working again. I appreciate all the e-mails and support and apologize for the downtime. This was a particularly weird mathematical bug and frankly I am surprised it did not show up sooner.

Please report any issues!

iSkyGaze Down

The iSkyGaze application is nor currently working due to a server-side issue.  I hope to get some time to rectify this by the end of the week.  I'm sorry for the inconvenience!

The iMac and iPhone SDK

Well, I took the plunge. I needed a new PC anyway, so I went ahead and got the iMac. I've successfully set it up with a dual boot using boot camp. I can now boot up into either MAC OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or Windows Vista. One of the images I attached above actually shows me installing Vista Service Pack 1 onto the iMac.

I will save my iMac praise for another post. For right now, I thought I would talk a little bit about the iPhone SDK.

For developers working with Visual Studio, XCode (Apple's development IDE) falls a little short compared to what you are used to. In addition, there are some real setbacks when it comes to the state of the SDK. Here are some of the bigger ones:

• Garbage Collection: The iPhone SDk does not currently support garbage collection unlike the SDK for normal Mac OSX applications where it is an option.  This is not too horrible, but it does require you to be VERY careful with memory allocation.  Using the SDK reminded me more of developing in C++ than C#.
• UI Designer:  This version of the toolkit does not provide a nice GUI for developing your screens like you see in Visual Studio.  I understand that it is coming, but for now it is not present which means that these interfaces have to be created in code.
• IDE:  The IDE is not nearly as polished as Visual Studio.  Great features like dynamic help and displaying methods in classes as you type are not present.  Again, it is not horrible but after using Microsoft's development products I am very spoiled.  The iPhone simulator that comes with the SDK works pretty well, and even includes Safari so you can test your web apps.  One of the screenshots above shows the simulator running on my iMac desktop with iSkyGaze running.
• Tight Sandbox:  There are some basic low-level things I wanted to do in the SDK and could not because Apple locked it down pretty hard.  A great example is the camera.  The SDk does not allow you to programatically take a picture without the user interacting.  The UIPickerView class brings up the camera dialog and makes the user press the shutter.  There is no way to just take a picture myself.

All this really means is that developing something like iSkyGaze Plus on the iPhone will take a little longer than planned.  I am no longer confident in a release in time to distribute for iTunes.  Overall, I think the SDk is pretty good, but is far from complete or perfect.