iPhone Development
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iPhone devsugar: Improved Network Reachability routines
Apple makes it clear: when applications rely on network connectivity, they must always test for a valid connection and report those results to the user. If the app cannot reach the Internet, the user needs to know. App Store reviewers regularly reject applications that do not test, and when a connection is not found, report that the network cannot be accessed. Developers need to integrate this process into their apps. If your app connects to a server, for example, it must test the current iPhone configuration and report to the user whenever the network cannot be reached. Apple provides sample code to help with this. iPhone developer Andrew Donoho was not particularly impressed by Apple's sample reachability code. So he decided to do something about it. He has created an open source, BSD-licensed update, which he posted on his website. His updated reachability utilities fix a few Apple misspellings and tunes up the code, allowing you to revert to the original implementation via compiler flags. You can easily download his update and integrate it into your iPhone applications. His write-up describes the testing process and offers an implementation process for successive network tests. You build your decision tree and user feedback off the results of each test. Donoho has provided this code to allow others to build off his work without having to re-invent the entire process from Apple's original source. If you're interested in a slightly different take on reachability, you might also want to take a peek at my UIDevice Extension category, which provides a number of other approaches to Reachability checks. Among other features, the category includes a WiFi check and hooks that allow you to change reachability status from within your application. As noted in the code, these Airplane Mode hooks are for testing only and not App Store safe.
WidgetPad: web development for iPhone apps
Sorting through the tips inbox, we encountered a new product that is coming out for the iPhone next week. It's not an app, game, or anything we "normal folk" would use but it looks to be a great open source, web-based development platform for iPhone. WidgetPad allows web developers to create iPhone applications using only their knowledge in web-based code. The software allows you to write your applications using web-based code and then transfer them to standalone apps for the iPhone or iPod touch. We're being told that the iPhone is only the beginning; the software will eventually translate to other smart phone platforms so that developers can quickly and easily export their applications for other app stores without re-writing the code. Here are some quick highlights: Create web-based applications that utilize each phone's hardware capabilities. The environment includes and helps you learn HTML 5. It's all open source. If you want another feature, you can help the development team create it. Each application is written within the software and can be publish directly to the iPhone (more platforms soon). Source code editing for Javascript, HTML 5 and CSS (with syntax highlighting). No additional software - all of the work is done directly from your browser. I am not a developer, but I do some web design on occasion. I find it very interesting that I could create an iPhone application without learning Cocoa Touch and the Objective C language. I imagine that porting these apps to Palm's WebOS would be quite simple since it's already running a form of web-based code for its applications. If this software works well, we could not only see an increase in the already thriving iPhone developer world, but the smart phone app world as a whole. If you end up taking the leap, let us know what you find. We'll keep you updated and let you know our results in a later post.
Booyah starts off slow, offers $1000 in contest
I've been playing with the hyped-up Booyah Society app for about a week or so now, and I don't think my reaction is too singular: it's not all that great. The idea is certainly a good one: take your real-life achievements and turn them into a game, complete with points and an avatar, but in practice, it's not quite there yet. Achievements are honor-based, which means you can make as many or as few points as you want just by punching anything in, and while the avatar is pretty nifty, it doesn't seem like there's that much to do with the little guy besides spin him around until he gets sick. That's not to say that the potential isn't still there -- the app's "Booyah" recommendations can give you some interesting things to do if you need them, and if they ever get the app using some actual iPhone mechanics (how about traveling a certain distance according to the GPS or playing a certain song or sound into the microphone?), it could be really addictive. But they're not quite there yet, and while we don't have any info on how many downloads they've gotten, the App Store rating is less than impressive at two-and-a-half stars.And they're not giving up yet -- they just announced a giveaway of up to $1000 over on Facebook. You'll have to log in to see it, but if you become a fan of their service and fill out a quick sweepstakes form, you're entered in to win a $500 Apple gift card for yourself, as well as a chance to give $500 to five more friends.Sure, the contest is blatant promotion (and it might even just be a shot in the dark to try and grab a Facebook audience). But what will be interesting here is to watch and see what happens with the app -- these guys have a legendary game development background (coming from Blizzard Entertainment), and at least $4.5 million in VC financing already. Whether they sink or swim, they're making for a very interesting case study of big-time development on the iPhone.
Over one million downloads for Stanford's iPhone dev course
Here's a telling sign of the popularity of iPhone development: we posted about an online course being offered by Stanford just a few months ago, and in that time, the course has been downloaded over a million times through iTunes. The director of iTunes U at Apple says this is the fastest any course has ever hit the million mark.Only those attending Stanford will get credit for completing the 10-week course, but the material is available to the public right there in iTunes. And of course there are lots of ways to learn how to make apps on the iPhone -- Auntie TUAW has answered that question, and we've even got an iPhone Dev 101 series to help you wrap your mind around all of it. The iPhone itself seems made for newbies, and considering that there's apparently lots of money to be had in Ye Olde App Store, it's no surprise that people are flocking in huge numbers to the documentation.Whether any of those apps are any good, of course, is still up in the air. But who knows -- someone who starts with the free iTunes U course might one day be a game-changing designer. There's got to be at least one winner in those million downloaders, right?
Apple and Stanford to offer free iPhone development courses online
Would-be iPhone developers struggling to make their apps do more than fart and crash take note: Apple and Stanford have partnered to offer videos and course materials from Stanford's undergraduate iPhone app development course through iTunes. The course is being taught by two Apple engineers, and it sounds like videos will go up regularly -- the first is scheduled to post on Friday. Alright, let's all practice together: "Yeah, I took a class at Stanford." Sounds good, doesn't it? [Via Wired]
Did Web-only development fail the iPhone?
A thoughtful post over at FactoryJoe.com asks whether the Web failed the iPhone. Apple's initial decision to support only Web 2.0 third-party apps on the iPhone gave the web-based community a huge shot of creativity and incentive to see how far they could push the iPhone and Safari in terms of delivering a new kind of third party development. Unfortunately the lack of persistent storage and local data, a la Google Gears, crippled the effort. Perhaps Apple's development model was simply a decade ahead of its time. Chris Messina's article calls on Web developers to improve what's going on inside the browser frame by designing and constructing new web primitives that make it simpler and easier to build for the web. He adds that "Steve was right" in that Safari development is the future of application development. If Apple had invested in richer and better Web tools, the outcry for native third party apps might never have taken off.
Lights Off: a native iPhone game
Given the fast and furious rate that iPhone native apps are becoming available you might get the mistaken impression that Apple has finally released an API for coders to get their hands on. Nope, Apple is still defending AT&T's network from third party developers, but that doesn't stop motivated people (and it helps if they are clever to boot).The latest iPhone application is the first fully native iPhone game, Lights Off. The game is simple enough; turn off all the lights by pressing them and you advance to the next level. The real shocker here is the polish. This app looks like it shipped with the iPhone, and that's a huge accomplishment especially when compared with the command line iPhone apps that have been available as of late, impressive as those may be.Sadly, the lack of support from Apple means that getting Lights Off running on your iPhone is harder than it should be, but I'm hopeful that Apple will see all this cool developer activity and open up the iPhone a little. It could happen, right?A word of warning, this software is provided as is, so if you aren't comfortable mucking around with your iPhone's innards it might behoove you to wait until Apple supports this sort of thing.[via Daring Fireball]
