#define  VERY_YES  YES

If you are wondering about the etymology of this, please check out the following informational message:

Where does the term “very yes” originate from?

I leave it to the imagination and creativity of my fellow developers to adapt this code to run in other flavors of C.  Please make sure to credit me if you decide to use it.

The most interesting part of his presentation for me was his presentation on using the Zombies feature of Instruments. We had some random crashes going on in our Basketball Statware application, and this might have helped to chase down the problem. As it was, I believe we fixed the problem by moving like named variables just sitting by themselves in the implementation files inside the class as class variables.

2010-07-22 20:42:46.998 MyApplicationName[246:207] Setting up reachability notifier
2010-07-22 20:42:47.006 MyApplicationName[246:207] Version: 0.6
2010-07-22 20:42:47.007 MyApplicationName[246:207] Checking for database
2010-07-22 20:42:47.007 MyApplicationName[246:207] Database exists

This information can be helpful, but for the purposes of my utility class that outputs the contents of a SQLite3 database table (see my blog post entitled Nicely formatted data to debugger console for iPhone SDK), this is very annoying as it takes up a lot of the debugging console window.

Well, I decided to look to see if I could output to the debugging and remove the date, time, and application name from the beginning of each line. As it turns out, I found that you cannot do this with NSLog, but luckily I found the following web page that contained the answer:

A Different NSLog()

Even though the web page is for Cocoa development, there is nothing Mac OS X specific looking in there, so I copied the QuietLog function and pasted it into my NSLogTable implementation file, and now I can see much more of my nicely formatted tables since the left 33% of my screen is not filled up with useless dates, times, application names, and thread identifiers.

Here is now what my NSLogTable.m file looks like. (The NSLogTable.h file is unchanged.)

//
//  NSLogTable.m
//
 
#import "NSLogTable.h"
 
@implementation NSLogTable
 
void QuietLog (NSString *format, ...) 
{
    if (format == nil) {
        printf("nil\n");
        return;
    }
 
    // Get a reference to the arguments that follow the format parameter
    va_list argList;
    va_start(argList, format);
 
    // Perform format string argument substitution, reinstate %% escapes, then print
    NSString *s = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:format arguments:argList];
    printf("%s\n", [[s stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"%%" withString:@"%%%%"] UTF8String]);
 
    [s release];
    va_end(argList);
}
 
+ (void)dumpTable:(NSMutableArray *)rows
{
	int idx = 0;
	NSMutableArray *rowData;
	int colWidths[100];
	NSString *s;
	NSMutableString *ms = [[NSMutableString alloc] init];
	BOOL firstRow = YES;
 
	for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) colWidths[i] = 0;
 
	// get the maximum column widths
	for (id row in rows)
	{
		rowData = (NSMutableArray *)row;
		for (int i = 0; i < [rowData count]; i++)
		{
			s = [rowData objectAtIndex:i];
			if ([s length] > colWidths[i])
			{
				colWidths[i] = [s length];
			}
		}
	}
 
	for (id row in rows)
	{
		[ms setString:@""];
		if (firstRow)
		{
			[ms appendString:@"     "];
			firstRow = NO;
		} else {
			[ms appendFormat:@"%4d ", idx];
		}		
 
		rowData = (NSMutableArray *)row;
		for (int i = 0; i < [rowData count]; i++)
		{
			s = [rowData objectAtIndex:i];
			[ms appendString:[s stringByPaddingToLength:colWidths[i] withString:@" " startingAtIndex:0]];
			[ms appendString:@" "];
		}
 
		QuietLog(@"%@", ms);
		idx++;
	}
 
	[ms release];
	QuietLog(@"");
}
 
@end

1. You can present a modal view controller on top of another modal view controller

This would appear to contradict fact #2 from my posting of July 13th, but I have learned some new information. In my previous attempts to stack up modal view controllers, I was sending the presentModalViewController method call to the navigation controller defined in my app delegate. For the second modal view controller, if I just send the presentModalViewController method call in the first view controller to self, all works as it should.

2. Watch your colons on delegate selectors

I was trying to wire up a cancel delegate call that passed no parameters back to the caller, since none are necessary. However, the cancel delegate that I copied and changed from the working accept delegate was never firing in the following code:

if (delegate && [delegate respondsToSelector:@selector(myDelegateCancelPressed:)]) {
    [delegate myDelegateCancelPressed];
}

After I removed the colon from inside the @selector, it worked right as rain.

1. The order of stuff in Interface Builder is actually pretty important

So I am in Interface Builder, copying and pasting some repetitive stuff. I usually like to have the document window open on the left of the screen, the view open middle left, the inspector middle right, and the library on the right. And every once in a while, the stuff I pasted that showed up at the bottom of the list of controls in my view disappeared.

As it turns out, this was happening when I was subconsciously sending the newly pasted controls to the back, and as you may not know, the order of the controls as shown in a view pertains exactly to the z-order of the controls. The control that I was sending to the back going to the top of the list of controls under the view in the document window.

2. Don’t try to present a modal view controller on top of another modal view controller

The subject above says it all. If you create a view controller and use the presentModalViewController method, nothing really happens. The new view is created, but just sort of fizzles out before reaching the screen. (Or in other words, the init is called, but viewDidLoad is never reached.)

This will present a bit of a challenge, as just about every other environment I have worked in allows you to lay modals on top of other modals.

I had the “Icon already includes gloss effects” item at the bottom of my plist file with a value of checked, but it would not get rid of the shiny icon on the simulator or on a device. I found that, after I moved the entry up to the top of the plist file, it now gave me an unshiny icon on the simulator and on a new device that I tried the software on.

My main iPod touch that I use for development still has the shiny icon even after deleting the application from the device and powering it off and back on. Anyone have any ideas why this would be?

Version 1.0.1 of Basketball Statware is now available for download in the App Store. Also, a little bug was fixed up concerning visiting the event list view when you do not have any events in your game.

Here is the URL for the product:

Basketball Statware

And here is a link to the revision history document for this application on our support web site:

Basketball Statware iPhone application revision history

The next revision of the application is going to have more minor bug fixes and memory leak fixes, as well as a neat feature that switches between a box score summary and an extended box score summary by rotating the device from portrait to landscape mode. This is almost ready to be submitted to Apple for approval, and should be ready by the middle of July.

Our iPhone app was accepted into the iTunes App Store on the very first try!!!

I am far too tired to post details right now, I will modify this message after I recover a bit. For now, if you want to see it, fire up your iTunes, go into the App Store, and search for Basketball Statware.

There was one application uploading issue I ran into. The distribution code built just fine after a bit of tweaking, but upon uploading the .zip file to the iTunes Connect page, I got the following error:

The binary you uploaded was invalid. The application-identifier entitlement is not formatted correctly;
it should contain your 10-character App ID Seed, followed by a dot, followed by your bundle identifier.

As it turns out, I needed to make some changes to my Entitlements.plist file that did not appear to be mentioned or documented anywhere. Thanks to the TwoAppGuys and their blog entry iOS4 and the wildcard for the solution to this issue.

I will post again when I learn the ultimate fate of our app.

Here were the steps that I took to finally get it building and running on my development devices:

• Regenerate the development certificate and provisioning profile after adding the new development device
• Move the development certificate from the system area into the login area in Keychain Access
• Clean out the old provisioning profiles in the Xcode organizer and from the device
• Add the new provisioning profile to the device
• Add the new provisioning profile to the provisioning profile section of the Organizer under iPhone Development
• Change the code signing identity in the Project info Build tab and in the Target info Build tab

Once I did all these steps, it started to build and run on the device. Now I just can’t wait until I try to build for distribution and submit to the App Store. What could possibly go wrong?