// do something here

Kevin Munc gave a presentation last night on doing continuous integration using Jenkins for developing iOS apps. It seemed somewhat complicated to set up, but I did like some of the things that he showed. Hopefully I will get a few free seconds here at my job to try and implement some of the things that Kevin showed.

Also, for those few of you who use Xnews for reading your Usenet newsgroups, it was acting up for me by not remembering that I only wanted to see unread articles when going into a newsgroup, I would have to hit the U key after the newsgroup loaded to hide all the read headers. This is far too much work for me. The way I found to get around this was to exit the program and spelunk into the folder on your computer where Xnews lives, and look for a folder called “data”. Inside this folder, you may see a folder or file for the group that you are having trouble with. When I saw this, I just deleted the file, started the application back up, and all was right with the world.

BTW, Happy Birthday to Doug Drabek, the former pitcher for the Pirates (and other teams) that I met briefly at last years Pirates Fantasy Camp.

Jonathan Penn gave a presentation last night on using the UIAutomation classes in iOS and Instruments to do user interface testing of iOS apps. It was a very thorough presentation with lots of demos, which are always good. At my previous company, we tried to use UIAutomation to help out with entering of lots of data, but were stymied by something that sure looked like a bug in UIAutomation. Here was the Stack Overflow question I asked regarding this issue: (I accepted an answer that was not truly an answer because I wanted to get my accept rate back up to 100%)

iPhone UIAutomation button tap does not fire

I would love to get back into using UIAutomation, but it can take a long time to get it to do what you need it to do, and unfortunately I do not have the time I would like to spend on it.

By the way, if you have need of a mobile solution for your sales or work force, then please check out Routzy, an iPad only app that my current company just released last week. Here is a link to the product web site:

Routzy

And here is a link to the press release:

Coalesce Launches Routzy, iPad App Designed for Sales Professionals

Thanks to everyone who turned out on Tuesday night for my CIDUG presentation on utilizing open source iOS projects. The presentation went a bit longer than I was hoping, largely due to the volume of demos that I had.

If you would like to download a PDF of the presentation, here is a link:

Open Source iOS Projects presentation

Also, if you would like to download a ZIP file of all of the demos that I did, here is a link for that:

Open Source iOS Projects demos

I realized this morning that what I should have done was to create a workspace, and then drag all of the individual projects into that one workspace for the demo. I have done this in the code that I uploaded, so when you unzip the demos file, just open the Demo projects.workspace file and then just use the Scheme selector at the top of the Xcode window to select which demo you want to look at or try out.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on the presentation or the demo code. I hope everyone out there has a safe and happy holiday season.

Ran Flasterstein gave a presentation tonight about his experiences in communicating with users of his apps. He mainly spoke about the ways that he encourages conversation with his users through feedback and e-mail.

Next month at the CIDUG meeting, I will be giving my presentation, Open Source iOS Projects. Hopefully, since the meeting date is only a couple of days before Thanksgiving, there will be fewer folks there for me to inflict my wit and wisdom on.

BTW, happy birthday to the pride of Kelvington, Wendel Clark. In my humble opinion, they should not even bother giving any other Leaf the C.

Justin Munger gave a presentation on iPhone peer-to-peer communications at the Columbus iPhone Developer User Group on March 22, 2011. He had some great examples of applications he had put together that used GameKit and sockets to implement a simple chat type application.

I have been thinking of doing some peer-to-peer communcation in one of my applications, so his sample code should hopefully come in handy.

BTW, happy 80th birthday to the best… and, most dashing… starship captain… ever seen on the small or big screen, William Shatner. Make sure to read with the dramatic pauses for full effect.

Geoffrey Goetz gave a presentation on iPhone application development at the Columbus iPhone Developer User Group on July 27, 2010. His topic was mainly a recap of some of the application approval and performance issues that were covered at the 2010 WWDC.

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.

Geoffrey Goetz gave a presentation on iPhone software development at the Columbus iPhone Developer User Group on October 27, 2009. He mostly talked about a lot of different topics, most importantly the creation of an iPhone application that utilized different types of view controllers.

During his demo, he created a new project from scratch based on the window template of the iPhone SDK, even though he was creating an application with a tab bar. I am probably going to revisit one of the applications that I am working on, which is also an application that uses a tab bar. However, I have had some issues with it, and I think that after seeing Geoffrey’s demo, it might be better to create it the way he did it than to use the tab bar application template included in the SDK.

Thanks to Geoffrey, he did a nice job (even though he ran way way over the time) and his information was super relevant.

Mac Liaw gave a presentation on iPhone game development at the Columbus iPhone Developer User Group on August 25, 2009. He mostly talked about how the iPhone is a very different platform to develop games for than the typical video game consoles.

I can sort of understand some of what he was talking about. In my experience developing games for the Atari 2600, a one or two person team can, with a good idea, produce a killer product. (Of course, the iPhone has at minimum 128 megabytes of RAM, while the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM, which is a topic for another blog post.) I have been kicking around a couple of ideas for games, now all I have to do is learn OpenGL ES. And find an artist who will work for peanuts.

Justin Searls gave a very good presentation on the Three20 toolkit for the iPhone SDK. The presentation was given at the Columbus iPhone Developer User Group on July 28, 2009.

The Three20 toolkit has a lot of interesting additions and extensions to the iPhone SDK, the most used of which is a photo and thumbnail browser that is based on the ones written for the Facebook iPhone application.

Here is a link to the Columbus iPhone Developers User Group:

CIDUG

And here is a link to Justin’s posting to the group, which includes instructions on where to find the Three20 code and information on installation and usage:

7/28 CIDUG Meeting on Three20