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Background Apps and the iPhone SDK
Yesterday I wrote that I didn't think background applications were a good idea on the iPhone and I've seen some other posts that support my position; anything that makes the phone less stable is bad. A good friend of mine pointed out why a background app would be good, but also reminded me of how this was handled on the Palm OS. Notifications were posted. So an application would register for a notification or set an alarm for a specific time and then would handle that. While I'm not saying the Palm OS was perfect (if you ever wrote Palm OS software, you remember that notifications and alarm callbacks had to reside in the first 16K (or was it 64K) of the application thereby causing you to use jumps to get stuff to work. If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, feel lucky.
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When my code bites me on the you know what
I released ReceiptWallet 2.0 on Tuesday and the reception has been pretty good. Unfortunately, as with any major upgrade, there are bound to be issues. I've been handling the support issues on a case by case basis, and I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what could have caused the issues. This afternoon I received a phone call from my uncle who just upgraded and now his data was empty. The good thing about the upgrade is the chances of destroying the data are slim; ReceiptWallet, in most cases, can't find it. Having visited my uncle back in November and knowing how his system was setup, it made getting him up and running much easier. Then, this evening, it dawned on me the problem, so I tested my theory. In ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet, I had a preference that let users move the ReceiptWallet or DocumentWallet data folder as people wanted to put it in Documents or on another hard drive. So I moved my data in ReceiptWallet 1.5.2, upgraded to ReceiptWallet 2.0 and saw that ReceiptWallet didn't find my data. Hmmm...at least I could reproduce it.
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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.
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$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.