Android programming

Frankly I'm not that fond of the Android platform, but recently we programmed an app for Intel, and in helping the developer implement the functionality I was struck with a couple of similarities in between it and iOS.

Of course memory management was important, freeing allocations, not freeing used variables, but I was surprised how little difference the Android's garbage collection made in this. It felt like the limit on application memory was tighter on Android, and clearing out references and initiating garbage collection was necessary. With Automatic Reference Counting in XCode 4, iOS memory management is much easier and better performing than on Android

Also when the developer ran into issues with putting up a waiting indicator, my experience with the main thread updating the UI, and how to get an activity indicator up, launch a thread to do a task, and have it callback to the main thread to clear the indicator was exactly how it worked on Android as well.

OSX Lion "Waiting" fix

Reposting this, don't know what is wrong with the App Store, but I couldn't install Lion, until I went through these steps. http://rendrart.com/view/os-x-lion-waiting-fix/

mi_cmd_stack_list_frames: Not enough frames in stack.

I was getting this error in the console when trying to run an iOS app on a 3.x device. Turns out 4.1 frameworks were causing the problem. By weak linking some of the frameworks (targets - get info - linked libraries) I could get the app to run fine on 3.x

I needed to weak link UIKit.framework and AVFoundation.framework

Capitalization

Was running into weird problems with a image viewer not showing images on the phone, but working fine in the simulator. Turns out that for filenames the simulator is case agnostic, and the phone isn't. so "image1.PNG" loads "image1.png" on the simulator but not on the iphone. Suckastic!

Distribution of iPhone apps

it has always been a pain and instructing people on how to copy over files onto their computers (and on the computer they sync to as well) has been a big hurdle. iOS4 brings web based wireless distribution of ad-hoc apps, and so now downloading test versions can be as easy as pointing the user to a website (after of course getting their UUID). Check out this.

IE6 usage

Just was looking at analytics for a major site my agency works on. The amazing thing was the IE6 usage looked like a heartbeat. Steadily decreasing (thank god) but peaking during the week and dropping on the weekends (IE 7 & 8 showed similar increases during the weekend). I guess the feeling that it is just big corporations forcing people to stay on IE6 (and so at work) is proven out here.

This behavior was consistent and periodic over the past several months. Interestingly, Firefox showed none of this fluctuation. I guess people being forced to use IE6 at work, aren't switching to Firefox at home.

New iPhone app

I've finished a new iPhone app that shows several technologies I've developed and how they can be used on the iPhone.

http://bit.ly/chAcWE