Scott Gruby’s Blog

Today I saw a new program at the app store called “I Am Rich”. The description says:

The red icon on your iPhone or iPod touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this.

It’s a work of art with no hidden function at all.

This app costs $999.99! Does the author think any idiot is going to buy it? Why did Apple approve this? This is worse than the flashlight apps. The AppStore is turning into a pile of crappy apps with a small number of quality apps. As I indicated on the T4Show podcast yesterday, the cruft in the store is going to make it harder for serious developers to make money because people will get tired of sorting through this junk and then the main (only) avenue for distribution will basically be gone. Apple needs to actually screen applications and needs to charge way more than $99 to be in the program ($99 is far too low to screen out the people that aren’t serious).

Tags: Technology

Yesterday I read a rant about how the iPhone is a crappy Mac. The author is completely misguided; he’s comparing a handheld device to a desktop saying what it doesn’t do. It comes as no surprise that the author writes desktop applications and not handheld applications. I’ve been writing handheld applications for most of my career; I started writing Newton applications in 1994 and then started writing Palm OS applications around 1997, I think. In terms of a handheld device, the iPhone is not only a joy to use, but it is a joy to develop applications for it. While the Newton was way ahead of its time when it was canned, it didn’t survive long enough to be a competitor in today’s world. If you look at Palm OS, it is still so backwards. It has never (natively) supported different screen sizes (the Dana and the HandEra 330 had extensions to handle larger screens), it doesn’t have protected memory, it has no where near the capacity of an iPhone and many applications don’t look as elegant as iPhone apps.

Granted the Palm OS has some ability to have background tasks (at least through alarms and some people have actually gotten true background tasks working), but how stable are Palm OS devices? I know, people have had the iPhone crash, but it is leaps and bounds above the Palm OS in terms of stability. If you want to get into distribution of applications, the author rants about that as well. There are definitely pros and cons of having Apple control everything. For the most part, having centralized distribution is ideal for developers and users; users don’t have to look around to tons of places to find stuff and for developers, they have a huge audience. At the moment, I think the pros outweigh the cons on distribution.

The iPhone does have some things that need to be improved, but its first (or second start) is so much better than what competitors have had years in the market to refine. Thinking of the iPhone as a desktop may lead to disappointment; thinking of it as a handheld will definitely make people smile (OK, at least me). For all those developers that complain about the iPhone, I think that they should write a Palm OS application and see what it is like to have to create jump tables because your application is over 16K and you have to have a launch code execute something not in the first 16K. Or create a table of data that scrolls. Or present a list of contacts in the address book? Or dial a phone number? I could go on and on. I really enjoy the iPhone and developing applications for it. My views might change later, but this has gotten me excited about writing handheld applications again.

Tags: Technology

My first iPhone application, GrandDialer, is now available on the App Store. Basically it allows GrandCentral users to call people and have their GrandCentral number appear on the caller ID. The reviews have been pretty positive and I’m quite excited. It is free and seems to be getting a bunch of downloads (the audience is quite limited at the moment because GrandCentral isn’t accepting new users). If I charged for it, would people pay? I think some would, but not everyone.

The App Store is a bit of a mixed bag; the centralized distribution is cool. The waiting for Apple to post it is a downer; the review system needs lots of work (the only way I can respond as a developer is to post a 5 star review which just isn’t right).

I have some idea on what to add to the app, but I’m quite limited in what is exposed from GrandCentral.

If you have a GrandCentral account and an iPhone/iPod Touch, go grab a copy of GrandDialer!

Tags: Programming, Software

In contrast to AT&T’s customer service or lack there of, my wife had a great experience with Amazon’s customer service. She purchased a case of Teddy Puffs for our son and when we received them, the expiration date was less than 6 months away. The boxes we have bought in the store expired about a year after we bought them. Amazon quickly refunded our money (about $32) and said we could keep them as they can’t take back food. I was amazed at the response as AT&T won’t give me my $20 back for their mistake (I still haven’t heard from a supervisor). My only recourse will be to fight the credit card charge.

In any case, Amazon is definitely the first place we’ll look to shop.

Tags: Misc

A user contacted me about an issue this morning (basically a corrupted download of ReceiptWallet which most people would just re-download it and be done with it) and when I replied to the message, I got an anti-spam challenge that sent me to a link. The link brought me to the following form:

First off, on my web site, I say that I don’t click the links to verify that I’m a human (I did this time because I was curious). Second off, look at how much stuff they want me to fill in. This is completely unacceptable. Is EarthLink’s spam filtering not as good as Google’s? Google’s works quite well for me and I don’t have to inconvenience people with this kind of baloney. When are people going to learn that these challenge and response systems just piss people off. I had my own system many, many years ago and stopped using it as it prevented legitimate people from sending me email.

Tags: Misc, Software

Today my wife and I were driving home from dinner and had just gotten on I-5 south to get to 163 North when she saw a San Diego County Sheriff’s Deputy driving with a cell phone to his ear. Yes, this is illegal in the state of California! If he had been seen by a highway patrol officer, he should have been given a ticket (the city of San Diego has a 30 day grace period, but he was on the freeway). However, it is completely unlikely that he would have been pulled over. What is this behavior teaching others? Are law enforcement officers exempt from the laws? I’d hope not, but sometimes they act like they are. While on the topic, yesterday I saw a San Diego Police motorcycle officer make a right turn on red without even stopping. Now if I had done that, I would have been pulled over, but this officer (who didn’t have his lights and sirens on) decided to break the law. Could I or should I file a complaint about either of these incidents? I have the identification number of the Sheriff’s car, so I could file a complaint, but it would take too much of an effort to do so. (If someone from the Sheriff’s department wants to contact me, I’d be more than happy to supply the information about this.

Tags: Misc

A colleague pointed me at a tool called LLVM/Clang static analyzer which is supposed to find bugs in code automatically. I was skeptical at first as how could it do it? Well, after running it on a few projects, I quickly became a believer! While it finds some stuff that isn’t technically bugs, it did catch a number of memory leaks that I’m actually ashamed to have found in my code. Some of my old crufty code had leaks in it and a few places where I misunderstood memory allocation caused me to revisit them (turns out that most of the sample code I’ve found dealing with NSManagedObject subclasses also has memory leaks). I’m going to make sure to run this on all my projects; I need to put a better front end on it so I don’t always have to type in the command and remember the syntax.

It took me awhile to get it to say that some of my projects were “bug free”; it uses function names as indicators as what should retain memory and what should not. There was a function GetSomeValue which returned a CFStringRef that had to be released by the caller. CF convention says that the caller does not have to release an object if the function name has get in it. I had to switch the name of the function to CopySomeValue as CF convention says that the caller must release an object that has copy or create in it.

Tags: Programming, Software

The price of oil took a nice nose dive today. The news says that this is in part to expected higher inflation which is attributed to higher fuel costs thus lowering demand. If the price of fuel decreases because of this, will people use more fuel and therefore drive the price of oil up again? While I hope not, thinking about that kind of cycle makes my head spin.

Tags: Politics

So now that my voicemail is turned off on AT&T, I decided to look at call forwarding to forward my calls when I don’t answer the phone. In AT&T’s online phone manager, it clearly says that it will forward calls when I don’t answer the phone (see picture below).

Unfortunately this isn’t true; it immediately forwards the calls and only rings my number after the other number has picked up (I tried forwarding to my JConnect number) which makes call forwarding useless to me. I could get the call forwarding on busy service, but that’s another $5 per month. It looks like I’m going back to Costco to look at new phones or just find a cheap answering machine. Did I make a mistake switching from MCI? I sure hope not.

Tags: Misc

So I switched us to AT&T to save a few bucks. I received the first bill and saw a charge of $8.95 for voicemail + $19.95 activation. Hmmm…I didn’t want to pay this and called them. They turned off voicemail, but won’t credit me for the activation. I argued that adding voicemail wasn’t an option online and got no where. A manager is supposed to call me back and discuss this. I’m not sure why it is so hard to credit me $20 when it is a failure of their system. The only thing I had written on the order is a comment that I’d like to be able to add voicemail; it wasn’t an option when I signed up and the cost was never revealed to me. As you can clearly see by the online confirmation that I saved, the extra charge is never listed.

Why is it so hard to deal with phone companies? First MCI didn’t attempt to keep me as a customer, now AT&T doesn’t seem to care about customers, either.

Tags: Misc