Was writing up an email for a friend who is a first time WWDC attendee and thought it might be of interest to others.

SF natives would probably call my list touristy – I don’t know the local lore as much as they do. So be it. I’m not ashamed to be a tourist! ;) I love SF though, and have been enough times that I have a few favorite places to go and things to do. Some of these have been covered by other folks as well.

So without further ado…

Some tips for you as a first time WWDC attendee:

1. Hope your hotel is close to the convention center. SF is the most pedestrian friendly city in the world, and parking is a pain. If it is, plan to NOT rent a car and instead, just take the BART from the airport to the station closest to your hotel. Wear good walking shoes.
2. Badge pickup begins on sunday. Get it done if you can rather than wait for monday morning.
3. You’re go…

From a book I’m reading on business development Growing a Business by Paul Hawken:

“Do you want to be a mushroom or an oak tree? Spores beat out Acorns every time in growth rates, but never in longevity or durability.”

He’s referring to whether you want to grow fast or slow.

Hawken advocates a middle-ground growth rate that suits your business and is sustainable. He says that while everyone knows growing too little can cause a business to fail, our society’s focus on the fastest growth as a measure of success is misguided, and that companies that grow too fast can quickly outstrip their ability to manage themselves.

Related, he also advises that during recessions is the time to expand, and during booms is the time to be fiscally conservative.

This is …

Tonight, I’d like to buy two books. I have the money in my hand, and I know exactly what they are.

The first was recommended by John Gruber and is Elements of Style . As a writer-in-progress, though I certainly don’t aspire to high literature, it seems useful to me to study what good writing style is, and to apply that to my work.

The second, was a book I found as a result of a discussion I had with a friend today about growing my software business, Growing a Business .

Now, it’s useful to note that both of those links are from Amazon. I said to myself tonight, "I’d really like these books… if I can get em at my …

Late Night Cocoa podcast starring ME! has been released Topic is Design Patterns. Complaints/Critisism/Rants can be sent to email, comments or null…

Preface

I got an email the other day from someone who was asking me where to start when it came to writing iPhone apps.

Those of us for whom the response to the question “What do you do for a living?” is “I make iPhone apps…” know all too well, that the very next words that follow that question are usually “Really? I have a great idea for an app…” This almost always leads to either “Do you think you could write this app for me?” or “Can you tell me how to write this app?” So the point is, we get asked those kinds of questions a lot.

So in response, I wrote up this email, and when I was finished, I said “Y’know, this would make a good Blog post…” so here it is…

“I can has iPhone code pls? kthxbai”

I’ve been writing code for 15+ years, and been thinking about interactions with multi-touch devices for at least the last 8 years as well as writing Objective-C for…

When I was about 16 years old, I was enrolled in a summertime art program at an art school in Orlando Florida. Every weekend, we would gather in a classroom and draw the subjects laid out in front of us. I wasn’t a particularly good student, partially because I didn’t really like the work of the teacher. So it was hard to appreciate taking instruction from her when sometimes I felt like she really didn’t know what she was talking about.

Being young, I was absolutely certain that I already knew everything that I could ever possibly know about everything. Ahh those were the days! To quote the song, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

That said, there was one particular incident that had a huge impact on me even to this day.

It was a warm sunny afternoon, and the class sat in a circle around a still life of seashells and fruit. The door to the classroom was op…

I’m going to start writing these things in my Blog so I can remember them myself.

Consider this a micro-blog entry….

How To Make Apache Not Prompt for a Password with an SSL Certificate :

cp server.key server.key.org

openssl rsa -in server.key.org -out server.key

This makes your server.key not require a password.

Warning: this may mean your key can be compromised, so be sure to keep it safe after you do this.

I have some exciting news to share!

Over the last couple of months I have been in negotiations with Wiley and Sons Publishing on a book proposal and we have finally settled on the final version of the table of contents. The contracts have been signed, and were moving forward. The name of the book will be “Cocoa and Cocoa Touch Programming” and it will naturally be about exactly that topic! It will be a part of their Apple Developer series of books, and should be going to print sometime this fall.

I’m really excited to be working on this project. For many years I thought it would be exciting to write a book and when this opportunity presented itself I immediately jumped at it.

Writing books is not particularly lucrative, so this doesn’t in any way supersede any of the fantastic work we’re doing here on iPhone and Mac OS X apps. This is simply an …

Just a little note… a few minor changes around the site here. New blog software that I wrote myself using Ruby on Rails … a bunch of html cleanups… better CSS… etc…

Most of which you’d never know if you just looked at the site, but I’m proud of it. It should make running things a little easier for me.

The biggest backend change is that I am slowly weening myself off Zope . It’s served me well over the last 10 years… but it just hasn’t kept up with the times. It was time to change.

Anyway, I’m liking it. It feels good.. shiny.. clean… fresh smelling…

If you run into issues with the site (broken links and the like), drop me an email.

It being the new year, I thought that I would do like everyone else, and list sort of a retrospective of 2008 technologies that have been making a significant difference in my life. However, instead of only looking at it as if it’s a retrospective, I’d rather look at it from the perspective of looking forward, meaning that this is a list of technologies that I’m currently so enjoying using that I really look forward to using them in 2009 to do more great things.

So, here’s a list of technologies that really helped me in 2008, and I really hope that I will get more opportunities to use in 2009:

iPhone and the App Store

Obviously, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the iPhone. If there’s any one thing that made a huge difference in my life last year, it’s been the iPhone and the App Store. I won’t rehash all the things that make the iPhone a wonderful platform to develop on….

Just wanted to wish all our customers and friends a very Happy Holidays!

It’s been a great year for Random Ideas, our best yet! And we’re thrilled and excited to welcome 2009 and the wonderful possibilities that it holds! We’re fortunate to have such awesome customers, and to be able to spend our time helping make a positive impact on people’s lives.

We’re particularly thankful to be bringing especially large donations to our charities this year. We realize that with the economy not doing as well as it should be, it can be hard to find the resources to donate to charity. So we’re very glad to be able to do that this year.

If you find yourself similarly blessed, I encourage you to also take a moment and try to give with your heart to those who need it.

Again, thanks for the great year! We look forward to bringing you more great products in 2009!

—

Jiva DeVoe
…

Back in November, Scotty over at the Mac Developer Network invited me to join him on his Mac Developer Roundtable podcast to talk about the iPhone SDK. I’m pleased to say it’s up now ! So head on over there and subscribe! We talk about all kinds of good stuff!

Really awesome UI testing article over at Cocoa with Love today.

From the article:

“Automated testing of application user interfaces can be tricky since user interfaces are designed for use by humans not automated tools. The iPhone is particularly challenging since existing tools that aid user interface testing on the Mac are not available. This post will show you a way to run automated, scripted tests on an iPhone app’s user interface.”

Just a little heads up… a new Edibles and a new What’s Goin Down just popped up in the App Store. Just some bug fixes really. We have some really REALLY cool stuff coming for those apps that I can’t talk about yet… but we wanted to take a brief side jump to fix a couple of minor issues while you guys are waiting for the good stuff!

We also put up a new iZen Garden a week or so ago too! The new iZen Garden is LOADED with new features including an additional 50(!!!) new elements you can place, and 4 more relaxation sound tracks! The new elements include things like a TON of new fossils, shells, and totally new: Fall leaves!

iZen Garden

Figure: * iZen Garden

We’re excited because this is the best iZen Garden yet! It’s got a few other new features too, but you have to download it to see em!…

I won’t quote the email directly, because I haven’t asked permission, but I just had to share this.

I got an email tonight from a customer using Edibles telling me how he’s using it to track the fat in his foods to help him lower his blood sugar and avoid diabetes. He said his family has a history of diabetes, and as a result, he tracks his blood sugar levels. He said that after just one day of using Edibles to track his food, and thus adjusting his diet, he’s been able to lower his blood sugar by 20 points!¹

That’s awesome! That’s what this is all about – right there! That’s the dharma. Enabling people to make positive changes in their lives either through improved diet, or meditation, or whatever.

As a side, related note. It felt GREAT making out our charity checks this quarter. Thanks to strong app store sales, we were really able to contribute significantly back to t…

Hey there! I’m excited to announce we’ve released another new iPhone app! This one is called What’s Goin Down and it’s a pocket network monitor for network administrators.

Years ago, I made my living writing network apps, and worked for a network bandwidth company called Opnix. It was the dot-com days, and we had an awesome datacenter that hosted our customer’s servers. Anyway, as part of that, I got to know a lot about networking, and spent a lot of time with network admins. When I saw the iPhone, I thought “Wow, what a perfect little portable network monitoring platform!” So I put together “What’s Goin Down”.

The premise is simple, you configure your TCP based servers in What’s Goin Down, then, whenever you want to check the status of your servers, you fire up the app, and it goes out and connects to each of them. If it’s su…

Just a heads up… this past week I had the great honor of participating in the Mac Developer Roundtable podcast hosted over at the Mac Developer Network. The topic was developer groups and the discussion was excellent! Go download it and check it out! It’s filled with a whole bunch of tips and information about participating in, and starting user/developer groups.

Just a heads up – I had the great privilege of being invited to contribute to the Mac SB Podcast this month on Privacy. It was great fun, and now it’s been posted. So, if you care to hear my horrible radio voice talk about customer privacy and things… go check it out.

Wow, it’s been a tremendous month, almost 2, since the App store opened. In that time we released another app Edibles ! And we released a new version of iZen Garden .

The new iZen Garden has been a tremendous success! With excellent reviews all around. The most popular new feature seems to be the relaxation sound tracks. We’re really glad we kept that feature in. It ALMOST went on the cutting room floor. But we pushed a little harder and got it in there.

Edibles has been received very well as well! TUAW gave us an excellent review and it was even picked up on MacWorld.com . Exciting times! Oh! And our charity for Edibles will be Feed The Children…

In case you’ve been living under a rock… Apple released the iPhone 3g last week. My wife and I stood outside the San Tan Village Apple store for a good 4 hours last friday to buy her one. Thankfully, the weather cooperated and it was a nice pleasant morning.

As part of all this, we released two apps for the iPhone – iZen Garden , and Tiles .

Both apps are awesome fun, and you should definitely check them out!

Tiles is a sliding tile (15 puzzle) I developed on a spur of the moment. I had been thinking about how nicely the touch screen on the iPhone would lend itself to sliding things around in a grid. During research on the project, I discovered that there’s actually quite a bit of history behind the 15 puzzle . I had no idea it had been inve…

Just a little note to send kudos to Snowmint Creative Solutions for their SM2DGraph Framework , which is an excellent open source graphing solution.

Posting this just so if someone else runs into the problem they’ll hopefully find this and find the solution.

I like to use OCUnit:http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/UnitTesting/Articles/CreatingTests.html for unit testing my Objective-C code. PowerCard has unit tests using this, and I was starting a new project, and set it up, and wrote some unit tests. I started to see the following error:

This persisted even with the simplest of test cases like:

Seemed to have something to do with the STAssertEqualObjects macro.

Anyway, after much digging and trying to figure out what the problem was. I discovered it was because I had enabled the “C99” setting in the C Language Dialect setting of my target instead of using “GNU99”. I have wo…

One of the weblogs that I read relatively regularly belongs to Andy Hunt of Pragmatic Programmers
fame. ¹

Last week he had an article about how writing software is similar to making hit movies. I have actually thought this myself on several occasions. It occurred to me originally while watching a documentary on how a particular movie was made (I think it might have been one of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy). While watching this documentary, I was struck by how all of these people with different specific talents were able to come together to produce a single unified work that was every bit as complex as some major software projects, yes was cohesive and seemless.

Now Andy makes the point that it is just as impossible to cre…

Or, Why freezing is good for popscicles, but not code.

Someone tell me, what does “Feature complete” mean anyway? Furthermore, define “Code Freeze” for me too.

Project managers use these terms like a warm fuzzy blanket to give them security when those cold hard release deadlines are rearing their ugly heads. But my question is, until you actually have a fully releasable product, how can you possibly even pretend to say your product is “Feature complete” or in a “Code Freeze”? Typically, they like to apply these terms as the application is going into a QA code-n-fix stage.

Isn’t the definition of releaseable software, software which has been 100% tested and verified as working?

Can you, as a developer, honestly say that any part of your app is “complete” before it is 100% tested and verified as working? And if you can say your feature is “complete” before it’s 100% tested…

Apple doesn’t document the API for interfacing with iCal, but it
does save it’s files as industry standard iCalendar
files .
I went looking recently for a python module to interface with iCal,
and couldn’t find one. But I DID find Rod Schmidt’s excellent article
for doing the same thing with Ruby.

So, naturally, I ported his solution to Python! It seems to even work!

Anyway, YMMV, no warranty implied. Do with it as you see fit.

Download

I bought iLife ’ 04 this weekend. I was excited to get the new features for iPhoto such as photo sharing, ratings, and smart groups. I was also excited to try out garage band. The truth is I have no idea how to play any instruments, and I have no musical talent whatsoever. I had heard that a garage band made it really easy to create music. So I thought it would be fun to experiment with it. Generally speaking, I’ve been very pleased with what I’ve got.

I am amazed at how it simple software tool enables me and my family to be so much more creative than we might be without it. With iLife, we’re able to pursue many interests that would normally be outside of our reach. Things like digital photography, music, movie making, etc.. I’ll write more about this in another article after I had an opportunity to contemplate the impact that this is having o…