A Tasty Pixel » Geekspeak

Links for February 28th through March 3rd

Links for February 28th through March 3rd:

Lifehacker readers: Most Popular Reliable and Affordable Web Hosts Top seven hosts as voted by readers (DreamHost, Blue Host, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, 1&1, GoDaddy, HostGator and A Small Orange)
Domainr, the domain name search engine Given a name, suggests a variety of different domain name possibilities, and reports on availability
Even More Rounded Corners With CSS – Schillmania.com Single-image, PNG-based, fluid rounded corner dialogs with support for borders, alpha transparency throughout, gradients, patterns and whatever else you (or your designer) could want
50 Beautiful And User-Friendly Navigation Menus Navigation inspiration
OCR Terminal OCR Terminal is a free online Optical Character Recognition service that allows you to convert scanned images and PDF's into editable and text searchable documents. It accurately preserves formatting and layout of documents.

Podcast interview with Dan Grigsby of Mobile Orchard on Loopy’s development

Last Thursday I did an interview with Dan Grigsby from Mobile Orchard; the interview is now online.

Highlights from this interview include: From UIView to OpenGL: the seven different implementations it took to finalize its unique — and Best App Ever award-nominated — UI. From audio-queues to Remote IO: the four different architectural approaches he tried before finalizing audio subsystems. The travails of trying to implement echo cancelation. The business of making a living off of a $10 app

Listen to it here, or subscribe in iTunes (30 min.)

Understanding error codes

Just in case there’s someone else that didn’t know this, when one gets an error code from one of the iPhone/OS X SDKs with no other information available, it can usually be looked up in the MacErrors.h header. Just open a terminal, type:

open -h MacErrors.h

Then do a search for your error code and you’ll hopefully find a corresponding macro name that gives some indication of what went wrong.

Failing that, if you have an inkling of where the error occurred (eg. the AudioToolbox framework), then you can often find the error defined within the framework’s headers:

$ grep -r '10863' /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS2.1.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/AudioToolbox.framework/ /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS2.1.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/AudioToolbox.framework/Headers/AUGraph.h: kAUGraphErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext = -10863,

That was, type in Terminal grep -r 'the error code', then drag the framework straight from XCode into the Terminal, where the path will be inserted.

Links for February 10th through February 27th

Links for February 10th through February 27th:

TinEye Reverse Image Search TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.
Traffic Shaping in Mac OS X | Mac Geekery "…Create several pipes that have a set bandwidth and other properties for all packets that get filed into them; you then add queues to those pipes that determine what priority certain requests will get in that pipe; then you add actual firewall rules to identify packets and file them into queues."
Brandon Walkin » Introducing BWToolkit BWToolkit is a BSD licensed plugin for Interface Builder 3 that contains commonly used UI elements and other useful objects. Using these objects is as simple as dragging them from the library to your canvas or document window. In particular, "No Code" preferences window and tabbed sheets.
Aussie iPhone app developers and the IRS? Discussion about tax details for Australian iPhone developers. It appears the advice from Apple on the tax form is incorrect for sales on the App Store.
google-toolbox-for-mac – How to do iPhone unit testing This is a quick tutorial on doing iPhone unit testing using the facilities in the Google Toolbox For Mac

Facebook News Feed RSS

Tired of either logging into Facebook frequently, or being entirely oblivious to friends’ activities, I was searching for a way to view the Facebook front page news feed as RSS, so I could load it into my news reader and forget about it.

‘Nemik’ has created such a thing and kindly made it available. It was a bit elderly, and didn’t work with the new Facebook, so I jazzed it up a bit.

Put it on a webserver, configure it, and access the URL to view the RSS feed. Probably a very good idea to provide password protection, as well.

Use at your own risk, and Facebook, please don’t sue me.

Download the script here

Happy Birthday, Loopy (Thanks, Apple)

Loopy is 2 months old!

More interestingly, it’s just passed the $4000 AUD ($2640 USD, or $2050 EUR – stupid Australian dollar!) earnings point, which works out at about $500 a week. For essentially a niche app, I’m pretty damn happy.

I can’t think of any other marketplace in history where almost anyone can jump in with an idea and a little ability, and come out with something resembling a salary almost immediately. I can’t imagine the indie lifestyle has ever been more attainable.

Apple have done something amazing here, in creating a marketplace fully equipped with their mature infrastructure, their brand, and most importantly, their enormous user base. They’re basically giving developers the fruits of all the work they’ve done over the past decades in building Apple’s brand and customer base (in return for 30% of sales, of course!).

Now that’s some profitable symbiosis. Apple – thank you.

Developing Loopy, Part 2: Implementation

This is part 2 of a series following the development of Loopy, my iPhone app.

In part 1, I wrote about Loopy’s interface. Part 2 will be more technical, and will cover some challenges encountered during the evolution of Loopy from concept and mockup to working software. Or, more specifically, the stupid things I did along the way.

Links for January 31st through February 9th

Links for January 31st through February 9th:

Lost and Taken Free stock textures for your graphic design and photography projects
NSCollection Extensions Weird and wonderful extensions to key/value coding ([myRecordCollection valueForKeyPath: @"[collect].{artist like 'Tom Waits'}.<NSUnarchiveFromDataTransformerName>.albumCoverImageData"])
Free Fonts Generator Make Your Own Handwriting Font
Grayson’s pluginmanager A series of classes that provides support for a vast number of scripting languages as well as standard Cocoa bundles
Deezer Listen to full songs online: Good for getting a preview of albums, much better than iTunes' silly 30 second snippets