dev:OSX

Geolocation with Mobile Safari on an iPhone

Hi there. I have put up a four-minute screencast showing how to take advantage of the new geolocation capability in Safari on the iPhone. Web apps for the iPhone get a bad rap for not being "native," but think about how many amazing web applications you can do if you know the exact location of the user of the app.

Enjoy.

Dell Mini + Leopard

Wow, this is sweet: Run Leopard on a Dell Mini 9

Backpack Journal with Quicksilver

Even though Quicksilver is on life support, I still love it and depend on it and continue to find amazing things it will do.

I was playing around with the Backpack API and realized that posting to the Journal was a perfect job for Quicksilver. So naturally, I wanted to record a screencast. ;-)

Here's the AppleScript template you'll need to do this on your own machine:

Download journal.scpt (6.9K)

Sumo Paint: Holy Cow!

Have you ever wondered if you can write "real" software in Flash?

Look at Sumo Paint.

New Hillegass Book Available Today!

The third edition of Aaron Hillegass’s excellent “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” doesn’t come out until May 26th, but it’s available today at Oreilly’s Safari Tech Books Online.

Updated for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, this revised edition includes coverage of Xcode 3, Objective-C 2, Core Data, the garbage collector, and CoreAnimation.

Get it while it’s hot! http://safari.oreilly.com/9780321562739

If you’re not already a Safari books subscriber, I highly recommend it. I am a tech books addict, and Safari saves me a lot of money, serious.

Mac Development, Bollywood Style

Our hero, the mac developer, sometimes has to put his code ahead of the ladies.

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/play_uk.php?id=1889530

Mobile Twitterrific

I have been looking around for a great open source example of native iPhone development.

I found one! Craig Hockenberry from the Icon Factory is sharing his code for Mobile Twitterrific. It's a great way to dig in and start learning how Cocoa translates to the iPhone. Even if you aren't developing for the phone yet, its fun to browse the source and see how it's put together. Check it out with the following subversion command:

svn checkout http://mobile-twitterrific.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ \
mobile-twitterrific

My First iPhone App

Ha! Here it is, the world's dumbest app:

Getting Started: Developing for the iPhone

Yesterday, I took the plunge. I've had my iPhone since last June, but I finally did my first jailbreak, and I built the toolchain. I have SSH working, and even Apache server running on my phone!

Download ZiPhone for the jailbreak. This is the first time you can jailbreak the 1.1.3 firmware without downgrading first. This comes with Installer.app which lets you browse and install an extensive directory of third party apps. If you don't plan to develop iPhone apps, you can stop right there.

For the full glory of writing your own apps, you need the toolchain. I followed these instructions for that. Note that since the instructions are from an older firmware version, you can reduce step 2 to the following:

1. make sure you have OpenSSH installed on your phone.
2. connect to your phone with Transmit or your favorite SFTP client and download /dev/rdisk0s1 somewhere on your machine.
3. rename rdisk0s1 to rdisk0s1.dmg

I still haven't written my first Hello World app, but I'll update when I do!

Screen Mimic Business For Sale

Lee Falin of Polarian is selling the business:

So what does that mean for you? Well it means that you, my faithful reader, now have the opportunity to purchase a complete turnkey software company that is currently earning substantial revenue.

Full report here: http://www.leefalin.com/2008/02/05/software-company-for-sale/