The Geek Blog

I may have mentioned it before, but I created a Migraine Diary application for the iPhone as my master’s captone/thesis project.  The school year finished out for me and I submitted the application to Apple on the 29th.  Two days – TWO DAYS – later they approved it and it’s listed in iTunes!

Head on over to Net Workz LLC to find the app.

I still have a lot of work left to do before I’m really happy with it.  Help screens, more graphing, and encryption are two things I really need to get out there.  Until then, enjoy!

I haven’t written unit tests before in Xcode.  I started to read Apple’s article on unit testing with iPhone development because I wanted to follow sound development principles with an agile approach.  Not long into the guide, I got stuck.  Literally.  Using Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard caused Xcode to lock/hang during the build of the logical unit test.  Same results after iPhone SDK 3.1 came out.  I couldn’t find anything online either except a few people experiencing the same issue.  In the system console (not Xcode console) I was seeing:

Xcode[669] -[XCBuildLogCommandInvocationSection setTestsPassedString:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x2009b7620

Xcode[669] -runOperationInBackground raised an exception: -[XCBuildLogCommandInvocationSection setTestsPassedString:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x2009b7620

Needless to say, I was losing my mind. Finally, a user in the Apple Developer forums, “cde”, posted the following gem:

We have recently discovered the root cause of this problem.

People who are affected can work around it by (I hope you’re ready for this)…

…changing the Time Zone on your Build machine away from Central Daylight Time.  (In six weeks you can change it back, and people in Mountain Standard TIme will be affected.)

No, seriously.  Give it a try.

The problem is a single-character typo in a regular expression that parses the date stamp of the unit test. It causes it to miss the beginning of unit tests that are executed at -0500 or +0500 relative to GMT, so the end of those unit tests is unexpected, and it causes the build log parsing logic to initially hang and eventually crash.

As has been said, “Then I decided to use regular expressions, and I had two problems…”

So until it’s fixed, change your timezone to Pacific time.

Everyone is giving their two cents about the iPhone 3GS.  I’m excited to see that Apple is releasing a faster phone that still feels like the first generation iPhone.  Developers are used to a specific screen size for instance.  Drastically changing the environment will create the discord other cell phone manufacturers feel when it comes to 3rd party applications.

I do suspect, however, that next year will bring drastic change to the iPhone.  Apple is still getting to where they really wanted the 1st generation iPhone to be.  They realized that its easy to make their own hardware and software, but its hard when dealing with so many third parties.  Cell phone carriers like AT&T stand in the way of real progress.  Why doesn’t Apple follow suit with Virgin and create their own private label cell phone company?  I suspect that would give them a lot more flexibility in pricing and give them the ability to put whatever carrier they want behind the name.

Overall, I am happy with AT&T at the moment.  I am pissed to hear MMS and tethering won’t be available this coming week for the iPhone 3.0 launch.  I refuse to pay any more money for something that I can get for free by putting my SIM card into an OLDER phone.  Silly AT&T, you’re the death of the iPhone in the US.

I’ve been scratching my freaking head for an hour trying to figure out how to load an image from my application’s bundle.  Doing this in Interface Builder is easy as pie, but not so straightforward.

[UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@”thefilename” ofType:@”jpg”]];

Easy, isn’t it?