Category: iOS

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Apple Core Labs Indie iOS

Esoteric iOS

Apple Core Labs: “Since we have to integrate with multiple scanners we have to decide at runtime which scanner is being used. Using the SDK’s we could take a stab in the dark at initializing each one in turn and the one that succeeds to initialize is the winner. Not such a great way determine the one to use, but it would work.

What if there was a way to determine you had connected external devices without using a third party SDK? There is.”

I’m not sure many people know about the External Accessory Framework. If you’re working with third party devices that work with iOS give the piece a read.

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How To iOS

iOS and KoamTac Bluetooth Scanners

I’ve been working on an application that pairs an iPhone, or iPod Touch, with a KoamTac KDC300i Bluetooth Scanner. I’m having a great time on the app and the scanner is awesome, but the website of the company supporting it is difficult to navigate. Every time I need to configure one of these little darlings I have to find the instructions included in the package to do it.

Not any more! I’m going to write it down, here in my web brain, so I can find it the next time I need to use it.

Step #1: Prepare the Bluetooth Scanner

  1. Press both Side Buttons at once to access the KDC Menu.
  2. Press the side Bottom Button until “BT Config” is highlighted.
  3. Press the Scan Button to select.
  4. Make sure “Connect Device” is highlighted, if not, press up or down Side Button and locate it.
  5. Press the Scan Button to select.
  6. Use the Side Buttons to navigate to HID.
  7. Press the Scan Button to move the asterisk.
  8. Highlight “Save & Exit”
  9. Press the Scan Button to select.
  10. Use the Side Buttons to navigate to “Top Menu”
  11. Press the Scan Button to select.
  12. Press the Side Buttons to navigate to “BT Service”
  13. Press the Scan Button to select.
  14. Press the Side Buttons to navigate to “Pairing”
  15. Wait here – Move on to Step #2

Step #2: Prepare the iOS Device

  1. Tap on “Settings”
  2. Tap on “General”
  3. Tap on “Bluetooth”
  4. Set the “Bluetooth” Switch control to “On”

Step #3: Finish Configuring the Bluetooth Scann

  1. The Scanner should be waiting on “Pairing”
  2. Press the Scan Button
  3. “Pairing Started…” should display
  4. Wait
  5. When finished the Scanner will beep and display HID Connected

Done! Now you can scan to your hearts content.

PS: It figures that once I write these down I find the instructions on the website.

PPS: Barcode Guy does an awesome job with these scanners.

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iOS

You said what?

The Telegraph: “But someone had entered the obscene seven-word phrase as the user’s name, so the phone blurted it out when it answered a question.”

The headline for the article is sensational, “iPhone Siri software tells boy, 12, to ‘shut up’ in Tesco”, but it does its job. I had to go see why Siri would say the eff word to a kid. Turns out someone typed the phrase as the users name. Siri was addressing the user.

Not as clever as I had expected. I thought it was going to be a genuine hack, not a prank a 10 year old could play.

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iOS

Even the little things matter

Technology Review: “Two years later, Autodesk’s SketchBook apps for phones and the iPad are best-sellers that have been downloaded seven million times. It doesn’t add up to a huge amount of revenue: perhaps $15 million. But there’s more than money to this innovation story. With its first consumer hit, Autodesk now has more customers than it did in all its previous 29 years combined.”

Heh, $15 million in sales is small for Autodesk, but any Indie iOS shop would kill for that sort of revenue. By contrast our little effort makes about $20 per month. Sure, it’s part time, but you get the picture.

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Development iOS Mac

Fresh Code: RFRddMe

Earlier this week Dave Winer pointed out some neat stuff Readability was up to. Part of the piece pointed out a new URL shortener. I marked it and came back to it today. Since I love writing code to talk to RESTful web services, why not write another one?

The Red Readability CouchThis afternoon I started on RFRddMe, an Objective-C library for the Readability Shortener Service. Late this afternoon I completed the library, and I checked it into my GitHub Repository tonight. Figuring out git submodules took a bit of time, but it works as advertised.

If you just happen to be looking for Objective-C code to shorten a URL, and add an article to Readability, look no further.

Get the code for RFRddMe on GitHub.

Please, drop me a line, rob.fahrni@gmail.com, if you use the code.

Enjoy.

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iOS

Go Native or Go Home

Daring Fireball: “But at a technical level, is this really something Adobe should be crowing about? The game requires an iPad 2 for performance reasons, even though the animation is 2D, not 3D. The game was originally written in Air for play on the PC, so I have little doubt it was less work to port it to the iPad within Air rather than rewriting it natively in Cocoa Touch. But it doesn’t seem right to me that this game doesn’t run on first-gen iPads. Commenters on Brimelow’s post seem to agree.”

Compiling existing code for another platform can be cost effective, but it doesn’t mean it will translate to a superior experience.

Remember Visual Basic? I do. I’ve written quite a bit of code in VB, and VBA, over the last 15 plus years. I’ve seen a lot of great Visual Basic code in that time. Mostly, I’ve seen a lot of poorly written Visual Basic code. Microsoft wanted to give the power of writing Windows applications to mere mortals and boy did they write applications. Thousands and thousands of crappy Windows applications.

Will write C/C++ for foodI worked with a great software engineer that tells a story of a former employer having designers develop the client application for their product. This client was written in Flash and communicated to a backend application to do the grunt work. It was discovered the client application was having performance issues. When the developers started looking into the issues they found horribly written Flash code was the culprit. The designers went back to designing, the developers went back to developing, and performance was improved.

My point is this. Just because the tool is easy to use doesn’t mean the resulting code will be well written.

This game may have issues because the code is poorly written, or it could be the cross compiler and its supporting libraries. It’s also worth mentioning someone could write a really horrific game, or application, using native tools, but, I still claim native gives you the best chance to be successful.

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iOS

ShakyPlanet

Little Ricky Alien DudeHere’s a neat little application introduced to me by a fellow NSSLO‘er, it’s called ShakyPlanet by Little Ricky Software. It’s like a Snow Globe with collectable themes. It’s a fun app.

To commemorate the final Space Shuttle launch they’ve added a free collectable called “End of an Era.” Enjoy.

End of an Era

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Business iOS

The Joy of Paid Apps

Marco Arment: “I’m asking people who bought a $200-829 device (many of whom also pay monthly for data service) to take a $5 risk. People risk that much for a side-dish of mashed potatoes that might suck at a restaurant, or a tremendous milkshake at Starbucks that they’ll finish in 30 minutes, without much consideration. iPad and iPhone owners often risk $30-70 on a case that they might break, lose, or get bored with after a few months.”

AHHHHHH!The App Store is such a strange beast. I think it’s a great distribution mechanism and if you’re an Indie Dev trying to keep the costs down it’s a real blessing. No need to worry about collecting money or keeping servers running. I’m more than willing to give 30% to Apple for that service.

The dark side is, as Marco points out, trying to convince people to take a chance on a $5.00 application.

When RxCalc shipped we priced it at $5.99. After a few months we decided to run a special and make it free for a day. After that we decided to keep the price at $0.99 believing it would increase sales. Well, we were wrong, again. It didn’t change sales, at all. We still get a trickle of sales, a few every day, just as we did at $5.99.

We will be making some changes to the price with the next release. When that will be, I have no idea.

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Business Development iOS Mac

Craig Hockenberry on Chameleon

AHHHHHH!Craig Hockenberry: “In summary, we’re very disappointed with how things have turned out. Not because of the funding, but because there’s some potential here that will never be realized. We’ll continue to add things we need for our own products, but don’t expect to see any documentation or bug fixes that don’t affect our own code. Any changes or fixes will get pushed out to the community on a schedule that suits us best: probably at the end of minor release cycles (every few months.)”

If you’re an iOS developer you probably know who Craig Hockenberry is, he’s the guy that created Twitterrific. Anywho, he’s also a Principal at Iconfactory. I guess my point is the guy has been developing software for a very long time and is well respected. I do find it odd that he’s a bit disappointed in the response to Chameleon. I’m not sure what was expected? Open Source is by nature fickle. What I see is this; people will download it, use it, gripe about bugs, but do nothing beyond that. Sure, there will be diehards that get behind it and contribute, but mostly people will just pull the source down, build, and use it. That’s the way it goes in the Open Source community. I have a couple of Open Source things, granted they’re nothing special, and I doubt anyone has used them, but I never expected anyone to contribute to them, or give me money to support them. I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful person, but I don’t think you should expect to receive any money for an Open Source project. It’s icing on the cake if you could raise money to support it, but I wouldn’t expect it.

Anyway, if you’re an iOS or Mac developer you should take a look at Chameleon, and support it in any way you can, the fine folks at the Iconfactory put a lot of time and money into it.

You can donate to the effort right from the homepage.

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Indie iOS Mac

Free App Idea

Justin Williams: “A notes app with native web, Mac, and iOS clients which supports rich (or Markdown) formatting on all three, and can do inter-note linking. There are a ton of apps in this space, but you can only get at most 2 of those 3 features in any one app.”

This is from Justin’s interview of Steve Frank of Panic for his new series “Show Me Your Pixels”

Get started, now.