About a year ago, when the iPhone 3G came out, I had that conversation with Karen – “Do you want to upgrade?”. We knew we wanted to get her an iPhone… so how to arrange it. I was betting then that there’d be another upgrade this summer (June), so we got her a 3G and I waited. Yesterday, after the lines had died down and initial flurry was over, I went and purchased an iPhone 3GS to replace my original, bought-the-first-day iPhone.
(Yeah, I’ve been playing with it pretty solidly – what’d you expect?)
So my impressions a day later?
- It is noticeably faster. I upgraded my first gen phone to iPhone OS 3.0 and it was a bit pokey in places. Particularly the email and the first unlock screen. Seemed like it always paused on the unlock, which really screwed up my patterns of using the phone for a while. With the 3GS, the email is really quick – much more like whipping through email on a desktop machine, and there is zero pause in the unlock panel.
- That video thing is cool. Had to try it out – so I went outside and captured a bit of video with a honeybee in our front yard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scMgmByu97c. The sharing from the phone right into YouTube was really nice too. I’m not much of a YouTube user, but I can see where I might start using a lot more. Never thought I’d want a camera on my phone either… I’m looking forward to the moment when I get the facebook video upload integration too – that’s where I’m thinking I’ll share most of the videos to be honest.
- Speaking of cameras, the new one is a LOT better. The light balance is greatly improved, and while it was interesting to work the original iphone camera around to avoid that terrible white-light bloom problem, it was a pain. The new camera makes that really easy.
There’s a lot more that I’m sure I’m missing from the phone as yet – things I’ll learn from watching Brad do some crazy ass thing with his phone at the Luau some thursday night, and then I’ll be all over him asking “Awright you – how’d ya do that”. Apple even sent me a nice email today saying “Thanks for buying a new iPhone, here’s some cool things you can do with it”. That’s pretty cool outreach.
So I’m happy with, and very glad I waited for the upgrade. I do wonder what’ll come out next year….
Oh yeah – all iPhone this time. I’ve been a bit incommunicado of late – just darned busy. Spending a bit of weekend time teaching iPhone for OReilly, which has been interesting as well as rewarding. This past weekend was at Loyola in Chicago with 9 students – again a whole different kind of crowd from the folks I taught in either San Francisco or here in Seattle.
While I’ve been working on this coursework, Beth has been learning about iPhone development, sometimes helping at the classes and other times working on her own. It’s been really interesting to see the responses to her emails on the cocoa-dev mailing list. Some incredibly good help, a few jerks and their responses.
Beth’s made a screen cast talking about one of her challenges: doing the Interface Builder work to put together a TabBarController and a NavController. A common enough pattern for utility iPhone applications, and one that isn’t easy to explain or see when it comes to Interface Builder.
I think getting people used to using Interface Builder, including learning how to debug it and what happens when you make mistakes, is one of the biggest bonus’ of the in-person class. There’s a huge amount to that tool that just isn’t obvious until you see someone do it.
Heh – it’d be nice if the refactoring tools in Xcode would understand when you’d renamed an outlet too. That’s an interesting error for a newbie to run into. All of a sudden they’re going “Hey, what’s the key value coding thing and what did I do to make an undefined key?!?!”.
Anyway, check out Beth’s screencast if you’re interested in iPhone development. It’s well done.
Kris Markel let me know today via Twitter that Seattle Bus made Todd Bishop’s Top 5 list of iPhone apps. A very nice to thing to hear indeed!
It’s especially nice news coming back from WWDC where my good friends at Rogue Sheep won the Apple Design Award for .
For the past several months, I’ve been coding away madly for a new iPhone application – a course to teach other folks the basics of programming on the iPhone. I’m developing the course for OReilly Media and will be teaching at least the first few iterations of it – probably more.
My first course is now available for signup if you’re interested:
http://youriphoneapp.eventbrite.com/. It’s a two day course – April 25th and 26th, from 8am to 5pm.
UPDATE:
If you’re interested in attending this beta course, use the discount code “iphonedev” when signing up – that should give you $900 off, reducing the cost of the beta session to $300.
We were going to try and provide the first course at no-cost to attendees in return for feedback, but the realities of today’s economic situation mean that we’ve got to cover at least the basic costs for this one. I’m really jazzed about getting this out there – I’ve been working for quite a while to make this as absolutely stellar as I can manage!
I received the email notification tonight – Seattle Bus 1.2 is now available for sale again on the App Store. The new version is all about the new parser which is able to read the not-quite-valid HTML page that provides the data from King County Metro’s tracker site . Hopefully this will completely resolve the issues we saw once a quarter then the MyBus.org site became somewhat unusable for the better part of 10 days.
Seattle Bus 1.2.0 has been pushed up to the App Store for application review. This update changes out the underlying parser, allowing the application to use King County’s provided real-time data feed (http://trackerloc.kingcounty.gov/avl.jsp) instead of the one hosted by UW (http://mybus.org/metrokc/avl.jsp).
While the MyBus.org site has been responding fine for the past few weeks, we’ve now seen multiple times over the past year when their site has been down and/or unresponsive to the point of breaking the Seattle Bus application. Hopefully this will fully resolve it. A future point update may allow users to choose between real-time trackers, but that hasn’t been coded in yet and I hope won’t be necessary.
I’ll post an update when it’s past review and is available for purchase again on the iTunes AppStore.
Since I haven’t been able to get the site providing the data back online within the week, I’ve temporarily removed Seattle Bus from sale on the AppStore. I’m working on a “fix” (changing the data provider) now that will hopefully be available soon.
I apologize for the trouble and annoyances.
If you have the application already, it’s worth noting that the application does work periodically. Unfortunately, the data feed is just so inconsistent as to be nearly useless.
UPDATE:
I have a new parser functioning correctly with by MyBus.org and King County’s Metro Tracker site. The update should be uploaded to the AppStore shortly. I’ll post when I get the new version uploaded, and when it’s available.
I must say, it’s incredibly embarrassing that the King County site doesn’t even emit well formed HTML. The new parser is an interesting screen-scrape accumulation of regular expressions to pull out the relevant data. At least they’re posting it online…
A quick update for folks looking for help with Seattle Bus:
The site that the application uses for it’s data source (mybus.org) has been intermittently available recently, and today it’s been down completely. This is a site run at the University of Washington, and I’m afraid I don’t have a direct contact with the administrators.
There is another site with similar data provided by King County Metro (not as well structured) – so I may end up re-writing my scraper/parser to pull data from that site as I have no details on when or if MyBus.org will come back online.
I wish there was a better way of providing this data to you – I’ll keep everyone informed through this developer diary as I have updates.
route-me – Google Code (via /.) is a mapping library for the iPhone that uses OpenStreetMap instead of Microsoft or Google’s mapping engines. It’s available under a BSD license and has some reasonable “how to embed” information on the wiki pages of the Google Code site to get you rolling.
I knew about OpenStreetMap from OSCON last year (or maybe even the year before) – but I had no idea that someone had put together this library. The terms of service for Google Maps are actually somewhat restrictive, Microsoft is quite a bit better, but this really tops them all. The mapping is also incredibly good. The united states have been pretty lucky that the information is technically “free”, even if finding it in published forms that is useful can be tricky. Other countries are FAR less open. The UK, for example has incredible ordinance survey maps, but they aren’t considered “public information” there.
Anyway, if you’re considering a mapping component to your iphone application consider checking this out.
I’m very pleased to see Disney’s Fairies Fly (iPhone/iPod Touch game) available on iTunes. While you won’t find my name in any credits on the application, I was responsible for the underpinning of some of it – one of the few things that I’ve done within Disney that isn’t “just plumbing”.
The game is $4.99 on the iTunes store – a “side scroller” where you fly one of several fairies around collecting some bits and avoiding others. I didn’t work on the game engine (done in OpenGL) – I put together the menus and animation all around the game system, up until I had to hand it off because I ran out of time to spend on a “summer project” outside of my normal areas of responsibility at work.
I’m really pleased with the polish and effect that went into the game – the crew developing the application went to great lengths to make sure the artwork was first class, including the renders of the fairies flying about. I think it’s really going to set a new bar on the quality of artwork and production values for some of the games.
I’m sorry that some of my hardest work didn’t make the cut – there was more animation with the fairies floating about – but the memory constraints on the device made adding that animation set (and the associated memory needed to do it in Core Animation) just too much and led to instability in the game.
A huge congrats to my friends and coworkers at mDisney (the group that incited this project and ran it through to completion) for a great launch and a great app that’s climbing the ranks of iPhone games (as I write this, it’s up to 81 of 100, from 93 of 100 last night).
