So so soooo busy....

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

We've got even more in the queue so keep watching us! We have new updates coming for our existing apps that I know you guys will be thrilled about, and more new apps being built too! So thank you to all our customers for your support and feedback!

iZen Garden, Tiles, App Store, Fun!

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 invented in the 1800s!

Anyway, Tiles let's you do more than just a 4x4 grid, you can do a 3x3 if you're a wimp, or if you're a real manly man, you can attempt a 6x6 puzzle. I'd argue that these are every bit as hard as a Rubik's cube to solve... at least for my meager puzzle solving abilities.

iZen Garden is a portable Zen Garden in your iPhone. If you don't know what a Zen Garden is, look it up over at wikipedia . It was the first app I really thought seriously about developing on the iPhone. It seemed like a logical way to "do the dharma" in iPhone development.

We were thrilled that iZen Garden was chosen as a Staff Favorite! That made us very proud! And also was picked up at CNNMoney and Silicon Republic And on Monday, Erica Sadun was kind enough to give us a pretty positive review over at TUAW

We also decided we would take 5% of our profits from iZen Garden and donate it to a Tibetan charity, so we're spreading the dharma in two ways!

We plan to do the same with Tiles, but have not yet settled on a charity for it.

All that said, we are really excited for the potential that the App store opens up, and really looking forward to making more apps for it. It seems like every time I finish an app, I come up with 4 more ideas!

So go check out the apps! And watch this space for more in the future!

Adventures in (BBQ) Pot Smoking

UPDATE: Just wanted to clarify, since more than one person has only read the first 2 paragraphs of this and then concluded I am a pothead. This is a BBQ Smoker!!! NOT actually a device for smoking other... uh things.

So for those of you who don't know... (all one or two of you that I flatter myself by thinking you read my blog) I like to smoke things. I think virtually any experience can be improved by a good smoke.

I originally got curious about it after reading Bill Bumgarner raving about his Big Green Egg which he uses and raves about for his smoking adventures. Since that time, I've smoked all sorts of things, but in particular I find smoking pork to be particularly satisfying and tasty.

Oh, you thought I was talking about something else? Oh pulheez...

Anyway.. back to smoking.

Bill raves about his BGE, and in fact it's widely known to be the best smoker made. Unfortunately though, with about $1000 price tag (once you add in a nest and sundry other accessories), well, let's just say I like BBQ... but not $1000 worth of liking.

Then I saw Alton Brown describe his version of the Big Green Egg whereupon he took a terracotta pot from home depot, and through a system of hotplate, wood chips, and patience... created himself an excellent smoker for under $100.

Now I enjoy building things too... and I couldn't resist improving on this, so I took it upon myself to make the Little Brown Egg to end all Little Brown Eggs.

Enter... the BIG BROWN EGG! Or something.... I need a better name for it...

Figure: The Big Brown Egg

Anyway...

In my design, the first thing that had to go was the hot plate. When I researched Alton's design on the internet, I heard a lot of people experiencing a lot of problems with the hot plates. From the fuses shutting off due to the heat, to them just failing to work after a while. Besides, to me, there's nothing that can replace the flavor of a real charcoal fire. So I first decided to try putting a fire right in the bottom of my pot. The problem is, I found they kept cracking, which would cause quite the excessive heat loss.

Figure: Charcoal > Electricity

I visited a shop that sold fire pits to research how they do it, and they recommended putting sand in the bottom of the pot. I thought this was a good idea, but it required some way of getting the venting from the bottom of the pot to the top of the sand.

To resolve this problem, I bought another smaller pot and placed it, inverted, in the bottom of the big pot. This enabled me to surround the bottom pot with sand and thus, raise the coals up off the bottom of the terra cotta. This seemed to work great.

Figure: Pot in bottom raises the vent holes above the sand.

Next, I wanted to have better control over the air flow without exposing the meat to too much cool air. The BGE has a big chimney on top which has a lid that is vented, so I bought a recessed light drill bit that enabled me to drill a 4 inch diameter hole in the top pot. On top of this hole I placed another overturned small pot that I could move and adjust to adjust air flow.

Figure: 4in. Diameter Hole Drilled in top (bottom) of lid pot

Figure: Smaller pot rests over the vent hole for control of air flow. Thermometer goes in drain hole of lid pot. Slide to the side to allow air to escape.

Finally, I thought it would be really cool to hack together a ventilation system that would also force air up from the bottom vents to maintain a precise heat. A trip to my local Fry's Electronics resulted in the purchase of a project box, a 12v CPU cooling fan, a potentiometer, and some battery mounts. I wired all of this together (soldering is fun!) so that I could control the fan air flow.

Figure: Fan Controller Box

Figure: The Top Showing the Knob

Figure: Fan - Truth is, the potentiometer doesn't get used because the fan is not variable speed. A plain switch would have worked.

I then built an air intake pipe beneath the smoker with it's end point blowing up into the bottom of the smoker. This was so that I could put the fan far enough away that it wouldn't melt from the heat of the smoker.

Figure: Air Intake Pipe in Bottom of Enclosure - Pot Rests on the bricks just above this.

Figure: The intake pipe from outside the enclosure. The fan just rests against the hole and blows air through the pipe into the bottom of the smoker.

As finishing touches, I built an enclosure for the smoker out of edging stones from Home Depot .

Figure: Smoker enclosure showing the grill grate and the bottom pot.

These are the pots I used for the bottom and top. Any size will do. Don't plan on moving it once you put it in place though. I noticed that despite my sand I still cracked my bottom pot, but with the enclosure and sand and everything else, I'm not losing any heat, so it really doesn't matter.

Of course all this would be in vain if it didn't work... and I am proud to say it works beautifully. With the fan running, and a bed of coals and wood chips in a pan with water, it maintains an almost perfect 225 degrees. I've done several picnic rib smokes lasting 4-5 hours, which results in awesome pork that breaks apart when you pull it off the grate. I'm not sure I'm up for the big 12+ hour boston butt smokes that Bill does... but I'm happy for my investment of probably less than $150 in total.

C99 considered harmful

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:

 syntax error before 'typeof'

This persisted even with the simplest of test cases like:

 -(void)testSomething;
 {
     STAssertEqualObjects(@"foo", @"bar", nil);
 }

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 wondered for a long time what the difference was. I guess now I know I should just use GNU99 for everything.