Dreamfreeze Software

Things have been busy around here. I've been working on many projects, some done and some still in progress. 

I've been collaborating with my good friend Terry Schubring on some projects for our joint venture Jambots. We released Railroad Train for the iPad a few months ago and just got our second app, Lo-Fi Folk Arranger, into the store. We have game / toy app, Lifebulbs, that will be in the store soon as well. 

These projects are all done using our awesome native wrapper. Terry creates the UI with HTML5 and WebKit goodness, while I do all the heavy lifting with objective-c. We support caching resources, so we can ship all our assets but update them when bugs come up. We created a multi-track audio engine, something web programmers can only dream of without a plugin like Flash. It also has support for iAds and In App Purchase, so we can support both ad supported and freemium models for our apps. 

Check Railroad Train and Lo-Fi Folk Arranger on the app store.

The summer has gone by fast. I started at Thomson in July and it has been a great two months. For the first time in my career I don't worry about how long it is until Friday. Many weeks I wake up and my wife mentions the weekend and only then does it dawn on me that I don't have to work tomorrow. 

I've been very busy getting a demo ready for their meeting of the board. It was pretty high profile and everyone likes what I accomplished for it. I have been mentoring a few developers on iOS development, which has been educational for myself as well.

I am presenting at CocoaHeads tonight, the topic is Core Data on iOS with Networked Apps. I put a lot of effort into it and am happy with the slides and the sample project. I'm sure that the delivery will be fine. While I don't like public speaking I have never had a problem giving technical presentations.

I have to get my secret project done soon, it will be a year at the end of the month. It has been fun at times, but now I need to get it done so I can move on. If it ends up making money great, but I have other things that require my attention and I'm certain they will turn a profit.

Now that I've been working with the iPad for a few weeks, I really like what Apple has done with the development process. 

Making Hybrid iPhone/iPad applications is very easy for existing iPhone apps. You simply open up the xib in IB and select the File -> Create iPad version menu option. That combined with UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() and you can reuse all your existing view controllers while having full control over how you handle specific devices. 

I think there merit in making hybrid apps from existing iPhone apps in many cases. Nibipedia for instance is a perfect candidate for this. It is a small lightweight app that is mostly UIWebView driven. There isn't a lot of UI code for animations or dynamic view creation. It makes sense to just create a hybrid app.

Hansel on the other hand is more complicated. My initial attempt to make a hybrid app has failed miserably. The main problem is that I have lots of UI code that moves views around and makes assumptions about the device, that it is indeed an iPhone. While I could have written it in a more generic fashion, I never felt the need to do so. It didn't seem like there was enough benefit for spending the extra time on a free app. 

I started a new job over the new year. Working for ITR Group was a good experience but they lacked direction and leadership. I was the senior most engineer out of a team of 6. It was enjoyable but I'm glad it is over. I have iPhone work I'm doing on the side, so I still get my fix.

Back at McKesson, I am now working with GWT, Java, and RDF. It is interesting work and I am happy to broaden my skill set. I forgot how challenging working with Eclipse can be, but I plan to work with CXF web services to expose data to the iPhone. I'll be writing a set of articles about that in the coming months.

This is the fourth installment about using and accessing RESTful webservices on the iPhone.

You can download the example project artifacts here. This includes the iPhone example project and SQL Server scripts for generating the CarDealer DB and demo data.

Getting Started with iPhone + Data Services

Getting this post out took much longer than I thought. Setting up my .NET development and hosting environment was painful. My personal environment is different from my work environment, so I had some catch up after several months of not using it. 

Setting up SQL Server Express was not bad at all. I had an older version and decided to upgrade it to '08. Trying to create the data services project was painless as well. The pain began when I tried deploying to IIS 6 locally. While I'm sure someone out there can do it, I was unable to make it work. I decided to setup a Windows Server '08 VM to ease the pain. It helped a lot, but was very time consuming.

I started looking around for a free .NET hosting service that I could use to make the services public for the example. After several hours a gave up on this. I could have paid for a cheap one, but I doubt that I'd ever use it for anything else. 

This is the third installment about using and accessing RESTful webservices on the iPhone.

There is no example project associated with this post.

Astoria

[ADO.NET] Data Services is Microsoft's way of turning EDM into web services. While researching the best way to access data stored in an SQL Server database from the iPhone, we decided to give Data Services a go around. Superficially it matched our broad criteria for the project's services layer:

• RESTful Interface,
• JSON payload support,
• Run on IIS,
• Easily access SQL Server

Accessing it on the iPhone turned out to be very simple. After it was accessible via a browser I began working on displaying a simple table from the database. I created the first version of RestConnection and I was able to get a list of data primitives out of the database and displayed in a UITableView in about an hour.

Atom is the default format for Data Services. You can specify JSON by setting the Accept header on your HTTP requests. JSON is much easier to deal with on the iPhone because of it's simpler format. However, if you have a good Atom handling methodology than that format maybe preferable.

{
    "myCoolObject" : 
    [ 
        "value1", 
        "value2" 
    ]
}

// Returns a dictionary representation of the last data received.
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSDictionary *dictionaryData;


...

- (NSDictionary *)dictionaryData
{
  return [NSDictionary dictionaryWithJSONString:[self stringData]];
}

- (void)finishedReceivingData:(NSData *)data
{
    NSLog(@"finishedReceivingData: %@", [restConnection stringData]);
    [activityIndicator stopAnimating];


    // Get the dictionary containing the raw parsed data.
    NSDictionary *rawData = [restConnection dictionaryData];


    // Get the interesting search results data for display to the user.
    [tableData release];
    tableData = [[[rawData objectForKey:@"responseData"] objectForKey:@"results"] retain];
    [mainTableView reloadData];
}