iPhone Stencil Kit

June 30th, 2009

Every iPhone developer should probably own one of these. Nice. (via mzarra)

iPhone OS 3.0 Adoption Rate

June 23rd, 2009

Tapbots on iPhone OS 3 adoptions among their active users:

We’re currently running at an overall 75% upgrade rate which is pretty insane considering the number of devices and the fact that its only been 5 days.

Early iPhone 3G S OpenGL test results

June 20th, 2009

Early iPhone 3G S OpenGL Test Results from Daniel Pasco over at Black Pixel:

the iPhone 3G S ran about twice as fast as the 2g Touch in every test

The iPod touch 2G was the previous speed champion of the iPhone OS X hardware.

Merlin Mann on Creative Work

June 19th, 2009

The Sound of Young America podcast episode by Merlin Mann on Creative Work. A few tidbits:

“Before you get [to awesome] you’re going to have to start a lot of things, and I must tell you you’re going to suck at it for a really, really long time. An unbelievably long time.”

“Getting something is what enables my brain to know it’s starting to write.”

“You have to write your way out of thinking block, because you can never think your way out of a writing block.”

“Tolerance means that you’re going to have to forgive yourself when it doesn’t work out on the very first day.”

Awesome stuff.

Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple

June 15th, 2009

Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple:

It was a giant middle finger to iPhone developers. And that’s the closing impression that Apple gave us for WWDC. Clearly, they had absolutely no interest in fielding even a single question from the topic that we have the most questions about.

User accounts removed

April 25th, 2009

I originally required registration to comment to cut down on spam, before Akismet was easy to use. It was a crappy requirement, who wants to register with a random blog just to leave a comment? So I turned it off, and the only purpose it’s served since then is to provide a useless vector for spammers.

Since I wasn’t using that data for a honeypot or anything, I’m just turning it off and removing all the accounts, even the few legitimate ones. They’re just not needed anymore.

I’ll be relying on Akismet for now; if that doesn’t work, in the future I’ll require an OpenID.

How to manipulate a developer

April 20th, 2009

Hint: We like being manipulated, as long as it’s being manipulated correctly.

inessential.com: How to manipulate me (or, Tuesday Whipper-Snapping)

Imagine you’re in my shoes: you’re me, for a minute. Think about feature requests, for example—you have a list several hundred items long of really, really good ideas. You’ve heard pretty much everything multiple times, though now and again you do hear new ideas. Which just makes the list longer!

imageNamed is evil

April 16th, 2009

Another iPhone programming gotcha, this one involving UIImage’s imageNamed: method. Worth noting for later.

Keeping optimal autorelease pools

April 4th, 2009

Martin Pilkington on autorelease pools:

However, a problem arises when you’re creating a lot of objects at once. The obvious solution is to initialise and release objects by hand in this case, but sometimes it isn’t possible. A lot of objects returned by Cocoa methods are autoreleased (by convention any object returned by a class method (other than +new or +alloc) should be autoreleased).

This is a good practical example of autorelease pool manipulation, including numbers showing before and after.

iPhoto Faces fail

March 27th, 2009

iphoto-fail