Appletell

In Chapter One of my Developing for the iPhone series, I shared some thoughts on the genesis of every project; the big bang for the entrepreneur, the idea that supports everything else. I also stated what I feel to be a truthful fact about the significance of the idea, and its role on the whole project.

What should I do now that I have that good idea? What do I need to make it happen? Is there any way to insure success?

More after the break.

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When it comes to developing for the iPhone, there’s no dramatic change in comparison to any other software development project. Aside from the technical aspects of programming for a mobile device, general guidelines have to be followed in order to achieve the highest chance of success.

This is the first of a short (I guess it’d be three of them) series of articles in which I will share some thoughts, explain some ideas, and lay out some strategies to deploy iPhone applications. I’ll be going through everything we need to start programming (ideas, time, skills, docs, tools, motivation, etc), and some of the best techniques to attack a problem and organize a team of professionals (developers, graphics designers, and more).

Learn more after the break.

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In a previous post, I wrote a little bit about the activities involved in the management of collaborative work using Subversion. That post was completely server-side oriented. 

Now, I’d like to address the other side of the coin, the client side of Subversion. I’ll be describing the most common activities related to SVN Clients for the Mac and the best way to use them, and will provide a few more useful tips from the perspective of, let’s say, a programmer.

Read on for info and tips.

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Nowadays, every experienced company or group of people dedicated to software development knows there are a lot of variables to handle when you work on a project from a collaborative point of view. The project leader has to handle every detail regarding time, costs, human resources, deadlines and quality of the delivered product. If you add to this picture a contractor, then your are adding more things to control, and, most of the time, more potential headaches.

There are many possible solutions for this scenario, but the one I’d like to address now is based on three main components: Subversion, Trac and a Mac. This proposal needs to be separated in two parts: on one hand we’ll have the server side, and on the other hand we’ll have the client side. We’ll now be focusing on the server side of the solution.

Read on for into and tips.

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IconFactory makes a great universal tool for designers called xScope — for people who constantly use this kind of tool, it’s a worthwhile investment. But, a new app now gives you similar functionality — for free. Rulers provides a subset of xScopes useful features in an easy-to-read format. Photoshop-style rulers appear at the side and top of your screen for accurate positioning, and the HUD gives precise cursor coordinates with a magnifying glass option.

Rulers also has the capability to take screenshots and auto-measure — similar to the “Dimensions” mode on xScope. You can quickly determine the size of anything on-screen by using this. When Rulers is the active application, holding Command+A will bring up the cross-hairs and measurement for the area surrounding the cursor.

This useful app, that delivers almost all the features and functionality of xScope is completely free. An excellent tool for those wanting to get into web design on a low budget. You can download it from Omnidea.

Via [TUAW] Product [ Rulers ]

Although very few details about Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard have been released, Roughly Drafted has supposedly uncovered some more tidbits and features. 

As many of you may already know, one of the main features of the latest big cat is Grand Central. Grand Central is a thread management tool used to help developers when writing apps. The following is from the aforementioned Roughly Drafted article:

Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch does the same thing [as modern networking] for processes, packetizing tasks into Blocks and routing them to available processing cores as efficiently as possible. It can also manage the big picture for the whole system, adjusting how it balances its tasks as the performance load increases. This would be close to impossible for Individual developers to do themselves.

Also in the article were details about OpenCL. OpenCL will also help with multi-threaded architecture, along with GPU outsourcing in order to help realize the full potential of today’s high speed processors. OpenCL code will be kept as bytecode to enable JIT Compilation allowing graphics optimization. 

Snow Leopard can be expected “within a year.”

Via [MacRumors]

Do you hate having to wait for your PHP scripts and files to upload to your server to make sure they work? If so, you would get along great with the people over at MAMP, or Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. MAMP simply installs a local server environment in its own folder on your hard drive and doesn’t affect your main operating system at all. You can then run and test PHP scripts and other database tasks without having to upload the files to your server. MAMP is completely free and is licensed under a GNU General Public License.

Currently on release 1.7, this application comes with a simple to use widget to start and stop the localhost servers. It works just as you would expect, and I’ve had no problems with it on my machine. There is a MAMP Pro that costs money, but many of you will find that MAMP does what you need just fine.

If you are a developer who is sick of waiting for files to upload so you can test them, check out MAMP, and be ready to start saving a ton of time.

Product [MAMP]

Ergonis Software has just launched an application for Mac OS X called Typinator that will make designing websites a whole lot easier. With over 100 built-in abbreviations, web designers won’t have to type as much code, and therefore they won’t have to worry about making as many spelling mistakes. As Christoph Reichenberger, founder and CEO of Ergonis puts it, “Regardless what tool they are using, most web designers are typing plain HTML code all the time, sometimes at least assisted by their HTML editor. With the new HTML snippets set for Typinator, you can insert over 100 HTML elements without having to click through a list of templates. Just type a double less-than sign followed by the name of the desired HTML element and Typinator will insert the corresponding HTML code and place the insertion point appropriately.”

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Former Apple Senior Software Engineer Scott Kovatch, now Adobe’s Senior Computer Scientist, announced Tuesday at WWDC that he will be heading up a project within Adobe to help port Java SWT from Carbon to a Cocoa interface. Although work on the project has already started, Kovatch sated he will not join the group full time until mid-august. 

The Standard Widget Toolkit is a tool used to give Java applications native GUI for each supported platform. The Mac OS X version was written back when Carbon had a slight performance advantage over Cocoa, but that has changed, and support for 64-bit Carbon has been dropped entirely. In addition, according to this Mac OS X report, after 10.6 or 7, Mac OS will be entirely written in Cocoa Touch.

The Cocoa port of Java SWT is anticipated to be ready for the release of Eclipse 3.5 sometime in 2009, but nothing is official as of yet.

Via [Infinite Loop]

Momail, a Stockholm based company, is the first company to announce support for the “next big thing” smart phones. Those next big things are the 3G iPhone and the Samsung Omnia.  The following is from a WebitPR press release:

”These devices will sell large volumes and their specifications makes them very suitable for consumer mobile email and Momail. Our server based solution gives us the possibility to add support for new devices very fast and today we support over 80 percent of devices shipped. So, with Momail, iPhone and Omnia users will soon be able to enjoy the world’s smallest, smartest and most cost-effective mobile email, says Roger Grönberg, CEO of Momail.

The Momail service provides the user with a single mailbox for all of their e-mail addresses, in an “easy to use, fast, efficient, no spam environment.” Momail uses a Mobile Message Optimization & Protection Engine (MMOPE) to provide its users with speed and reliability, along with an IronPort to stop mobile spam and viruses. 

Momail already provides services for a range of other “super mobiles” soon to be released, including the HTC Touch Diamond, LG Secret, Nokia N96 and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1.

Via [WebitPR Press Release]