Thousandapologies

So much news about the iPad, but of course the most important question is; will it blend? Find the answer below

Some time ago, I updated my wordpress installation to the most current; something I had postponed quite some time because I expected problems. Like I wrote before, the update itself went ok, but I could not recover most of my previous posts because a bug in wordpress exported all spam comments to the backup file. Unfortunately, this resulted in a backup file so large it could not be imported into the new version of the software. I tried several approaches to reduce the file size, but to no avail. That’s why I finally decided to write a little program to deal with the spam myself, which resulted in my first Mac OS X program ever. After quite a lot of time, today I finally got a working solution that brought the backup file size down from a whopping 44 MB with spam, to a mere 2 MB (with just a little spam) that could be easily imported into the new version of wordpress. I’m happy to announce that as of today all posts from the very beginning of this blog in 2007 are available again. I will try to tidy up the software and put it online for those of you who are looking for a solution to similar problems.

I must say I really love developing for the iPhone; never seen such a complete and helpful API as the one offered by Apple. Also XCode is just brilliant. However, one thing that can be a complete nightmare is code signing. Especially, when developing on the simulator, one doesn’t encounter the specific errors that can stop you from deploying your app to a real device. One such error I encountered already before, but completely forgot about. When trying to deploy my language learning software on a 3G device I suddenly was confronted by a weird error “object file format invalid or unsuitable”, my first suspicions were the JSON framework I recently added. These suspicions turned out to be correct; after finding this helpful blogpost I was finally able to solve the problem. A short recap of what I did:

1. Right click the Target you’re building in my case “Language Learning”, and click on “Get Info”
2. Go to the build tab
3. Find the Code Signing section
4. Add the $(SDKROOT)/ResourceRules.plist to the “Code Signing Resource Rules Path” in this section
5. Clean the build (Build Menu/Clean)
6. Rebuild your app and you should be good to go again

I would like to share with you a problem that has been a proverbial pain in the bum for me and has been nagging me for quite some time. As an application developer the last thing you want to have is people waiting for your application without showing them some kind of progress. For my work, I’m currently developing an iPhone application for the MACE portal that allows users to access content, more specifically images, related to a building in their vicinity. For each building, the images available are shown in a grid view. Thus, this involves a lot of thumbnail images to be downloaded from a webpage and thus can lead to some lags in the software. To give the users some feeling of progress I decided I wanted to load the thumbnails and show them in the UI as soon as they were download. While it sounded like a trivial problem, it took me quite some time to solve and by sharing it I hope to save you all some time. Shortly the problem can be broken down in a couple of steps:

1. Creating a method to update the UI from the main thread
2. Setting up a thread to download thumbnail images in the background & sending updates to NSNotificationCenter from this thread
3. Creating a method to receive notification updates and registering this method with NSNotificationCenter

Below I will provide some examples on how to solve these problems and provide you with the necessary code. Most of it, I already figured out for my self, but the final step to get it working was given by this post.

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In the middle of the now oh so common waste of time of what’s called a windows reinstall, I decided to spend my time a bit more wisely than just waiting for the next “next button” to click. Therefore, I’m typing this post on the macbook pro I borrowed from OUNL’s new medialab, and, to not waste the geeky atmosphere I already created, I decided to tell you about the new media pc I recently assembled and is now the subject of a brand new Vista install.

Before Christmas, the range of multimedia content on my harddrive was already growing; I’m a big music fan, and want to have the my music collection always near me, so basically this meant ripping all my cds to mp3. Furthermore, with my new found hobby of photography, the number of photographs in my photo collection was also growing. Nothing that couldn’t be handled my old pc so far. But then came another hobby of mine….movies…having recently acquired an enormous amount of HD-ready or Full HD movies (some of you might have seen me carrying around with half a terabyte of new movie material in my arms) the need for a separate media machine became clearer and clearer. Not in the least, because my old machine was not able anymore to playback the movies. Therefore, with some advice of my fellow colleague Tally, I decided to assemble a new media pc.

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