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iOS NETWORKING with Jim Dovey who works @ Kobo inc.

Jim discussed Grand Central Dispatch which is the iOS approach to multicore computing and thread management. He talked about asynchronous network development in 10.6 using CFNetwork, NSURLConnection, Reachability, and the new Blocks which provide function closures.

I was also curious about his personal site allanquatermain.net and just who was this Allan Quatermain character?

Media Player Programming on iOS with Adam Hunter who heads up the mobile division @ Rogers

Adam showed us how he was able to stream large media files. He used the short animated film elephant dreams as an example, and was able to stream the film creating 10 second chunks using open source iPhone streaming technology called a segmenter. He discussed other streaming services like encoding.com. He walked us through some sample code that showing that one can now create a video player instance within an app that doesn’t need to take up the entire screen using AVPlayer sharing it with other views.

Adam’s latest success story was the CityTV ipad app which held the number one free app position.

Flash Platform for Mobile and Devices with Mark Doherty

The massive variety of screens make for an unpredictable future and that Flash has at least attempted to remain consistent across these screens. He did encourage developers to test on each device and create different builds depending on how they perform; don’t just build for one device and think it will translate to all Flash devices. He mentioned the move towards the cloud where we can centrally store data and share it among a swarm of screens.

Adobe has a lofty goal of supplying the Flash Player Lite to 1.2 Billion devices: tablets, smart phones and set top boxes. The mobile version of Flash — Flash Lite — is still different from the desktop version of the latest Flash Player 10.1. As Scott Janousek points out, the differences between the two players should be minor and allow for easy porting. It seems we do need different version to support under powered devices.

It was cool to see him demonstrate the papervision 3D site ecodazoo.com on a Froyo android device and see him spin the 3D models showing that it had only a slight loss of performance over the desktop version.

Adobe has started to work on the iPhone packager for Flash CS5 again after Apple decided open up to other third party developers which is an excellent move and renews my faith in the future of both Apple and Adobe.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Where do I stand in 2010 on Mobile Dev? In 2009, I liked the idea that you could in theory develop for multiple devices specifically the big three. Today, I think that generalist approach isn’t practical for the apps that I want to create and not having access to multiple devices is a definite barrier. The differences between the Blackberry, android and iPhone devices are simply too great. By focusing on a single platform, I’ll become a specialist for that device which for me should translate to future iOS projects in 2011. I do know that I need a decent app in the app store before anyone would consider me as serious iOS developer.

I’ve decided to dedicate 2010 to the iOS platform and have buckled down to learn objective-c [as well as C/C++ since they all work on iOS] by reading textbooks, watching iTunes university lectures [the Stanford iphone ones are exceptional!], and chipping away at a side project prototype which should be ready for release in a couple more months.

The more time I put into objective-c dev; the more I discover that I need to know which only re-enforces this specialist approach. So as much as I do admire android, I’m not attempting to learn Froyo just yet but banking on Flash to port any desktop apps to that device so that I don’t have to learn yet another language; the various flavors of C are quite enough for 2010.

What a difference a year makes! From last year where less than an handful of people had apps in stores to this year where half the audience had apps in the stores and basically everyone (including myself) had one in production.

The first presentation that I attended was from the person behind Andspot which is an alternative to the Android Market place something which is outlawed on the iPhone frontier.

While I’m not currently pursuing android development, I was interested to see how android apps are marketed and jotted down some of his figures regarding device sales and why he considers Android as the fastest growing platform:

Windows
15 M in 2009
12 M in 2010

i0S
24 M in 2009
41 M in 2010

Android
6.8 M in 2009
47 M in 2010

Rim
34 M in 2009
46 M in 2010

He had projections into 2014 that had Android as the major player but I won’t include those as I think the market is changing too quickly. The prediction of close to a billion smart phones sold by 2014 is compelling enough to mention though but I think there still will be an immense variety of devices; too many to predict at this point.

Next up, I attended the talk by Owen Goss of Streamingcolour Games. Owen is a solo, indie game developer living in Guelph and he decided to speak about memory managements and leak analysis within iOS.

Owen discussed how iOS has no garbage collection and how memory is allocated through retain and release counts. He pointed out that when you instantiated an instance through self, its retain count grows surprisingly by 2 not 1. Instead, he recommended pointing to a temporary object and releasing it right away.


self.myClass = [[MyClass alloc] init]; // retain count is 2 not 1!

-(void) dealloc
{
[myClass release] // retain is 1 !!!
}


MyClass *tempObj = [[MyClass alloc] init];
self.myClass = tempObj; // retain count is 1
[tempObj release];

In order for an instance to be removed completely from memory, its retain count must be zero upon dealloc. He went to on to demonstrate how you can use tools like Build & Analyze and Leaks diagnostic to further troubleshoot memory leaks.

I wasn’t brave enough to ask Owen a question during his session. Instead, I decided to email him afterwards so that I could poise several questions, and he graciously agreed to share his responses with you.

b: Obviously, the goal is to ship games with zero memory leaks. I’m wondering if you happened to ship any of your games with memory leaks?

o: With each of my games I’ve strived to ship with zero memory leaks. Occasionally, fixing a bug at the last minute, you end up introducing a small leak. There are probably a few small leaks in each of my games (a string that leaks once, for example), but not enough to warrant concern. However, my primary goal is always to ship the best game I can.

b: If you had memory leaks, how did you hear about them? Did your users report general bugs which you then tracked down to memory leaks?

o: During the beta testing stages of a game is usually when I dig deep into looking for and fixing leaks. It’s rare that a leak causes a serious problem, but occasionally you might get memory warnings showing up from a beta tester’s log files that can be tracked down to something leaking frequently. If you introduce a bad enough leak, the OS can terminate your app if you run low on available memory and don’t respond to memory warnings.

b: Bugs happen. I know how difficult it is to edit and bug check one’s own code. You are a solo developer on your projects. What simple advice would you give other solo developers in tracking down their own bugs and memory leaks?

o: Yes, I’m a solo developer, so finding and fixing my own bugs is a challenge. I have a great selection of beta testers who help me test my games. I’ve asked friends to help, I’ve asked other developers to help, and I’ve put out public calls for beta testing help on iPhone game forums. The testing help I’ve received has been amazing. Without the 20-30 people I have testing my games, there’s no way I’d ship a game with as few bugs.

o: Tracking down memory leaks is a different problem though. For that I use the Leaks Instrument. Users won’t find memory leaks in you game (they might notice it crash if you run out of memory, but they won’t know why it crashed). The Leaks Instrument is an incredibly powerful tool for tracking down memory leaks in your own code. Every iOS developer should be running it on their own apps (and fixing the leaks they find) before they ship a app.

As I near completion of my first app, I’ll follow this sage advice and make sure I run my app through the Leaks Instrument as well as lean on a few friends and family to assist with bug tracking offering them at least a spot in the final credits.

I have been working with the Aviary suite of image creation and editing apps for a few weeks. Purchasing the pro license will set you back around $25 for a year which is extremely cheap compared to a license for Photoshop and Illustrator. If you have several machines, you can quickly see the beauty of the aviary apps which are all browser-based. No software installs and all your work is saved in the cloud.

I did feel somewhat conned into subscribing to Aviary, however, after playing around with Phoenix, I wanted to save my unfinished work and realized that it was being shared publically with the community. They make it very easy to share work with the various social media sites, and this would be an excellent feature if the paint was dry. In my case, it was very wet, and I felt caught with my pants down unless I paid up.

In order to save a private version, I had to buy the pro license. I was hooked though and that super sweet $25 price point didn’t phase me at all. In fact, it would be great to see more software developers adopt that price plan for small fry like me.

For instance, I’m also a basecamp user and promoter. I have a free personal account which I wouldn’t mind subscribing to $25 a year with 1 project. I think they should create a “minnow” or “my life” plan just for me (and perhaps the other 20 thousand or so using the free version– just a guess). The closest level they have is a “personal” plan with 3 projects for $12/month. I only need 1 project for myself and won’t upgrade. I actually support 37 signals promoting basecamp for all our client work and passing the buck to Blast Radius. It is an exceptional tool for team collaboration and project management. So I can see that offering free accounts to individual customers who work for larger agencies can benefit the company overall.

Moving into 2010, I plan to continue to use basecamp and explore Aviary more. I’ve just installed Aviary’s Talon firefox extension which is amazing. You can capture any image in your browser and easily open it in Phoenix. If you are a photoshop power-user, I must warn you that Aviary — while having a familiar environment — takes some time to get used to but after a few hours of frustration you begin to develop a strange rhythm.

A few of the tools do not behave like those in photoshop. I couldn’t get the brush tool to change paint colours and size unless I toggled the foreground to background option each time. Its an extra weird click but once you do it ten times it begins to be less annoying. Small bugs like this are to be expected for a beta app though and I’m sure will be ironed out by version 2. If you haven’t tried them yet, I highly recommend giving these Aviary apps a spin in 2010.

I’ll leave you with an unrelated screen grab of a griffin from one of my favourite sierra series of games: Quest for Glory 2 ( recently remade as a free download). Back in the day of EGA, you can see how pixel artists created shades by laying two different colours side by side in a grid. At the time, I thought these graphics were incredible, and I wonder if photoshop 1.0 was used to create them?!

I’ve been evaluating the possibilities of using html/javascript/css to create mobile apps that work across various smart devices. I’m concentrating on the iPhone first. Along with developing with universal html/javascript/css, I would also like to pick up some Objective C so that I can learn a few of the unique hooks into the iPhone.

Since I’m working with html to create a rapid prototype of my app, I want to use the speed of the browser and simply hit refresh each time. I don’t want to wait the 20 seconds or so that it takes Titantium’s developer to compile the app in the iPhone simulator on my Mac (maybe that’s just my Mac though).

By publishing the app in the browser I missed the look of the simulator cradling the potential of my prototype. It made it look that much more real. I did a search for iPhone templates and found this amazingly detailed iPhone template psd by Teehan+Lax and extracted the vertical and horizontal faces from it.

I used those faces to develop my own shell with 2 views; each using an iframe. This could probably be further improved to flip on an internal app activity but it works great for simple testing and I can edit the iframe to point to a different app or game when I’m ready to test something else.

my simple iPhone shell demo

Feel free to download the source and use it in your projects.

download iPhone shell zip

BOOKS

I picked up a few books on the weekend, and I recommend both of these which should be instrumental in learning more about iPhone development.

Professional iPhone and iPod touch Programming: Building Applications for Mobile Safari (Wrox Professional Guides)

This booked is directed at the novice iphone developer and includes an Objective-C Primer with best practices on how to approach iphone development inline with the Apple app store.

iPhone SDK Application Development: Building Applications for the AppStore

This takes advantage of HTML/CSS/javascript to build browser-based applications and games that can leverage the iphone’s api to handle things like multitouch and phone calls.

SAVE THE CARIBOU

There should be an app for that.
hinterland who’s who: caribou

I admit it – I’m a n00b when it comes to mobile development. I have experimented with Android’s Java and Objective C but I’ve come to realize that what I really need is something simple that will translate easily from the web to mobile. I also need simple, well-written getting started tutorials to make this transition even easier.

In most of my posts, I point to Flash as my weapon of choice. Its my Excalibur. But then again I’m no pendragon; I can’t pick and choose my technologies. I’m somewhere in the middle of the pack of dragon developers who require a larger arsenal depending where they need to stick their media. Don’t get us confused with the other jacks out there. We aspire to be specialists even gurus in a few languages and command them to do our bidding. For me, its all about the speed to prototype and a decent level of control over the media.

For this test to compare frameworks, my goal is to link together 3 html pages with a mixture of text, images, and interaction. I want to build an iPhone app in the simulator without an actual iPhone nor developer license.

PHONEGAP

I approached Phonegap first which now slants my take on Titantium because it took out most of my hair during this process. It helped me learn to how to think about html/css/javascript for mobile, and this made diving in Titantium easier.

After downloading and opening the PhoneGap project in XCode, I mainly struggled with the xcode interface itself so I can’t really fault phonegap for my not being comfortable with its in and outs. For instance, I could easily edit the html but it took me a long time to figure out how to add an image to my project. I also attempted to manually rename the PhoneGap project to my own project name and this caused havoc [specifically I got a weird pathing error to a missing configure folder] and I had to rename it back to get it to compile properly.

I think most of my problems could be cleared up if this tutorial was better though. In fact, because they have a wiki system, I (or you) should consider writing one.

Getting started with phonegap and iPhone

TITANIUM

For Titanium, I watched a few videos on their site [ youtube also has decent Phonegap videos] and then downloaded and installed their Titantium Developer tool for the Mac which allowed me to configure my iPhone app without even touching XCode!

Next, instead of wrestling with XCode, I decided to open a familiar html editor — Dreamweaver — and edit the index.html in this environment. Again, without using XCode, I created an images folder and linked my html to an image in that folder. I returned to the Titanium Developer and launched the app. I saw my html page and the image [ I never did get the image to appear in Phonegap but that's xCode's fault I'm sure]. From there, it was relatively easy to create another html page as they include an about.html to reach my goal of three html pages with images and some hyperlinking interactivity.

Getting started with titanium and iPhone

CONCLUSION

Phonegap supports Android, iPhone, and Blacberry while Titanium supports Android and iPhone. This difference doesn’t really matter to me as I’m currently focusing on iPhone and Android. If I write standards compliant html/javascript/css as my base, I should be able to an create app that works within any platform and it would then be a matter of learning the individual hooks. The underlining html/css/javascript should then in theory be web friendly too so that one could that work and create things like facebook pages. Its a little bizarre to be thinking about the mobile first then the web.

I’d like to see both Phonegap and Titantium add a big quick link to their iphone development getting started pages on their home page as I had trouble finding them initially. I would like to see Phonegap write their own official guide to getting started separate from their wiki page as much as I love wikis, it needs an authority voice.

For your next mobile project, look at what your app needs to do and consider using html/javascript/css. One might consider the following workflow but I’ll jump straight to steps 2/3

1. create a prototype that works in a web browser
2. hook the prototype into a framework like phonegap or titanium in an iphone simulator
3. test the app on the actual device

I think I wanted PhoneGap to be a no brainer as it was recommended to me by friends. Right now, after about only 3 hours using each platform, I will have to recommend Titanium as I simply found it easier to get started with but I don’t know yet how it might limit me down the road.

* UPDATE *
Jesse MacFadyen has graciously provided the desired iPhone Phonegap tutorial. I’ve haven’t stopped following the Phonegap mailing list, and am continually impressed by their progress. I would now recommend giving both Phonegap and Titanium a shot and see which one best suits your needs.

XML is so simple even Maggie Gyllenhaal could update it but she never would; nor would your receptionist or even your PM.

In theory, non-technical people should be able to edit xml files. Creating configurable xml files are a relatively cheap solution to content management over one driven by a database. XML is really meant for other developers to manage your compiled work without having to dig around your source looking for variables.

On a side note, I’ve been building a lot of html, css and javascript lately so that I can eventually claim to be a true front-end developer not just a one-trick Flash pony. I’ve grown to realize that there is a cool conversation happening with html these days and I should be more versed in it. But I’ll save that tangent for another post. I only mention it here because I’m working with a django developer and learning django tags. In the django documentation, there is a line about the pains of having to hand write xml which they call “sadistic”.

As much as you try to keep it organized, xml becomes increasing more challenging to work with as the data grows beyond 100 lines. It would be nice to have something like form-based editor for it which could create the xml behind the scenes. But you need to model the xml first before you can create the editor. In most cases, its simply faster to edit the raw xml.

With the introduction of Flash player 10, we can now develop xml editors in CS4 without using AIR or ZINC. We have a new method on filereference: save(). We can use save to open file dialog so that the user can save the new file to their desktop. Currently, there is a bug though in the save method which won’t allow you to overwrite existing files — it will attempt to and actually append your data to the end of the file which isn’t good especially when dealing with xml.

You can get around this bug by creating a new file each time. In the below example, I simply added a timestamp to my file name to avoid this problem. Then, when I need to load this xml file, I open the latest version. Here is a small code sample demonstrating this save work around:

view code sample
download code sample

I liked these two blog posts about the filereference features and the known save bug:
deleteaso.com
dynamicflash.com

This post is a little backwards. I’m showing you a code sample before I reveal its purpose.

I like to evaluate new features in Flash by creating mini game engines. In order to get more comfortable with filereference and potentially use it my client work, I decided to design/develop a story editor which would allow me create reams of xml for a story-driven game like Mass Effect. For this exercise, I did the wireframing and coding simultaneously. This felt natural to me as I basically had an idea of what the end interface would look like, and, as I discovered missing controls, I could add them and wire them up as I went along. It’s a strange feeling when your interface starts to speak to you and recommends new features ;-D.

Along with the ability to create/edit scenarios, you can see a few other features sketched in this working wireframe like an image option which doesn’t do anything yet; the preview scenario which will show the images and cycle through the scenarios; and the bizarre “male” reference in the top right that tells me that this scenario is written from the main man’s point of view. I have to plans to add female, alien, and possibly unicorn POVs.

After the recent Adobe announcement about how they had managed to circumvent the Flash player on the iPhone by developing a way to convert AS3 to a native iPhone app, I did a black flip back into Flash and have pretty much abandoned my shallow dives in Android and Objective C. I’ll thrilled to be focusing on Flash again with some complementary side steps into javascript.

As much I know this scares some hardcode Apple developers who fear we’ll fill their precious little wonder with trivial bubble wrap apps, I’m dreaming of serious Flash games and apps on the iPhone now as an extension of our greater advertising campaigns that will uniquely consider an iPhone’s hardware requirements. As soon as CS5 is ready, I hope to have a Flash mobile game but in the meantime I’m starting to look at many of the Flash gaming portals with their reduced desktop space that seem like an ideal tank to test the waters.

This photo has nothing to do with the FITC Mobile conference that I attended last week. Its just one sick flashlight.

PHONE GAP

Phone Gap is an opensource javascript framework that helps you develop native apps for all major smart phones: Android, iPhone, and Blackberry.

They have also taken the popular jQuerry framework and created their own version XUI; reducing its size from 25K to 2.5K in the process.

Titanium is a similar framework to Phone Gap which also produces native apps using javascript, html, and css so a web developer can continue to work with familiar technologies and not have to dive deep into objective c.

MOTOROLA

Motorala doesn’t just have one phone to worry about; they offer a “portfolio” of phones; well over 40 devices. By 2010, they plan to have 17 handsets that have android OS.

The Motoblur platform is all about the concept of “I broadcast” — users don’t need to surf anymore; anything that they could be interested in comes to them, and they simply flick passively through panels of facebook, myspace, and twitter updates.

Once one has setup the device, it retains its settings even if lost so that you can pick up a new device and it will re-sync.

MOBILE FLASH

Scott Janousek
Mark Doherty

Adobe is committed to bringing out the Flash 10 Player on a android device by 2010. They will also be releasing a new version of Flash lite 4 supporting AS3 for underpowered phones.

Device Central will allow developers to test their apps in any device that support Flash Lite. They can also test new accelerometer functionality on a virtual 3D phone.

In order to promote their openscreen project, Abode and Nokia have joined together to put up a $10 million fund for aspiring mobile flash developers.

According to Mark, Flash lite will most likely be the dominant flash player until 2012.

FLASH LITE

frameworks:
Feather
Shuriken Flash lite 2 components

portals:
thumbplay

Brian Robbins
Riptide Games

Brian discussed iPhone game development. He mentioned that turning on NSZombieEnabled = YES will help you track down memory leaks by creating zombie objects that persist; make sure you turn it off after testing though. He also recommended the Clang Static Analyzer found in the new Snow Leopard

Mobile Analytics:
pinch media
flurry
localytics

You can track not just your own games, but leading games like Paper Toss by Backflip Studios.

RIM

Composer and Themebuilder are two tools that designers can use to completely skin the entire blackberry interface. Designers can sell themes on the Blackberry market.

Flash developers/designers will be interested in the swf import functionality. These tools will convert the swf into an svg so one can build custom animated wallpapers and other animated effects like button states.

ANDROID GUITAR APP

Active Frequency developed an android guitar app which is for sale in the US android market. There is no Canadian app market yet where we can sell apps.

Android tip: Instead of using pixels in your layout, try using dip ( density independent pixels ) instead as described in this blog post.

The goal was to form a dream team; pick an existing client; and design a game-changing iPhone app that they couldn’t live with it, and also to motivate us to build more apps/games on our own. So far Blast has produced 1 iPhone app commercially — iMotivator for Jordan’s Flight Club. And, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more iPhone apps being developed here in 2009/10 as demand heats up; hopefully it will pick up for android as well.

The competition was open to the Blast offices around the world with two stages: proposal and prototype. In the second phase, we produced a functional prototype leveraging box2d for our iphone game with various marketing and social media hooks.

Even though the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, Flash did play a major role in the success of our pitch. I was able to animate a complete game experience as if our game was real; very compelling to our judges. Its such a shame that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash — our game really doesn’t need objective c — we could create the entire thing in Flash and have it run on both phone and desktop — wishful thinking — which is one reason I’m more excited by the android platform after hearing Adobe’s promise to bring Flash 10 to android by 2010.

In Canada, we have these nasty 3 year phone contracts which are very expensive to break and I still find myself somewhat on the sidelines until I get a smart phone. I’m ready to purchase one but not at the price of breaking my existing contract to do so. In meantime, its great to have free tools available for both iPhone (xcode/interface builder) and Android (eclipse plugin) with virtual emulators.

When my contract ends next year, my plan is to get iTouch and then something like an HTC hero ( or which ever model supports android, Flash 10, and G3 — more dreaming ;-D ) and then get the best of both worlds.