Instead of sending me spam email advertising your new GPS service, how about pulling your finger out and providing the MMS service that Apple have been dubiously promoting for around six months now? (“Late Summer” my arse).

The moment I can get an iPhone on Verizon, you guys are toast.

Bests,

Andrew

Part of that is because I’ve left behind the sun-drenched beaches of Los Angeles for the slightly chillier climate of the Bay Area – San Francisco to be precise. Despite dropping about 10 degrees in temperature (5.5 degrees, Celsius readers) I’m very much enjoying the change. It’s nice being back in a city where walking and public transport are a part of everyday life, definitely an improvement over the car-centric nature of Los Angeles. Also I’m living in the North Beach district which means I have a huuge number of bars, restaurants and shops just a few blocks away, which is fantastic for those summer weekends and evenings

And with a change of city comes a change of job! About a month ago I started at LucasArts and so far it’s been brilliant. I’m part of a team working on something that’s fantastically exciting, but also highly highly confidential and several years away. I’ve always avoided talking about work here other than in the abstract and that’ll continue, but I do look forward to the day when I can say more

This of course means that I’m no longer at Seven, something that has mixed emotions for me. On one hand there’s some great people I’ll really miss working with, but on the other the last twelve months were pretty grim with layoffs, salary cuts, and the public lawsuit around our game, Scratch: The Ultimate DJ.

I think all of us at Seven felt that Scratch had the potential to be pretty special so having it taken away was hard, and not helped by then seeing our former publisher hawk the game at E3 or various parties. Or butcher our original concept art into a pretty horrific website. But hey, it’s their game now. I’m not sure if they’ll ever manage to release it, but if they do hopefully they’ll stay true to the game and it won’t be just another button-pressing music game.

Being bought by Activision, even with the loss of Scratch, is definitely the best thing that could have happened to Seven. I wish all those guys the best of luck and look forward to seeing what they come up with next.

On a totally different note, now that life should be a little less hectic I’m going to hopefully have a lot more time to devote to personal projects. On the Whiist side there’s a few things in progress that I really need to finalize so I can release a new version. I also have a new plugin for Windows Home Server that was part of Whiist but made more sense as a standalone item.

And then there’s the iPhone… Some of the changes in 3.0 while not outright breaking Photo Speed Dial have definitely made it less useful (such as the OS now prompting before initiating calls from 3rd party apps, urghh!). This weekend will be dedicated to deciding if and how I’ll try to work around these issues. I have a number of changes for Better Christmas List that I’m grouping together into a bigger release for later this year. It might just be me, but I tend not to think about Christmas shopping until at least September I also have a couple of ideas/prototypes for new apps that I’ve been working on,  hopefully things that will stand out in some way from the gazillion apps that are now to be found on the app store!

Anyway, I’m off to play the Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition that we just released

The kudos of being selected gets your app a place in the “Staff Favorites” on iTunes, and the “What’s Hot” section of the iPhone App Store. This is prime billing, and almost as good as being in the top 10 list.

But what effect does this have on sales? Well so far it seems like a 2x effect

Notes:

• Stats supplied by the most excellent Pinch Media service
• Retail price has remained $2.99 since launch
• The last orange entry is a partial day and incomplete
• Better Christmas List is #1 on the staff favorite and What’s Hot list
• After being featured Better Christmas List is now #61 in the top paid apps list

I’ve omitted actual sales figures from the above because I don’t feel it’s relevant, but suffice to say that before being featured daily sales were several hundred.

Since being released in early November I saw a steady day over day increase in daily sales (before being featured). This is in contrast to most apps that experience a boom and then a decline, but is likely to be a result of being a festive app and Christmas approaching. I expect sales to fall off a cliff in the next week or so

1. Over the air downloads via 3G (and Edge) are limited to 10MB
2. Not only does the mobile iTunes store lack the ability to filter larger podcasts, but nowhere is the size of a podcast shown!

I can kind-of-sort-of-perhaps see the rationale behind limiting download sizes, both to alleviate strain on the AT&T network and preserve battery life (more the former than the latter I suspect), but not being able to filter non-eligible podcasts (manually or visually) is a big usability issue if you’re on 3G.

But wait! In 2.2 there’s another podcast option that I don’t believe has had much press:

Tapping the name of a podcast will cause it to stream instead of download, with no 10MB limit involved (so much for the battery life theory).  At first I thought this was only a preview, but you can listen to entire shows and even watch video podcasts – which are full quality and not lower-resolution as Youtube videos on 3G are.

This would be super cool except for one thing – this mode almost seems a little unfinished for a couple of reasons.

1. It’s practically hidden – no music-store-like play buttons. I only found it by looking to see if there was more info for shows (like size!)
2. Playback doesn’t occur in the iPod App, and while you can return to the home screen without stopping playback headphone controls do not work (instead they start the iPod playing!).
3. Only certain podcasts appear to work with others returning errors about invalid formats. (This could be a network issue though – my 3G fluctuates a lot at work).
4. Unlike the iPod App, video is only supported in landscape mode. A minor niggle but there’s a podcasts with video or graphics that I like to play at work and glance at on my docked iPhone.
5. Videos remain in high-quality on 3G, whereas Youtube intentionally delivers lower quality versions even on 3G.

Very interesting!

I’m pretty pleased with this application. My first app (Photo Speed Dial) was really an exercise in learning Cocoa/Objective-C and the iPhone SDK and tools. Everything took time and there were several things that I basically did wrong, things that made certain aspects harder than they needed to be or fought against Cocoa’s MVC pattern.

Lessons learned. This time around I was able to focus entirely on the design of the application and it really showed both in development time and the end product. Inspired by the FriendFeed 24 hour app challenge my aim was to try and put together an attractive and useful app over the weekend. I didn’t quite manage that but came in at around 72 hours total.

During the development process I kept a log and screenshots. When I get time I plan to write them up as a post, mostly for my own edification and a self-reminder how useful design and planning can be even for personal projects.

Until then… Buy my app!

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd Edition)

Due to the stringent SDK NDA there are no "Programming for the iPhone" type books currently available. However that are still plenty of books that can teach you how to program the iPhone.

Because the iPhone SDK is built upon the Cocoa foundation framework, and the iPhone UIKit framework is heavily influenced by the regular OSX AppKit, many of the same principles apply. In addition the tools used to create regular Mac apps are the same as used for the iPhone.

If you want a book that offers a quick way to get up to speed on the iPhone, and that serves as a great reference to both Objective-C and Cocoa, then look no further. This book’s extremely readable and you can pickup a lot without writing every sample. Being new to XCode / Interface Builder I also found some of the workflow tips to be extremely helpful. Single-pane all the way!

This book definitely helped me get to grips with Objective-C / Cocoa (some areas of which I still find just odd, but more on those later). If/when the NDA restrictions are lifted I wouldn’t be surprised if this is still a better starting guide for iPhone programming than some of the dedicated books.

The interface is a bit confusing, particularly the keyboard handling in the editor. (the location of done/save should really be switched).

Here’s a picture I took in palm springs on Saturday, though images don’t appear to be shown inlined.

Note: This tutorial allows you to add music/videos/podcasts from multiple machines. If you just want to sync PIM (Contacts/Calenders etc) on one machine and media on another there’s a simpler way.  On the computer you want to sync contacts/calendar with select only these items and perform a sync. Now, on the second machine enable Music/Photos/Etc and perform a second sync. You will be warned the media library will be deleted, but as there’s no media this is fine

Because I do most of my music listening at work and my Calendar/Address book are kept in Outlook I have my iPhone setup to sync with my office PC.  When I’m at home however I find I also want to put music/podcasts/videos on my iPhone for the weekend or trips.

Normally it’s only possible to sync media on an iPhone with one computer. If you try to use a second computer you get the warning below that "the iPhone XXX is synced with another iTunes library. Do you want to erase this iPhone and sync with this iTunes library"?

However, I’ve found an easy fix for this. In the instructions below I’ll show how to modify any iTunes Library so it can also be synced with your iPhone. You can then either manually manage your iPhone on a second computer, or sync different data on different machines (E.g. Music at home, Contacts/Calendar at work).

The instructions below use the example of modifying the iTunes library on my home Mac to work with my existing iPhone/PC setup. If your existing library is on a Mac, or both machines are of the same type, then the steps are identical.

Notes

• On the PC you can find your iTunes folder in your "My Music" (XP) or "Music" (Vista) directory. On the Mac it is in your Music directory.
• For the editing part, I recommend UltraEdit on the PC and a combination of TextExit / HexEdit on the Mac. Any hex editor will do, and you only need to edit files on the second machine.
• After completing these steps you will be able to sync your iPhone with both computers, either by normal syncing or choosing one machine to manually manage your music and videos. Unless you also keep your music libraries in sync, I recommend you do not attempt to normal sync the same types of data on both machines.

Backup Your Library

On the machine you want to sync with, backup "iTunes Music Library.xml" and "iTunes Music Library" (Tunes Music Library.itl on PC) to a safe location. These are the files you will be modifying.

1) Find your iTunes Library ID

On the machine your iPhone currently syncs with, open "iTunes Music Library.xml" with a text editor and find the entry between the <string></string> tags, after "Library Persistent ID". In the example below this is 8B6C633F7DACB74B. Copy this entry exactly to a piece of paper, email, temporary file etc. You can then close this file.

2) Change your Library ID

iTunes stores your library information in two places. An XML file and a binary file. You now need to change the ID in both so they match your other library.

Make sure iTunes is not running.

On the machine you want to sync with open "iTunes Music Library.xml" in a text editor. Again, find the entry between the <string></string> tags after "Library Persistent ID" and copy this entry exactly. This time you can use the clipboard if you wish.

When you have a copy, replace this entry with the one you copied in part 1. Make sure you do not change anything else, and the length of the entry is 16 characters/digits. Save this file and close it.

In the Hex Editor, open "iTunes Music Library" (Tunes Music Library.itl on PC).

Select "Find and Replace" from the Edit menu. Make sure "Hex" matching is selected (not ASCII). In "Find" enter the ID you took a note of in Part 1. In Replace, enter the ID you copied at the start of Part 2. Choose Replace All, there should be one match.

Save this file and close it.

Success!

Start iTunes on the machine you wish to sync with and plug in your iPhone. When you select "Manually manage music and videos" you will no longer be prompted to erase your data, nor will the files on your iPhone be grayed out.

Additional Notes

Previously I’ve found that intentionally corrupting the binary "iTunes Library" file (e.g. replacing it with a text file) would cause iTunes to regenerate it using the XML data. This no longer appears to work for me in iTunes 7.6.1 and the "repaired" file only contains a few songs. This may be because I keep my music on an external drive but I cannot say for sure. Either way, patching the binary file does not take long and removes any chance of later problems.

It’s very iPhone orientated but has been done incredibly well. The interface is very slick and offers easy access to the most important areas of the admin panel. My only niggle is that the writing section is a little plain. It’d be great if there was an easy way to use some simple markup or insert links (although without copy&paste I’m not sure how useful it’d be anyway!)

One thing that’s very neat is that auto-save still works, which is always welcome when typing large amounts of text into a browser

I also came across wPhone which is another iPhone management plugin. It’s also well done but overall I prefer the look and feel of Mobile Admin.

This

It’s disappointing that the iPhone doesn’t have any support for saving these sort of media files to memory though. While playing a media file on a webpage you are unable to use Safari, although you can return to the home screen and do other things.

Of course, the best solution would be for the iPhone version of iTunes to support downloading of new podcasts to your phone, but I suspect that is some way off. Hopefully the new remote syncing capabilities of the Zune will kick Apple into gear though