Über coolness ...

Saturday morning, I managed to get my app on my iPod. I was rather nervous about the whole process after reading various horror stories from fellow iPhone developers, but my worst fears didn't materialize. Lucky me I guess ... I followed religiously the howto sections of the developers' site to provision my device then get my certificate stuff in order and things were going well, until I ran into the first issue: there is no NSCalendarDate on the device (bummer!). Now, this is really my fault since I failed to paid attention to the fact that, as stated in the documentation, that particular class is on its way to be deprecated ... and missing from the iPhone OS. The surprising thing, though, is that that class is available when targeting the simulator ... Anyhow, that wasn't a huge drama and after a bit of cleanup, I was onto the next issues: the dreaded 0xE800003A and 0xE8000036 ... errors :-|

The first one, is easy to fix after a bit of googling as for the second one, it is also kinda easy to fix since it only occurs when I try to install a new built over an older one. When it occurs, which isn't all the time but rather often (read 9 out of 10), I just delete the older version from the home screen, before hitting Build & Go or Go. Which is a bit of a bummer 'cause each time I lose whatever state & data my app was in ... :-(

Anyhow, now that the app is on the device we are finally ready for our big event ... and with enough time to spare so that we have been improving the app ;-)

What the heck are you listening to?

Here's a little something I'd like to share with you (yes, that's you Usman), and for once, it's not something that I have heard on the The Signal, but rather something I stumbled upon in Cult Of Mac of all place. Be ready, though, for some extremely "weird" music:

Unfortunatly, there doesn't seems to be any available audio files on the SLOrk project site ...

Not so fast ...

Well, we finally got approved yesterday afternoon in the iPhone developer program :-) Which is pretty cool, I must confess. I have yet to go trough the (possibly) grueling process of getting the application on my iPod, but I should be doing that this evening (an blogging about it, unfortunatly for you ...).

Susan did a test run of the app using the simulator the other day, and she came up with a detailed list of bugs and changes, which keept me busy over the past 48 hours. It's not that it was much work, really, it's just that I have only a limited amount of hours each days ...

Kind of done ...

I sort of completed my first iPhone app yesterday. It's nothing fancy, really, but it's something we were in imminent need for. Since I only applied for enrollment in the iPhone developer program back on October 29th, I have yet to put the app on my iPod touch for testing. I sure hope we get accepted ASAP so that we can do a real life test ...

The experience has been very fun, so far. For a mobile device, the IDE (Xcode) and the API (Cocoa Touch) are pretty good in comparison to what I was used on Symbian (CodeWarrior). Now, to be fair I should mention that the last time I had to use Symbian stuff was back in 2005. Since I haven't followed-up on it since, I shouldn't really compare both experiences ... yet, coding for the iPhone as so far be a real pleasure where Symbian was a major pain (lacking documentation, constant need for tricks & hacks ...). I have yet to explore the whole touch API, but right now it appears to be consistent and well though-out.

I'm not going to disclose just yet what sort of application we are working on. But I believe it should be fairly easy to guess at it. Post your guesses as comments if you'd like, the winner will get a free version (if and whenever it get released) ;-)

C++ Considered Harmful (?!)

Lately, I have been following an interesting discussion started a some weeks ago by Eric Raymond on his blog. The subject is a very touchy one as the title of the work ESR is working on (and which motivated his post) is : “Why C++ is Not Our Favorite Programming Language”. As anyone could guess, this post have generated a certain amount of reactions over more than a month. It's overall a great read which I strongly recommend for C++ lovers and haters.

Since I'm in no way the C++ guru (although I have been using it for a good 10 years), I'm confining myself to respectfully taking-in comments from both sides. This doesn't mean that I don't have my opinion on C++ and its supposed harmfulness. Is C++ complex and confusing? Yes, some is. Is C++ syntax tricky? Not so much. As much as possible I try to stay away from all the features I found to add more complications that their are really worth (e.g Templates, iostream ...). In fact, I'm really using C++ in the way it first came about : C with objects.

While I'm on the C++ subject, Kevlin Henney recently (March of this year) participated to a Google Tech Talk, in which he talked about C++ Stylistics. A good talk worth watching IMHO:

As I have been moving away from C++ (on to Objective-C), I have become a bit more critical of C++ lately. I guess I'm having too much fun with Objective-C and Cocoa to be really language agnostic anymore ... so C++? Yuk!

The other Saturn ...

While most people on Earth have heard of the mighty Saturn V (except maybe the lost tribe of Amazonia ...), very few people (except the space geeks) knows about the Saturn's older sibling: the less mighty (but yet impressive) Saturn I. Check out this video for some incredible (and yet not seen often) footage of the propellant tank, and staging cameras:

Thanks to NASASpaceFlight.com's forum member Proponent, for pointing out that superbe video of the 5th flight (SA-5).