iPhone applications will be created using Cocoa. To develop native applications for the iPhone, developer will be using the XCode IDE and the newly released iPhone SDK and iPhone simulator. Third party applications will be made available through an iPhone App Store. The applications developed on the iPhone SDK also work on the iPod Touch.

The App Store is the exclusive distribution channel to deliver applications to the iPhone. From the press conference, it is reported that the developer picks the price of the application and get to keep 70% of the sales. The developer can release applications for free to the end user, Apple will not put charge fee for free applications.

The SDK is available right now, but the App Store might not be released to end users until sometime after June, perhaps in the next upgrade release of the iPhone kernel and software.

The iPhone SDK is free but Apple has a iPhone Developer Program starting at $99. At this point it is not entirely clear what you get from the iPhone Developer Program, but I imagine that you need to be in the program for you to actually sell your applications on the App Store.

At the press conference, John Doerr of the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capital firm said, “best way to predict the future is to invent it. At Kleiner, we say the second best way is to fund it.” Doerr announced a $100 million iFund to fund companies and ventures developing application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Apple had a few demos at hand at the press conference, which all seemed to make use of the iPhone’s great touch ui, touch gestures, and accelerometer.

Back in July of last year, I was at the iPhone Dev Camp where I had a small part in developing Tilt, perhaps the first iPhone motioned controlled game for the iPhone. Having full access to the accelerometer and location data will open the possibilities for a wide array of new applications.

Prior to the SDK being freely available, the only option for custom applications for the iPhone was web development.

Technorati Tags: iphone, ipod, sdk, apple, cocoa, xcode, touch ui, accelerometer, development

Top 5 Top Lists

• Top Programming Books on Google Book Search
• Top Technology Podcasts
• Top 10 WordPress Plugins
• Favorite Programming Quotes 2007
• Favorite Programming Tumblelogs

Software Development

• Is Software Development Dead?
• Software Development Environment
• You Might Be in a Broken Project If
• Developing Your Programmer’s Intuition
• Java, Ruby, and Even Python Sucks

Java

• JavaOne 2007 Conference Notes
• Run PHP Web Applications on the Java Platform
• Java 7: The Closure Debate
• Builder Pattern Made Groovy
• Swing Application Framework

JavaScript

• Learning JavaScript
• Unobtrusive JavaScript with Prototype and Behavior
• Best Practices in JavaScript Library Design
• Twelve Elements of JavaScript Style

Ruby

• Rails Performance Link Fest
• Reopening Ruby Classes
• Ruby Class Tutorial
• JRuby on Rails: Agility for the Enterprise

Ruby Shoes

• Running with Shoes – A Mini GUI Toolkit
• Running with Shoes – 2D Graphics and Animation
• Running with Shoes – Shapely
• Running with Shoes – 2D Examples
• Running with Shoes – Show Me More

Ruby on Rails Plugins

• Rails Flash Charting Plugin
• Rails Acts As Authenticated Plugin
• Rails google Maps Plugin
• Rails Google Analytics Plugin
• Rails Simply Helful Plugin

Windows Tips

• Microsoft Power Tools for Windows XP
• Windows Print Screen Key
• Creating Internet Shortcuts in Windows
• Windows Explorer Custom Shortcuts
• Scan Your Ports

Mac OS X Tips

• Mac OS X Boot Camp
• Mac OS X F11 Key
• Mac OS X Screen Grab

Year In Review

• TechKnow Year In Review 2006
• TechKnow Year In Review 2005

Seasons Greetings

Technorati Tags: java, javaone, software, development, windows, mac, ruby, groovy, rails, javascript, shoes, tutorials, top

Boot Camp is easy to set up and configure and perhaps that is why I was unable to find any tutorials or instructions on how to set it up, so that is why I am writing this post.

Before you begin, I would recommend you back your data.

If you are using Mac OS X Leopard, just launch Boot Camp Assistant located under the Applications | Utilities folder. Select ‘Create or remove a Windows partition’ to create a separate disk partition to install Windows on. Select the size for the Windows partition.

Once you have created the partition, you can insert an ‘authentic’ Windows installation CD and restart your system. You should use Windows XP with SP2 or Windows Vista. When your computer restarts, it will ask to load from the CD which takes you through the Windows installation process. Before the installation can begin, you will be prompted to select the partition to install Windows to, select the partition with BOOT CAMP in the name. Be careful not to delete or install over you Mac OS X partition.

Once you have installed Windows, insert your OS X Leopard installation CD to install the required drivers for your Apple hardware. At this point, you should have both Windows and Mac OS X installed on your Mac. To switch from one operating system to another, restart you computer and hold down the Option key. Holding down the Option key will allow you to choose which system to start. If you don’t hold down the Option key you will boot using the default system.

It is also a good idea to update your Windows installation with the latest security patches. After I installed Windows I had to restart Windows twice; once to get 86 patches including IE 7, and the second time to get additional patches for IE 7. I’ve discovered that Windows security is an oxymoron!

To change the default operating system which your computer boots from, you can use the Startup Disk application found under the System Preference in Mac OS X. In Windows launch the Boot Camp application in the Control Panel and select the default system on the Startup Disk tab.

It is great that I can boot either OS X or Windows on my Mac, but I would prefer if Apple would provide the same level of Boot Camp support for Ubuntu!

Technorati Tags: macosx, mac os x, leopard, windows, ubuntu, startup disk

You can also grab a screen shot by using the Preview application. Open the Mac OS X Preview application and select the File | Grab | Window menu to capture a screen shot of a selected application window.

Technorati Tags: screenshot, macosx, grab, utility, preview, mac

The iPhone Dev Camp started on Saturday by a nice presentation by Chritopher Allen, a MacHack veteran, regarding what is known about the iPhone from a web developer’s perspective. What is known is that the iPhone uses web standards (HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF and Quicktime). Web 2.0 best practices apply for the iPhone, such as the proper use and sepration of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Christopher recommends avoiding the use of Flash, SVG, Java applets, embedded video, custom x.509 certificates, and framesets. Christopher also states the the finger is not a mouse and you need to design accordingly with large enough buttons and links with plenty of space between each other.
Fingers can do more than the traditional point and drag cursor such as double tap, touch and hold, one or two finger drag, flick, and pinch.

It might come as a surprise but many of JavaScript events don’t work, such as onscroll, onkeydown, onkeypress, onmousemove, etc. Some web development recommendations for the iPhone are to use columns and small blocks in the layout, such as floating divs. You should also use the tel: and mailto: protocols in links. You can also integrate with Google Maps simply by adding your location search to maps.google.com/maps? URL.

The current activity on the the iPhoneWebDev Google Groups seems to be focused around iPhone specific development libraries, implementing the infamous back button, debugging JS, optimizing application for low bandwidth, and hacking the viewport. There is also a series of open questions such as, what level of support is there for the canvas tag? What level of persistent storage is available, cookies? The right questions will lead to the right answers. I have also published a great list of available iPhone development resources.

Most of time at the iPhone Dev Camp was spent developing a collaborating for the hack-a-thon. This was a working camp focused on developing some really cool applications on the iPhone.

iPhone Dev Camp Hacks

Telemoose has a nice presentation for optimizing a web application for low bandwidth environments and the iPhone entitled Living on the EDGE. He also has some helpful JavaScript functions for working on the iPhone.

Nearly 50 iPhone hacks were developed at the iPhone Dev Camp. I can safely say that about thirty percent of those hacks developed used iUI and the iPhone liquid navigation, both developed by Joe Hewitt. Joe also has been busy phone phreaking the iPhone and had time to developed Firebug for iPhone.

Some of my favorite made at iPhone Dev Camp hacks include Tilt (the first ever motion controlled iPhone game), PickleView, AppMarks, and Qix.

iPhone Dev Camp Pictures

Hacking the Phone
moPhaic co-developer
Sleeping MacBook
Chris Messina, iPhoneDevCamp co-organizer
Hard Core Hacker
Tilt Paper Prototype
iPeeps
In the Crowd
Microsoft Techie
Newton Dev Camp?
Joe Hewitt, Kent Bye, Felipe Ortiz
Hack this Phone
iPhone Zoolander
Option Shift K

Technorati Tags: iui, apple, iphone, iphonedev, iphonewebdev, iphonedevcamp, devcamp, barcamp, webdev, webapp, javascript, js, tilt, iphone game, firebug

Rich Collins started off the lightning talks with a presentation of his new Ruby on Rails plugin Simply Presentable. In the meeting Rich said that Simply Presentable is an alternative to Simply Helpful, and view helpers in general. Simply Presentable introduces Presenter classes in your Rails projects, in addition to the already existing Model, View, and Controller classes. The Presenter class knows how to render the model, an active record instance, based on its state such as is it a new record or an existing record in the database.

I missed the name of the second lightning talk presenter but he talked about image generation with RMagick. Rmagick is a Ruby binding to ImageMagick. The presenter went through some sample code that created several images with text in them and filling the image with a gradient. The presenter said, “The same things you could do in Photoshop you can do with RMagick in a few lines of code.” He also said, “You want to be careful what you expose” when pressed about security concerns. Someone in the audience also mentioned ImageScience, as opposed to magic, as an alternative to ImageMagick.

Tim Burks’ lightning talk was a demo of RubyObjC, a new Ruby/Cocoa bridge he is working on. Tim stated that RubyObjC is rake/gem friendly. In fact in demoing a Cocoa application and manipulating it from Ruby he stated something to the effect, “No Apple tools where used in the making of this Cocoa app.” His demo app was really interesting because it was using ActiveRecord to insert and read data from a database and Cocoa on the UI front end. Can you imagine, a Cocoa on Rails framework?!?! Well, I did!

Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, rubyonrails, cocoa, rubyobjc, activerecord, rmagick, imagemagick, imagescience, rails plugin, simply helpful, simply presentable

require ‘rbosa’
app = OSA.app_with_name(‘iTunes’)
track = app.current_track
p track # -> #<OSA::Itunes::File_track:0x1495e20>
p track.name # -> “Over The Rainbow”
p track.artist # -> “Keith Jarrett”
p track.duration # -> 362
p track.date_added.to_s # -> “2006-06-30″
p track.enabled? # -> true

According to Laurent, Ruby has been shipped with OS X since 10.2, ‘Jaguar’ which buncled Ruby 1.6.7. Apple packages Ruby as a framework which is easier for Mac development and allows versioning. In addition to Ruby, OS X includes RubyGems and gems like rake, rails and friends (mongrel, capistrano), libxml2, and sqlite3. Laurent mentioned that he is open to suggestions for adding including additional gems into OS X.

For sometime Apple has allowed Mac developers to programmatically control Mac applications via AppleScript. Now Ruby/Mac developers have that same power via RubyOSA. Laurent gave a powerful demo where he controlled his iTunes from Ruby’s irb. He was able to play, pause, and stop a song. He was able to list his play iTunes playlists.

Laurent topped off his irb/iTunes demo by writing an Ruby/Cocoa UI application that controlled iTunes. Cocoa is a UI framework for building Mac applications, often with Object-C. Laurent described a Ruby/Object-C which allows Ruby developers to create Cocoa applications for the Mac. if you want to get started with prototyping Mac applications with Ruby direct your browser to RubyCocoa. Apple also has a lot of Cocoa reference material at their Cocoa developer site.

Technorati Tags: ruby, rubyconf, rubyconf2006, mac, cocoa, ui, itunes, rubyosa, rbosa, object-c, osx, os x

The NetBeans UI Builder reminds me a of XCode’s Interface Builder. An IDE has context help, and UI Builder, like Interface Builder, have alignment help. With both these tools, UI design becomes an art rather than a science. At the end of the session one of the speakers simple summed up the session as, “Hand coding bad, Matisse good.”

Here is a good design practice when using the NetBeans UI Builder: Design every container as resizable.

Technorati Tags: javaone, java, swing, netbeans, xcode

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {
   NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

   // insert code here...
   NSLog(@"Hello, World!");
   [pool release];
   return 0;
}

The above code was auto-generated for me by Xcode. Now only if Xcode could auto-generate the code for a new killer app that I been dreaming of.

I also want to note that the above code is a command line, Foundation Tool, application.

The @”Hello, World!” piece of code is a NSString literal. You night also have noticed that there are a lot of types that start with NS. The NS prefix stands for Next Step which is where Cocoa first started out.

Technorati Tags: object c, os x, mac developer, hello world