nice little iPhone app.
iPhone apps: or how Nic gets to the party REALLY late
Yup, I’ve finally pulled finger and sat down to do some iPhone development, right in time for the iPad’s release. No, that wasn’t the reason – I just finally have a “spare day” to do stuff in, and the other (non-day-job) project was allowing me some spare time.
I had two projects earmarked as learning projects, which is always the problem for me – get an idea which isn’t something I want to put up on the store (ok, maybe…), but meaty enough to make it worth while doing. A tip calculator does NOT pass that test. These two I did do.
First app I did was a small earthquake lister. USGS provides a RSS feed for all of the earthquakes worldwide which are over 2.0 on the richter scale. The idea – stolen, I thought, from the Android samples – was to get the list, show it in a list on the phone, then when the user drills down, show more info and a map.
I found out later that this is a sample that Apple ship, too, so I purposefully didn’t refer to it, so I kept my learning a little cleaner.
In general, it was rather easy. Cocoa has native classes for downloading from a URL (and there are easier ones than I used), XML parsing, as well as all the visual components that you expect to see in an iPhone app. I had a bit of fun with the memory management (thanks James and Shaun), but that was easily fixed once I got the retain/release/autorelease thing sorted.
I learned afterwards that I didn’t need to make a custom UITableViewCell, as the default one has what I needed, but it was good for learning. I wish I could do offline maps, but thats for another time / app.
All up, it took me about 6 hours to do this, including a load of documentation reading.
The second app is a small twitter app, which scratches an itch I usually have at conferences where there is little or no bandwidth. The goal was to be able to press a button, type in your message, hit send, and be done. No list of posts. No adding new followers. If you want that, you have too much bandwidth and should go get Tweetie 2 – this is not the app for you.
All up, this was also an easy application to write. I had to learn how to integrate someone else’s code – MGTwitterEngine from Matt Legend Gemmell in this case, as well as how to handle errors, lack of connections, how to get editing going in a UITableViewCell, overlays, CoreAnimation, HUDs and the like.
All up, I like the power and focus of Cocoa and CocoaTouch. They give a massive amount of power to the user, even if I’m still stuck managing memory, something which I’ve not used to doing since I left Delphi behind in 2004. I’d put them in the same class as the base .NET libraries and WPF. If you include all the other stuff which is “in” .NET, Cocoa doesn’t have that reach, but for what its designed to do, it does it exceptionally well. I have to keep in mind that I’ve learned .NET over 6 years or so, not a weekend, so the frustrations of “how do I do X” are going to be normal, and with me for a little while.
So, now for the one which might actually get some use.
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Dollhouse: Is this how TV should be done?
So, Dollhouse has finished for good. Last episode screened last night in the US (and has just finished coming down from iTunes). I’ve not watched the last 3 episodes yet – we’ve been waiting to have all three so we can see them all in one go. But in general, shouldn’t this be the way that TV is done? Short run, very high quality writing, short series? Grab the viewer and make them want to watch it?
Well, thats the common format in the UK, and some of the US, and it appears to work quite well. The big networks don’t do it like that, tho.
Take a few of my preferred shows: Californication and Nurse Jackie are 12 half hour episodes. Dexter, Spooks (UK), and Dollhouse are 12 one hour episodes. Even Lost is only 18 episodes this time around. All of them (with the exception of season 1 of Dollhouse) have plotlines that move at a good pace. They dont get bogged down with a “generic” episode, which doesn’t move the underlying plot at all.
Lets contrast that with CSI (all of them), Lost (season 1-4), Heros (which should be killed off), Dollhouse (season 1), Fringe and others: in 24 episodes (or 12 in the case of Dollhouse season 1), you get maybe 10 which actually move the underlying plot. Lost was the worst for this – you’d get maybe 30 mins of actual show in 45 mins, the rest is recap and flashback, and then maybe 20% of that was moving the plot. Luckly, they fixed that in season 5. Heros wasn’t too bad, but with all the cris-crossing plot lines, it was hard to move anything forward much.
The test, for me, is if I can stand watching 4 episodes of a series in a row. All the top ones pass this test with flying colours. All the bottom ones do not. They are, for me, truely weekly shows, each episode is almost independent, with only passing references between them. As soon as the quality goes down a bit, they are gone from my schedule (eg Heros, Desperate Housewives, almost Lost. CSI is getting close, especially Miami, tho Fringe is still good). This is especially the case as I now have a direct financial amount for each season, so not watching a show puts money back in my pocket – or rather, doesn’t take it out (I get TV from iTunes, using the Season Pass feature. Still costs me less than paying for Sky per year).
So, maybe this is how Dollhouse should have been done in the first place – 24 episodes over 6 “seasons”, over 2 years, in the same style as Top Gear does 4 seasons a year.
Once they got the axe, Whedon had 6-8 episodes to finish off 4 years of pre-conceived plot – and I think, so far, he’s done it exceptionally well. There are none of the “echo goes out on a call” episodes, which are fun, but don’t pass the block-viewing test. They are all moving the underlying “Rossum Corp” plot, and it’s made it a better show for that, but I seriously doubt they could have kept up that pace for another 3 years.
With the advent of DVD, Hulu, iPlayer, iTunes and all the other (cough) ways to getting TV shows, short, sharp seasons make a lot more sense than long ones. At least to me.
Iceland’s rift valley
Iceland’s rift valley, originally uploaded by Nic Wise.
More iceland pics (set on Flickr)
and Leonie’s write up of today.
Managed a couple of HDRs, but to be honest, the light was SO good all day, the non-HDR’s came out just as good!
The Master, The Expert, The Programmer – absolute gold
The main thing I noticed about the experts I’ve encountered is they are into impressing you with their abilities. They are usually incredibly good, but their need for recognition gets in the way of mastery. Everything they do is an attempt to prove themselves and in order to do this they must perform like an actor on stage. There’s nothing wrong with this, and I don’t think the expert can become a master without going through this stage in life. At some point though, the expert becomes comfortable with themselves or fed up with impressing everyone and starts to look inward to the core of their art.
I think this was what was pissing me off when I wrote architects – why business cards need to be bigger and more on architects and titles.
Iceland Panoramic
shot from out the back of the hotel. Waiting for the northern lights to come up now :)
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London Wetlands
prefect place for tweeting ;-)
also for walking on water if you are a Coot (and there are a few old coots with telescopes here – they take this bird watching thing way too seriously)
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wandering around london
Leonie and I went for a bit of a wander around London, from Canary Wharf to Tower Bridge, via the Prospect of Whitby, which is a lovely old pub.
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- Canary Riverside
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- Raz, the Pharaoh Hound (very friendly)
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- The Thames
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- Hang ‘em high!
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- Some bloke by the Thames
Nice way to spend a day, esp as it ended with Christmas Pud and left-overs sammies :)
the cult of scrum
Interesting, from O’Rielly Radar:
The Cult of Scrum: If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name. In many ways, Scrum as practiced in most companies today is the antithesis of Agile, a heavy, dogmatic methodology that blindly follows a checklist of “best practices” that some consultant convinced the management to follow.
Endless retrospectives and sprint planning sessions don’t mean squat if the stakeholders never attend them, and too many allegedly Agile projects end up looking a lot like Waterfall projects in the end. If companies won’t really buy into the idea that you can’t control all three variables at once, calling your process Agile won’t do anything but drive your engineers nuts.
Thoughts? I’ve seen scrum done well, and done very very poorly. He’s 100% correct about stakeholders tho.
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first look at the guardian’s iphone app
I tend not to read many – or any – physical newspapers these days, but I do read a lot of news, all of it for free, and all of it online. Since coming to the UK, my main sources have been the BBC (where I used to work) and The Guardian, as well as tech news from Ars Technica, and a smattering of New Zealand news from the New Zealand Herald and NBR.
Today, The Guardian released their new iPhone app. They have had a very mobile friendly version of the site available, but it wasn’t overly nice to use – no images, mostly – but it was functional. Their new iPhone app really lifts the quality of the reading experience.
Now, first and foremost: this app costs money. I paid $3.99 on the US iTunes store, and it’s about £2.49 in the UK. If you are the kind of person who thinks “oh, I could just get it for free from somewhere else” – chances are this isn’t an app for you. If you want a polished, easy to use method to read (IMO) a good newspaper, then read on. Remember: the cost is about the same as a Latte. Seriously.
Also, if you subscribe to the UK “oh, you must be a <insert term here> because you read <insert name of paper here>”, sorry, this is also not for you. Crawl back into the class-based-hierarchical hole from whence you came.
OK, so how does it look?
Home screen
Basically, it looks like an extension to the Guardian website. This is good, as they have a very consistent look and feel on the site. This feels like a well designed extension of that. Down the bottom you have sections for research and discovery (ie, favourites and most viewed), links to their various audio podcasts and content, and under more is all the subsections – business, money, sport etc. You can customise what it on the home page – you can add up to 6 sections (in my case, sport was the first to be removed) and how many items to show in each section. The small tags next to each item allow you to browse by that tag – which is great for discovery.
Most Viewed
The article view is pretty much as expected, including a way to browse the author’s other items.
An article
The app also allows you to view the galleries they have, and a host of other content.
The app also allows offline reading, which is good, being that 3 million or so Londoners (and others around the country and world) spend a large chunk of their reading time underground.
offline
All up, I think this is one of the better iPhone apps I’ve seen, and certainly a good indication of how the various newspapers could go about not going bankrupt. I’d pay a monthly fee for this, if they decided to charge for it. I wouldn’t pay as much as a paper subscription, but I think it’d be worth it.
Also, for me, this would replace the absolutely AWFUL free newspapers that are dumped given away on the tube every day. I wish more people would do that, tho it appears to be better since two of the three (now 4) have closed.
Now, will someone tell Chris at NBR.co.nz – this is pretty much what I was talking about in September. When’s the NBR’s one coming?
How could they improve it? I think it’s really polished, and plan to make very good use of it. I’ve only found one thing so far: In the offline settings, allow me to select (or select for me) the sections I’ve marked as favourite. Chances are those are what I read mostly anyway. Or just keep the ones I had selected last time.
Now, as this interface is so good – how about licensing it to other newspapers (outside of the UK) – I’d love to be able to read the NZ Herald like this, or the BBC (who, I’m told, are not likely to do an iPhone app for anything, any time soon. Bother). Or the likes of Ars Technica, which doens’t have a physical presence at all. Or Wired(.com/.co.uk). Or….. you get the idea.
Bravo. Fantastic app.
[BTW, I'm not affiliated with the Guardian at all - or anyone else in media, especially including the BBC, where I previously worked, but don't any more]