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.
Finding bugs automatically
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.
Cycle of fuel costs
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.
More AT&T Fun
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.
Battling the phone company
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.
Congress caused the gas price problem
In the president’s radio address this past weekend, he blamed Congress for high gas prices. He thinks that drilling everywhere is going to bring the prices down. Boy, and people actually elected this guy president? The high prices couldn’t be caused by supply and demand (lots of demand around the world), the war in Iraq (takes a lot of gas to fuel those military vehicles), or the world hating us (I’m sure Venezuela and other countries would pump out more oil if they didn’t hate us or more specifically the president so much)? Drilling everywhere isn’t the solution to anything; it may help in the medium term (starting to drill today won’t lower prices next week), but there is only a limited supply of oil in the world. If you want to blame Congress, blame the Congress that rolled over 20-30 years ago by not pushing for higher fuel economy for cars and trucks. The auto makers just didn’t want to spend the money back then to produce more efficient cars and congress didn’t act to force them to do it.
How many days do we have until this guy is out of office?
How not to get contract work
I was browsing LinkedIn today as I got accepted to the iPhone Developer Group (whatever that really is) and noticed an ad at bottom:
(URL removed to protect the innocent.)
While it may seem that Google AdWords is a good way to get business, how many serious projects that are worth several thousand dollars do you think you can get off this? I had a hard enough time getting people to buy ReceiptWallet off an AdWord (I probably didn’t do it right) let alone pay me a ton of money to write an app.
Good luck with this type of advertising!
iPhone Development is Cool, but not easy
I’ve been doing some iPhone development lately (screenshots and announcement of my first app will be next week) and realized yesterday why I keep running into hurdles; I’m a perfectionist. I want everything to look and work well and have studied the built-in apps for guidance. In my app, the hardest part was the settings believe it or not. As I was looking at apps yesterday and found some issues with some major applications in terms of functionality and interface.
Let’s take a look at a screen from the AP news application pictured to the right. The text placeholders are far too big and in my opinion, there should be labels to the left of each text field. Second and this is where someone really didn’t pay attention to details is that if you hit the + button, it brings up the people picker; there is a cancel button like there should be, but if you hit the Groups button (standard in the people picker), you’re stuck. You must choose a group and then hit the cancel button. Next if you goto the Local section, if you add a location, there are 2 glaring issues to me; first, the return button in the lower right. That really should be a done or something else. The second is that the title says “Add Zip Code”, but the keyboard is NOT the
standard number pad used for PINs and the like. Furthermore, you can enter something like Los Angeles, CA and it says that there is no local news. This is not very user friendly. Do I happen to know the zip code for LA? (OK, I could enter 90210 and get close).
Am I nitpicking? Of course. Will someone pick apart my apps? I’m sure that someone will just to say that I can talk the talk, but not walk the walk. Everyone and his brother is going to say that they do iPhone apps and there will be tons; I hope that people pay close attention to detail as that is what I think will separate the iPhone from other platforms.
I hope to have some neat apps for the iPhone in the near future; so far I really enjoy the platform, but paying attention to detail is the hardest part. In the current app I’m working on, I re-did my settings 3 or 4 times until I liked how it worked.
If you have any ideas or need a contract iPhone developer, please let me know.
No excuse for crappy UI
I’ve been reading about Stevens Creek‘s new TripLog/1040 application through some discussions about bad UI. Steven Patt, the author and long time Palm developer (like me, however I stopped a few years back), defends his decisions saying that users want everything viewable on one screen. While this may be true, this app looks like a horrible Palm OS app. It follows none of the Apple UI guidelines and looks nothing like any built-in iPhone application. There is absolutely no excuse for it; some of the buttons are far too small to actually hit on a device. They may work fine in the Simulator, but they are not usable. Then the background color is just awful.
He can justify his decisions all he wants, but this kind of UI just makes the iPhone look like a piece of junk. Developers need to adhere to the guidelines to make the platform look solid. Years ago I wrote an article for one of the Palm conferences about minor things developers could do to polish their apps, like have the correct button sizes and placements. Many Palm OS developers ignored it.
While I’m ranting about software, it was so nice of him to violate his non-disclosure with Apple by posting screenshots of his application. It seems like he wasn’t only in this violation. Does Apple care? I don’t know, but it annoys me to no end that even if I did have an app ready, I would have honored the NDA and not posted anything until I was released from the NDA. I would have hoped that Apple would have punished these developers by not accepting their apps into the AppStore, but this didn’t happen.
No financial incentive to recycle
Here in San Diego we have free trash pickup (for single family residences) due to the People’s Ordinance of 1919 which I believe came out of the city selling refuse to pig farmers and making money on it (hmmm, it would appear that the city leaders back then had some of the same issues of public trust as the current ones). With free trash pickup, what incentive do we have to recycle? We recycle as much as possible and just started a compost bin last week to reduce the amount we send to the dump. If the city wants to encourage more recycling, they should offer a financial incentive (don’t take away the free trash pickup) to say lower property taxes or something like that. The city is already in hot water as state law requires it to recycle more, but it isn’t meeting that. While people should just feel good about “going green”, let’s be realistic. Unless it positively or negatively affects people’s wallets, it just isn’t going to be adopted by everyone.
(I’m not new to “going green”; back in 1990, I started a paper recycling program for my Eagle Scout project. Times have changed, but I’ve tried to do my part to help.)