Writing handheld applications using the iPhone SDK

In the past week since the iPhone SDK event, there has been a lot of discussion about the limitations of the iPhone SDK. I think that the "limitations" are coming from people and developers that have kind of missed the point. The main concern with a cell phone/handheld device is stability, at least that is my take on it. Way back in 1997 when I started working on the Qualcomm pDQ phone (the first Palm OS based smartphone), my main concern was that the phone could not crash as it was a consumer electronics device. (Imagine your TV crashing because you tried to watch an episode of Lost that had some magic encoding in it.) Maybe I was a little before my time, maybe not. The biggest problem with the Palm OS (up until just a few years ago) is that it didn't have flash based storage, so if the battery died, you'd lose everything. So not only could the phone crash, but sometimes in order to reset the device you had to pull the battery causing you to lose all your data.

I've just started to watch the iPhone SDK videos and will start taking a look at the SDK in the near future (I'm kind of working on 3.5 half time projects which leaves virtually no time to think or write this blog :-)).

One Mac developer has posted a list of its feature requests for the iPhone SDK. These requests are coming for a Mac developer and NOT a handheld developer or average consumer. As someone that has written handheld applications for the last 13+ years, I know that desktop development is completely different from handheld development. While the tools may be the same and it may use the same language, there are tons of differences. The primary concerns with handheld apps are stability and ease of use with limited screen real estate and input mechanisms. I hope that Apple ignores most of the requests from developers to give root access on the iPhone, allow access to the entire filesystem, and the ability to run background apps, just to name a few. These items will (not can) cause instability in the phone and provide a poor user experience that will reflect poorly on Apple. Furthermore, one app touching the entire phone could cause other applications to have problems and then people would come running to me (kind of like they do on the desktop, but more so).

Maybe I'm just jaded, but I want a stable, well functioning iPhone with good applications. I don't want a bunch of hackers or desktop developers writing crap for the iPhone. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how the market shakes out.

(I double checked this post and all the information above comes from public sources; I highly respect the agreements I sign, either physically or virtually, and I hope that others do the same.)

$2000 dog bone

No, we don't feed our dog diamond studded bones or anything like that. We've been letting him chew on a plastic Nylabone. He loves them and goes through them periodically. Well, on Sunday we were playing with him when I noticed a tooth fragment on the ground. My wife looked in his mouth and saw the tooth with the pulp exposed. After reading that this could be serious, I took him into the vet yesterday. The vet said that it was a fractured tooth and the tooth was a major one. The only option is root canal since Marley (the dog) is only 3.5 years old (older dogs he'd recommend just giving antibiotics and depending on the tooth, extracting it) and he really needs the tooth.

There are basically 2 veterinary dentists in Southern California; one here in San Diego (there are less than 100 board certified veterinary dentists in the world). The vet called later in the day after talking to the dentist and gave me the bad news; it was going to be close to $2000 for the root canal plus $250 for X-rays prior to the procedure. Ouch. So, the dog is scheduled for his root canal next Friday. While we have pet health insurance, I think we'll be lucky if it covers half. (Yes, we have insurance for our dog; while it may seem frivolous to some, the costs as seen here, for some procedures are extremely high.)

I hate that this is going to cost a chunk of change (and will likely delay the purchase of some stuff), when do you say stop paying for your pet? Isn't your pet family? I know that Marley is a big part of our lives and I can't imagine life without him. I know that his time will come, but until that happens, we're going to do all that we can do for him.

ReceiptWallet 2.0 Released!

I am pleased to announce that ReceiptWallet 2.0 has been released along with a completely redesigned website! Thanks goto Julie Bender for the new website design, my beta testers for finding all the bugs that I couldn't have found on my own, Eric Ullman for my press release, and of course, my wife, for putting up with me while I got this release out the door!

I'm very excited not just about the software release, but about the website as it now looks professional and all 5 components of my site are themed the same (the main site, the knowledge base, the store, the news area, a WordPress install, and the contact area). A lot of work went into getting this site to work smoothly and I think it looks great! I'm biased, but I've seen few "indie" developer sites that have the same look on all pieces of their sites; some get close, but leave out a piece here or there. I figured that while I was getting my site redone, I might as well go all out and make it all be consistent (as much as possible). My site looked like crap before and I should have made the leap earlier to get a professional to do it, but that's now 20/20 hindsight.

Oh, and this ReceiptWallet upgrade is FREE to all ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet users!

Important lesson in using NSLocalizedString

In ReceiptWallet 2.0, I use an ellipses in a number of places for menu items, window titles, etc. I switched all my source files to UTF-8 and started using ellipses in the NSLocalizedString macros to make localization easier whenever I get to that point. Well, despite using UTF-8 for the file encoding, something went horribly wrong that I didn't notice until today. The ellipses caused a bunch of my menu items to take on names of other things, like Scan Receipt became Combining Documents…. Huh, I thought. So after a bunch of research, I found the solution. 1) Replace … with \\U2026 and 2) In my script phase where I run genstrings to generate the Localizable.strings file, add a -u flag. While that seems like an easy fix, I almost went bonkers today as I'm nearing the ReceiptWallet 2.0 release and this would have been bad.