They say the best gifts are handmade. For my wife’s birthday last year, I came up with the idea to write a simple little “birthday card” application and slip it on her iPhone to surprise her. I scanned in some graphics from a real birthday card and digitally chopped it up and added some animation to give it that true “Made in Flash” feel, and stayed up until 1 AM working to get ad hoc provisioning working on her phone. I even had it register a protocol handler so I could send her an email while she was at work saying “click this link: <happy://birthday> from your iPhone email” and it would launch the application. It was a hit.

The one thing I had planned but couldn’t get working was for the appliction to play a song. Core Animation took enough of my brainpower at the time, and the idea of learning AudioUnit in such a short time was quickly dismissed–I would have to “ship” without that feature. But a recent post by Mobile Orchard’s Dan Grigsby showing the simplicity of AVAudioPlayer prompted me to pull the code off the shelf and give it an update.

What a dusty shelf that was. The project was configured for SDK 2.1(!) and some of the code was indicative of “tweaking until it works.” As I was updating the project for 3.0, moving code to Interface Builder and swapping lots of Core Animation code for UIView animations, it dawned on me that this has surprisingly many little tidbits of code and would be good to share.

(Read the article)

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I’m packed for WWDC, and have mowed the lawn so it’s not a jungle when I return. Earlier this week, I began prepping my hardware to have (hopefully) everything I need. There are plenty of WWDC “survival guides” out there–most recently an excellent one from Brent Simmons–and I even tried adding some pointers of my own last year. This year, I’ve noticed some little tips and ideas which may not be obvious; they may be too close to the trip to help anybody else out, but they might help you (or me) next year. (Read the article)

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Local Xcoders founder Joe Heck has just announced his 2-day iPhone course/workshop here in Seattle.

Joe has a very solid grip on the topic, and a seemingly boundless desire to both share what he’s learned and learn from others. Writing for the iPhone can be a bit disorienting at first, especially if you’re not already familiar with Cocoa; Joe is an ideal sounding board for questions you may worry might mark you as a “rookie.”

We got a preview of the course at last month’s Xcoders meeting, and I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to get up to speed on iPhone development. (Especially if you can get the discount he mentions in his post.)

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I submitted my first iPhone app to Apple for review on Thursday. The process didn’t go smoothly; there were issues I probably should have known about, and issues that seemed to have been compounded by using my client’s keys to release under their developer account. Now that it’s in Apple’s hands, I feel I should write down the issues and resolutions I encountered, even at the risk of looking like a doofus at times. To be trite, if it helps just one future developer have a smoother release it will be worth it–odds are, that future developer will be me.

Warning: If you are not an iPhone developer and don’t plan to be, you should consider skipping this post. It’s minutia you will never use, and I don’t offer a refund for your time or brain cells spent reading this. (Read the article)

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I wrote my first check of the year yesterday and remembered to date it “2009.” More importantly, it wasn’t a personal check–it was a business check.

My wife and I have registered with the State of Washington as “Goracke Consulting, LLC” (the word “Corporation” is not allowed in an LLC name–who knew?) doing business under the name “Corporation Unknown.” It’s been an interesting process; not difficult, but filled with worry about not “doing it correctly” at each step. We made the final step of opening the business bank account on the last day of the year, and are ready to officially enter our first full year of business.

Since last year’s simple goals worked out pretty well, I think I’ll state my business goals for this year. In no particular order:

• WWDC
• C4
• Ship It!
• ?
• Profit!

(Hoo-boy, that joke never gets old.)

I have a couple dev-related posts I’ve been meaning to get out of my head which should be appearing soon. One of them will (if all goes as planned) include shared code I hope people will find useful.

Happy New Year!

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I don’t intend for this to become a link blog–not because of some high-falutin’ ideals, but because I assume most potential readers are at least as connected into the Mac dev community as I am and will have already heard the latest cool news.

But the latest post by Glen Aspeslagh describes Ecamm Network’s usage of a project which seems to deserve increased exposure: Cocotron, “an open source project which aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc.’s Cocoa documentation.” Or, as glibly summarized by the Ecammeratus: “Wrote a Cocoa app? Just add a new Xcode target, hit compile and out shoots a Windows version.”

Sure, it doesn’t work perfectly, but Glen’s warts-and-all description sounds promising. If you have a product that could benefit from a Windows equivalent please give Cocotron a look and contribute code–so it will be easier for me to use when I come up with a product that could benefit from it.

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Hooray, Apple has decided to lift the long-in-the-tooth NDA on the iPhone SDK!

I can’t imagine anyone will be hearing that news from this blog first, but I do want to acknowledge and take advantage of it. My last post felt a bit vague, even to me, about my definition of “iPhone black” and that was partly due to dancing around the NDA. While it was really tempting to be provocative, I felt it would be irresponsible for my current contract work to risk getting smacked with an NDA violation (even though I have yet to hear of an instance) and have the client’s product suffer as a result. I considered screenshots, but felt they were either singling out someone else’s application, or a simplistic straw man if I just used an Interface Builder mockup.

The definition I had in mind of “iPhone black UI” is not simply “any view whose background is black”; it is a UINavigationController whose UINavigationBar's barStyle is UIBarStyleBlackOpaque (instead of UIBarStyleDefault) and is controlling a UITableViewController whose controlled UITableView's rows have either a white or black background. If a UIToolbar is present, its barStyle is also UIBarStyleBlackOpaque. I think most people understood that, but I still prefer to be explicit.

Wow, that feels great to type all those UI* prefixes in public–I encourage everyone to do so!

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Yesterday I tweeted: “Sorry, but I still feel black iPhone UIs are the equivalent of brushed metal.” I was aware that people I know personally are writing applications that this would seem to disparage. I also knew that I should follow it up with more explanation than can fit in 140-character chunks. (Read the article)

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I’m not usually one for New Year’s Resolutions, but this year I set three goals–one personal and two professional.

Goal #1 (The Personal One): Return to our honeymoon place for our anniversary. For the first 5 years of our marriage, we did an anniversary trip to Sooke Harbour House, the same place on Vancouver Island we honeymooned. It was an awesome indulgence and great way to recharge. Then baby came along, and logistics haven’t worked out. My goal was to get that tradition back on track–it didn’t happen. We (actually, Marya) did find a really nice weekend hideaway closer to home and more affordable, and that’s where we celebrated this year; we also technically still have time to visit Sooke this year, so I’m counting this goal as “half accomplished” and it’s already reappearing on next year’s list of goals.

Goal #2: Attend WWDC. I wanted to take the next step toward creating Mac software, which has long been a hobby/pasttime/fascination. This isn’t really a goal that can give half credit, and I didn’t actually think this was going to happen until (again, with not only my wife’s blessing but encouragement) it was decided at the last minute of early registration to go for it. I haven’t regretted it since, and need to make this another annual tradition.

And now the biggie:

Goal #3: Make some money writing Mac software. This could have been the easiest one, and certainly the most affordable. The size of the check wouldn’t matter–it could have been $5 under the table for all I cared, and it would have been a step forward. I have exceeded that goal.

I now hold in my hand a check for a side contract I accepted to write an iPhone application. I had not really been interested in iPhone apps when I went to WWDC, but I had just thought of an app that would scratch a personal itch and started writing that app when I was approached about this contract so I felt confident enough to accept it. It’s been hectic fitting this development into my schedule, it’s been frustrating to figure out not only how to do things on the phone, but how best to do them. But it’s also been incredibly rewarding even beyond the financial end.

This check was for the prototype of an application. It may never make it to the App Store, and you may never see it. I hope you do, and if it gets that far (and I’m allowed) I’ll make sure people know about it here. I’m proud of what I’ve done on it so far, but if it never goes any further, it will still be the application that accomplished one of my goals.

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The prizes for Iron Coder at C4[2] have been announced: A MacBook Air loaded with more than $5,800 (MSRP) of software for first place and “just” the software for second! Gah! Now I really wish I’d been able to go so I could…watch the award ceremony.

That’s just software created by attendees. It’s an impressive Who’s Who of companies and applications, all sitting down together in a conference room for the weekend.

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