you want to start something?

XCake, the local developer group for folk who use XCode had an interesting meeting last night. It was held in the very impressive University of Ulster Belfast campus and was catered for with cake and traybakes by Digital Circle.

The first presentation lasted about an hour and detailed the developments in the OneAPI, a GSMA Reference model for interoperability of network services for telecommunications operators. That’s the long way of saying it’s an easy way for developers to get access to call control, SMS and location services from cell networks. We had three clever folk (Seamus, Richard and Michael) from Aepona who very ably demonstrated the services and answered developer questions. More usefully, however, they were asking the developers about their opinions regarding the use of SOAP and JSON. This is all above me – but it was entertaining to hear the opinions (which were essentially: making XML for SOAP isn’t an issue for most developers but JSON is lighter and simpler).

After that we had a short discussion about our future meeting with Translink, the developments we’ve had with accessing their data and the renewed enthusiasm considering that the Ordnance Survey in Great Britain is opening up it’s 1:10000 map dataset to the public. I hope you’ll join me in encouraging the Ordnance Survey in Northern Ireland to do the same. For what it’s worth, we also have our baleful eye cast in the direction of the Postcodes held by the Royal Mail. At the end of the day if there was government money (our taxes) used to pay for datasets, then I’m determined not to pay for them again.

And we finished with a discussion of future events:

• An Intro to InterfaceBuilder
• NimbleKit, PhoneGap and Titanium: do they do what they say or is it all bollocks?
• Developing for iPhone without InterfaceBuilder
• Unit Testing for iPhone

We’re kinda unaware of other developer-related events in Belfast but we did mention that Monday night is Demo Night at MobileMondayBelfast.

Tags: Code4Pizza, DigitalCircle, Location-Aware, cocoa, iPhone by mj
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Jeff LaMarche writes a long article on how to survive and indeed thrive at WWDC.

My earlier WWDC First Timer’s Guide posting was so positively received that I’ve decided to re-post it now that we’re only a few weeks out from the conference. I’ve also made some corrections and additions based on comments and feedback I got. This posting really has been a community effort, so please feel free to ping me if you think there are additions or changes that should be made.

WWDC is Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference and runs from the 8th June to the 12th June.

In June this year, we’re bringing 30 Northern Irish developers to WWDC and having a Pre-WWDC meet-up of attendees in The President’s Club, Talbot Street, Belfast at 4 pm on Wednesday 27th May. If you’re attending WWDC and want to meet up to talk to experienced developers (some of whom are experienced at WWDC as well), then come along, attend a brief presentation and network with other folk who are travelling to San Francisco.

Tags: DigitalCircle, Mac, cocoa, iPhone, infurious by mj
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About a hundred years ago in 1995 I was being taught Modula-2. And I loathed it.

One thing I took home from it was to somewhat intelligently name your variables.

This is why the Hillegass Cocoa bible is causing some upset for me. They use terms like ‘tableView’ and I’m never sure if these are reserved keywords or if they’re variables. This means you’re groping around in the dark a lot of the time in the hope that you can figure things out. i.e.

-(NSInteger)numberOfRowsInTableView:(NSTableView *)taskList
{
return [taskStore count];
}

-(id)tableView:(NSTableView *)taskList \
objectValueForTableColumn:(NSTableColumn *)tableColumn \
row:(NSInteger)row
{
return [taskStore objectAtIndex:row];
}

took me an hour to figure out that where I have ‘taskList’ the book used ‘tableView’ which makes it just harder to understand. The code above still uses one ‘tableView’ but it works. If I replace that with something else, it breaks.

Yes, I am stupid. And a n00b. Sue me.

Tags: Code, cocoa by mj
12 Comments »

Comment spam is a pain in the butt – to the point that XCake.org ended up with over eight thousand lines of spammer links and crap because I allowed open comments. This overhead caused a huge load on my MySQL server and it affected performance elsewhere so, in the end, it had to go and for just under a month, xcake.org has been sitting idle, dead.

Until tonight.

Tonight I trimmed the Comment spam and removed every single comment. I also required a user to be logged in before they can comment. Smart, huh?

So what is XCake?

Well, I’ve covered it before so go have a look.

Tags: Code, Commentary, Mac, cocoa, iPhone, infurious by mj
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Pretty much summed up my lunchtime coding session.

XCode seems preternaturally sensitive to hidden control characters so tonight I’m going to have to retype all of the code in my project all over again. I checked it line by line and every { was followed by a corresponding }.

Frustrating but part of the learning process I reckon.

Tags: Annoyances, Code, cocoa by mj
6 Comments »