FernyB

Yes that’s me the first blurry one. Photo by Chuck Toporek.

After attending NSConference USA 2010 in Atlanta, GA all I have to say it was awesome! Really it was. The content was great. The folks were cool and the food was ok not bad. One thing that I really did not like and I think everyone would agree, food was not allowed in the auditorium. I’ve managed to record a few of the talks using QuickTime on my Macbook. I think one of the best talks was “Spelunking OSX” it’s just awesome. The lunch talks were also great. The Cocoa Rumble was really great and entertaining. Hopefully next year it will be at a different city, I have nothing against Atlanta but having a conference in different cities will be great.

Atlas is like Xcode. Atlas is built with Cappuccino and Cappuccino is built using a language called Objective-J which is just a superset of JavaScript and its very cool! Just like Objective-C is a superset of C. The best thing I like about it is that it’s so much like Cocoa and Objective-C. The syntax is almost the same, NSObject would be CPObject.

280 North makes Atlas and I signed up for their beta program from beta version 3. Once I had access I played with it but didn’t do much. Now just yesterday I got interested in it again and while reading the forums to see what people where saying I saw a tutorial that caught my interest ( http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/11/280-atlas-introductory-screencast/ ) and I decided to write a simple app as-well.

I wrote a simple calculator to calculate the tax of an item but my goal was to find out if NSNotification was being supported and well, it is being supported of course it’s not called NSNotification but called CPNotification. In Objective-J ALL classes are prefixed with CP instead of NS. Here is my source code for the app I wrote using Atlas.

To learn more about Atlas go to their site and read about it and of course try it out!

Francisco Tolmasky – FOWA Maimi 2009 from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Today, I started a new project. A minimalistic bug tracker that should really work under Dreamhost. The only reason I need this to work on Dreamhost is because bills begin to add up after having a few VPS accounts and I’m trying to cut my spending and since Dreamhost gives me unlimited disk space and bandwidth I figure I will use it and yes I know I can use GitHub but that cost money for private repositories.

I installed the latest rails using sudo gem install rails –version 2.3.5 and I got Capistrano all set-up and was able to deploy. Now the only thing that took almost all day was trying to figure out why rails would not process the request. So I did “rake rails:freeze:gems” to freeze the gems. Once I did that I was having problems with Rack version 1.0 already activated and I hacked around RubyGems to see if I can deactivate it but I didn’t find anyway of doing that. I also googled a ton of searched but found nothing.

What did work was to modify the rails core, ActionController to be specific in file:

vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller.rb

I modified lines 34 and 35 and commented them out.
I then added the following:

load "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack.rb"

the end result look like this:

#gem 'rack', '~> 1.0.1'
#require 'rack'
load "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack.rb"

which after doing that, it ALL worked well. Now I can continue with building my app.

NSConference 2010 (USA) just opened up for registration and I just completed registering for the iPhone Developer Sessions and Mac Developer Sessions which makes that a 3 day conference for me. It will held in Atlanta, Georgia at Georgia Tech Research Institute from Sunday, February 21 through Tuesday, February 23, 2010.

This will be my very first Mac Developer conference and I’m really not sure what to expect but the quotes from last years conference sound great. One thing I do expect is for Wifi not to work and to not expect any meat for food which happened at other conferences I’ve been to. Considering I have only been to two other ones. Hopefully that will not be the case and they will have meat! I guess I will find out when I get there…

Register to NSConference 2010 only 200 spots will be available so do it early.

So, it’s been while since I last wrote something here.. Well it’s for a good reason, I’ve been busy with work but besides the work hours, I actually managed to create a PHP Framework which I call Cupcake. The reason for the name is being that I wanted a version of CakePHP without lots of the component I will never use. I initially forked CakePHP but ran into some issues with it. So I decided to write my own and implement it that way I thought it should be. That is available on Github.

Another project I’m working on is a Mac OS X Application that will be similar to my previous apps GAMV and LyFOX which were a great success, and I will attempt to release it by the end of this year 2009.

While looking into my app for deprecated methods I have found one that did not have much documentation to it. It was a delegate method from UIImagePickerControllerDelegate and this is the way I use it for when an image is ready to be posted.

- (void)imagePickerController: (UIImagePickerController *)picker didFinishPickingImage: (UIImage *)img editingInfo: (NSDictionary *)editInfo {
  [[picker parentViewController] dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
  [image setImage:img];
  [self confirmPhotoUpload];
}

Now the only problem with that method above is that it is now deprecated in the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK and you must now use a method called imagePickerController:didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo:
and the way I use that method is like this:

- (void)imagePickerController: (UIImagePickerController *)picker didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo: (NSDictionary *)info
{
  [[picker parentViewController] dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
  UIImage * img = [info objectForKey:@"UIImagePickerControllerEditedImage"];
  [image setImage:img];
  [self confirmPhotoUpload];
}

So if your stuck trying to figure out what method to now use, use imagePickerController:didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo: and what will have a NSDictionary with all the needed information about the image.

This weekend as I wait for Apple’s response to my iPhone App being accepted or rejected. I’ve been wanted to create an Adium Plugin for a while, so now I took the initial steps and made it much easier to begin. I have created a XCode Template for creating your own Adium Plugins.

It can be downloaded over at my github reposity. 

http://github.com/fernyb/adiumplugin/tree/master

Installation

• Make sure you have the following directory:~/cocoa

If you do not have that directory create it and navigate to it.

• Make sure to download the Adium source code into the ~/cocoa directory. You will need to use mercurial
  hg clone http://hg.adiumx.com/adium
• Make sure you have the following directory.
  “/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Project Templates/Adium/Plugin”

If that does not exist make sure to create it.

• Download or clone the git repository:
  git clone git://github.com/fernyb/adiumplugin.git

Copy all files from git repository and place them in:
“/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Project Templates/Adium/Plugin”

• Launch XCode and create new project. On the left side under User Templates you should have a new entry for selecting Adium and selecting Plugin to create.
• That is it.

Lately, I’ve learned how to use GDB with XCode and it’s awesome! It really saves your lots of time debugging an app. I was having lots of trouble trying to figure out why an instance variable was not retaining it’s value in a new method.
Well, it happen to be I was using a UITableViewDelegate and those methods where being called before my setter method and so the instance variable was nil, the only way I found this out was by using GDB and believe me NSLog for debugging is not always going to work.

It’s been a few months now and I’ve been listening to the podcasts from Mac Developer Network (MDN). The podcasts I like to listen to are the Developer Lives because they provide an insight how they got started. They also have other podcasts which are all good like Mac Developer Roundtable and Late Night Cocoa. Take a listen to them. They are good.

This week I finally gave apple $99 so I can test some of these apps I’m experimenting with on my iPhone and see what I can come up with. I was having so much trouble getting it to run on my iPhone I was getting the following error:

So, to get this error to go away, wheather it’s the correct way to solve this problem, I’m not sure but it works and it allows you to test on your iPhone. Just do the following, Change from Debug to Release and that should be it.

Update:
So I fell into the same trouble I could not debug under the iPhone device the key answer for me this time was to go under the Build menu and click on Clean All Targets. After that just make sure you set your Bundle Identifier in the info.plist and lastly make sure it is code signing your build under Get Info the left panel Targets > AppName right click select Get info in Code Signing Identity.

As I wrote earlier, I was trying to release skatr.us on the first of january but unfortunately that is not going to happen. I just don’t have the strength to pull it off.. I’m going to push back the release date for Skatr for mid February, I think that is a good enough time, thats like 8 full-days to work on it plus whatever time I have after work. I’m sure I’ll get it done, it’s better than half-complete.

Happy New Year!

Just a small updated on my development of skatr. It’s almost ready to go for beta release.

If anyone has taken notice, the site is currently down on purpose. I figure I will take it down it gives me more reason to complete my project. The site is being developed using the Merb Framework. After reading some news about Merb being Merged into Rails 3, was actually good I think. Anyways, my project skatr.us will be up live sometime soon, I’m aiming for the first of January, of course this will be beta release and I say beta because things might not be correct on the site, etc..

Lately I’ve been writing Objective-C/Cocoa code, and lately I’ve learned how-to capture video from an iSight on a Macbook. It’s actually easy. Here is the code. and I’ve also attached the example application I was writing so you can take a look at it.

[Download Source]
[Download Application]

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
#import <QTKit/QTKit.h>

@interface MyRecorderController : NSObject {
  IBOutlet QTCaptureView * mCaptureView;
  QTCaptureSession       * mCaptureSession;
  QTCaptureDeviceInput   * mCaptureDeviceInput;
}

- (IBAction)startRecording: (id)sender;
- (IBAction)stopRecording: (id)sender;

@end

@implementation MyRecorderController

- (IBAction)startRecording: (id)sender
{
  // Create a new Capture Session
  mCaptureSession = [[QTCaptureSession alloc] init]; 

  //Connect inputs and outputs to the session
  BOOL success = NO;
  NSError *error;

  // Find a video device
  QTCaptureDevice *device = [QTCaptureDevice defaultInputDeviceWithMediaType:QTMediaTypeVideo];
  if(device) {
    success = [device open:&error];
    if(!success) {
      // Handle Error!
    }
    // Add the video device to the session as device input
    mCaptureDeviceInput = [[QTCaptureDeviceInput alloc] initWithDevice:device];
    success = [mCaptureSession addInput:mCaptureDeviceInput error:&error];
    if(!success) {
      // Handle error
    }

    // Associate the capture view in the UI with the session
    [mCaptureView setCaptureSession:mCaptureSession];

    // Start the capture session runing
    [mCaptureSession startRunning];

  } // End if device
}

- (IBAction)stopRecording: (id)sender
{
  if([mCaptureSession isRunning]) {
     [mCaptureSession stopRunning];
     [mCaptureSession release];
     [mCaptureDeviceInput release];
  }
}

@end

Apple announced today that it has decided to drop the controversial iPhone developer non-disclosure agreement because it ‘created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success.”

via Techcrunch

For while now, I’ve been learning Objective-C, and while I’m writing in Ruby more often I figure I would also learn RubyCocoa. I figure I’m going to create a few screencasts on getting started with RubyCocoa and anything I learn with it. If you don’t know what RubyCocoa is, it is described as:

“…a bridge between the Ruby and the Objective-C languages, allowing you to manipulate Objective-C objects from Ruby, and vice-versa. It lets you write full-stack Cocoa applications in Ruby…”