Ad-hoc distribution on the iPhone is super tricky. Here I explain how you can fail at the last hurdle so Windows users won’t be able to install the app. It’s because of the Mac resource fork getting into the zip archive, but you can avoid this problem…
What Color is My Pixel? Image based color picker on iPhone
March 6, 2009 By 52 Comments
iPhone’s cocoa touch doesn’t seem to have a call to get pixel color from the screen or an image, which I needed to make a simple image based color picker. Here’s a solution to do this using an offscreen graphics context we can use to get pixel by pixel data from the image. I’ve wrapped up the technique in a new class ColorPickerImageView and there’s a complete demo XCode project you can download to see it in action.
360 iDev iPhone conference, days 2&3
March 5, 2009 By 1 Comment
360 iDev is over. Wow. Totally awesome conference. There were about 170 of us there (?) and we had 47 session over 3+1 days. I missed several sessions I wanted to see because of overlap or just brain melt. But that’s the kind of problem you want to have right – too much of a [...]
360 iDev iPhone Conference day 1
March 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Years of hard work with the US immigration system has me living and working in San Francisco just north of Silicon Valley, and I make sure to get to all the awesome iPhone developer events here: iPhone Dev Camp, Silicon Valley Developer’s Meetup, and now 360 iDev iPhone Conference which is on right now. Day [...]
iPhone Calling Card and Travel Guide
February 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment
I’ve updated the web site for Smart Caller with an iPhone Calling Card Guide, Guide for Travel with iPhone, news page, etc, to better support customers.
Apple’s TV Ad Causes Hit Tennis Sales Spike?
February 22, 2009 By 2 Comments
On Feb 17th I had a 5x sales spike in my iPhone game Hit Tennis. Cool – a little extra income, but what caused the spike? I looked at Google Analytics and over the next couple of days I Googled and Yahooed looking for a new review or something, but nothing. The only clue I [...]
UITables with Downloaded Images – Easy Asynchronous Code
February 21, 2009 By 211 Comments
How do you download images from the web and display them in a UITableView that scrolls smoothly and never lags? You need a multi-threaded app! Cocoa makes it easy… I’ll show you how I did it in just 40 lines of code and with no thread safe headaches…
Best Books for iPhone Development
January 15, 2009 By 15 Comments
Some brilliant iPhone developer books are out now which are great for learning iPhone native app and web development, and handy references for existing Cocoa Touch experts. In this article I review several titles and give you pick of the best four for learning the native SDK and Objective-C programming: iPhone in Action; Beginning iPhone Development – Exploring the iPhone SDK; Learn Objective-C on the Mac; The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook.
Christmas Day 4x sales boost for iPhone Games – Hit Tennis numbers
December 28, 2008 By 2 Comments
iTunes Connect just opened its doors after the Christmas break, allowing iPhone developers (me!) to log in and check our sales stats for Christmas. I’m very pleased to discover that Apple managed to get some extra pressies under the tree for me this year in the form of 4x sales increase for Christmas! Check out [...]
Smart Caller is now live in the App Store!
December 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment
It took a lot of time, but I’m thrilled to announce that Smart Caller is now live in the App Store! Click here to download it for free. Its not available in all countries yet because I need to add a feature for international exit code choice for Japan and countries in South America, but [...]
First 24 hrs Going Well for Hit Tennis
November 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment
In the first 24hrs, Hit Tennis has over 20,000 free downloads. I think its in the top 50 for free games, and I got some good press at Pocket Gamer in the UK. Today bugfixes.
Hit Tennis game for iPhone iPod touch
November 23, 2008 By 2 Comments
I just released Hit Tennis for the iPhone and iPod touch, its available now on the app store!
iPhone App Store Price and Category Analysis
October 16, 2008 By 1 Comment
The iPhone app store is bursting with apps and I wanted to put some numbers to it. (I should have just looked here: http://projectx.mobclix.com/appstore/ :-). A little copy, paste, and Excel later I have a spread sheet with 5,293 apps from Oct 16th 2008 in the US app store. 99c is the most popular price [...]
Smart Caller comming soon, testers apply now.
September 25, 2008 By 2 Comments
The first version of Smart Caller, the iPhone calling card software for making effortless and affordable international calls from your iPhone without needing WiFi, has been submitted to Apple. I hope it will be coming to the app store soon, and its free! Mean time I’m looking for a few additional testers before its released. [...]
iPhone vs ZX Spectrum vs Nintendo DS by ngmoco’s Neil Young
September 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment
From iPhoneDevCamp2, Neil Youngs excellent presentation about iPhone compared to ZX Spectrum and Nintendo DS. I started on the beloved ZX Spectrum, and I’m now focusing on iPhone, so I took this very personally while sitting in the audience. Neil Young > iPhone is greater than… from Dom Sagolla on Vimeo.
Smart Caller for iPhone
September 2, 2008 By 5 Comments
I have a new venture: Smart Caller – save on international calls with calling card iPhone integration. This native iPhone app has built in smarts to know how to dial any country in the world, and it can do it with an integrated calling card to get great rates. Hopefully, coming soon to the Apple [...]
Bottlenecks – disk, cpu, synchronization, etc
April 26, 2008 By 1 Comment
Bottlenecks are the parts of the system that limit performance. The system is made up of multiple parts that can run in parallel, for example the disk can be doing disk IO at the same time as the CPU is running some code, but when the system is at its maximum throughput then one of [...]
MarkJ’s Rules for Good Software Performance
April 21, 2008 By 1 Comment
To get good performance from your software applications your team needs to follow MarkJ’s Rules of Good Software Performance: 1) Measure first and optimize second – find bottlenecks , ie don’t guess where a performance problem might be before you have one, find the slow part of the system through testing. In performance engineering it’s [...]
Scalability and Other Meanings of Performance
April 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment
In Throughput and Response Time I described the essence of what we mean by software performance, but there are some additional meanings that are important to consider in many cases. So here is a bigger list of what we mean when we talk about performance: Response Time Throughput Scalability Stability Resource Utilization, eg memory footprint [...]
Throughput and response time
April 16, 2008 By 3 Comments
What does ‘performance’ mean? Software performance is mostly about how fast the software goes and how much work it can handle. To discuss performance we need more accurate terms than ‘speed’. The two most important concepts are: Response time – how quickly the system responds to request Throughput – how much work can it do [...]
