//dennisbloete

Als Stephan Griesenbrock und Daniel Knobloch mir Ende letzten Jahres die Idee für ihre DISSER App für’s iPhone (und iPod Touch) vorstellten war mir schon klar, dass die App ein sehr großes Potential hat: Ein schlüßiges Konzept um eine witzige und bislang so nicht umgesetzte Idee, eine gut zu erreichende Zielgruppe und angebrachte Sharing-Funktionen für soziale Netzwerke, so dass auch der Grundstein für eine virale Verbreitung gelegt ist. Aber damit, dass die App direkt so einschlagen würde, hat von uns dreien selbst bei dem guten Feedback das wir von Freunden bekommen haben keiner gerechnet.

Wir schreiben heute Tag 4 nach Livegang im App Store und der Disser hat sich bis ganz nach oben an Position 1 der meistverkauften Apps in Deutschland gepöbelt. Der helle Wahnsinn, vor allem weil es so schnell ging – was aber wiederum der sehr Marketingarbeit der zwei Jungs aus Köln zu verdanken ist: Rund um den Disser wurde vor dem Livegang ein umfassendes Gesamtpaket inklusive Website, Projektblog, Facebook Fan-Page, Marketing-Video und Pressematerial geschnürt, so dass die App nicht nur auf dem iPhone stattfindet. Schnell trudelten die ersten sehr guten Rezensionen und Video-Reviews ein: So schreibt beispielsweise iPhone-Junkie Carsten Scheibe im Stern.de Blog: “Der Disser ist eine überaus professionell umgesetzte Fun-App, die auf jedes iPhone und auf jeden iPod touch gehört.”

Auch das Feedback der Nutzer im App Store und auf der Website sind super: Viele wollen den Wortschatz des Dissers erweitert sehen und schlagen selbst neue Wörter vor, so dass sich ein sehr kuriose und amüsante Liste von Vorschlägen ansammelt, die wir möglichst schnell mit einem neuen Update herausgeben werden. Wir sind gespannt auf die nächsten Tage, freuen uns über weitere Reviews und Vorschläge und bedanken uns bei allen Nutzern für’s Herunterladen der App – sowas macht echt Spaß!

There is a really nice introduction at the MongoDB site on How to get started with MongoDB and Rails 3. I used this as a starting point but had to do a few more things before I was fully satisfied and got things running with MongoMapper. At the time of writing this the official repository is not Rails 3 compatible (because it does not implement the ActiveModel interface, yet), so I had to go with the rails3 branch of merbjedi’s repository. Use the following line to add the dependency to your Gemfile:

gem "mongo_mapper", :git => 'http://github.com/merbjedi/mongomapper.git', :branch => 'rails3'

And while you are at it, add this line to include some handy generators for Rails 3, including one for MongoMapper models:

gem "rails3-generators"

To use the generator set the orm config in your config/application.rb to :mongomapper

config.generators do |g|
      g.orm :mongomapper
      …
end

… and you are good to go!

btw: If you are like me and you prefer to have some kind of GUI for quick database lookups, check out MongoHub. It is in a very early stage of development, but at least you get to see your databases and documents.

Es ist soweit und ZENDOME – ein Kundenprojekt an dem ich in letzter Zeit gearbeitet habe – ist nun kostenlos im App Store erhältlich. Die Applikation wurde im Auftrag der ZENDOME GmbH entwickelt und ermöglicht die Planung von individuellen Event-Landschaften, die beispielsweise auf Messen oder für Ausstellungen verwendet werden. Der Benutzer hat die Möglichkeit, die verschiedenen geodätischen Dome zur ZENDOME.domescapes zu kombinieren und damit seine Veranstaltung vorzudenken. Ist eine Planung erstellt lässt sich schnell und unkompliziert ein Angebot anfordern.

Besonderer Wert wurde auf eine intuitive Benutzung der Anwendung gelegt. Um dies zu erreichen wurde auf die aus dem allgemeinen iPhone-Kontext bekannte Gesten und Aktionen (bspw. Pinch/Zoom, Drag and Drop, Scrolling, etc. ) zurückgegriffen und einfache Interaktionsmuster benutzt. Es gibt bereits Erweiterungspläne für kommende Versionen: So ist insbesondere eine iPad-Variante angedacht, da die größere Bildschirmfläche natürlich mehr Platz für eine komfortable und detailreiche Planung bietet. Noch etwas zum technischen Hintergrund: Das Projekt wurde mit Xcode und CocoaTouch-Standardtechnologien wie UIKit, CoreGraphics und CoreAnimation innerhalb von vier Wochen realisiert und hatte insgesamt einen Arbeitsaufwand von ca. 40 Stunden. Weitere Projektdetails und Informationen plane ich in naher Zukunft in einer kurzen Fallstudie zu veröffentlichen.

A few months ago, after the birth of our daugther (yeah, Lotta!) and during my parental leave, thoughts arose about realizing an idea I’ve carried around with me since I finished my studies: Going solo, working on my own projects and earning a living as a freelance software developer. A few weeks ago I realized that plan and decided to quit my current job at neuland, though it wasn’t an easy decision: working for neuland has always been fun, especially because of the nice environment and the multitude of different personalities of the people working there – some of which are now close friends of mine. Nevertheless I felt that deep urge of doing something on my own and having sold venteria in summer makes taking the plunge a little less risky.

Alright, so where am I heading? A new focus will be iPhone/Cocoa app development and I’ll keep on working with Ruby on Rails – I’m really looking forward to all the great enhancements planned for Rails 3.0 and I just love doing web development, so that I won’t burn all the bridges

The bootstrapping went pretty well so far, I joined a really nice coworking environment and got an office at the infamous Abfertigung. As far as I can tell I’ll be surrounded by a bunch of very nice, creative and innovative people. Furthermore it’s good to know that I can, but don’t have to work from home – that makes meeting clients and finding quiet hours to get work done (I’m lookin’ atcha, Lotta) a lot easier

Hopefully I’ll find the time during the next weeks to write about some of the aspects of becoming a freelancer as I know some of you are interested in that and I’d like to take you along on that journey. I think it will be a pretty interesting time and I’ll learn tons about myself, meet nice and interesting people (including clients ) and most important of all: still have the time to enjoy my family… we shall see

If you are working on multiple Macs (i.e. having a personal and one at work) you probably know this problem: You would like to sync some application data between these machines, so that you don’t have to manage separate todo-lists, items in your inbox that you’ve already read on one machine but are marked as unread on the other, etc. I’m using Dropbox (disclaimer: If you sign up using this link, I’ll get some more disk space, thank you!) to sync various applications (Things, Billings and Socialite for example), but you can use any other cloud storage solution if you like.

In this little tutorial I’ll explain how to sync the data with Dropbox and I’m using Socialite as an example. It basically works like this for any app that stores its data in an Application Support folder, but Socialite requires some extra steps people are frequently asking about, so here we go:

1. Go to your Dropbox folder and create a new folder called Synced Application Support (or whatever you like)
2. Quit any running instance of the application you would like to sync (in this case Socialite).
3. Got to your ~/Library/Application Support and move the Socialite folder into the Dropbox folder you just created (Synced Application Support)
4. Open your Terminal.app and symlink the moved folder:
   $ ln -s ~/Dropbox/Synced\ Application\ Support/Socialite/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/Socialite
5. Start the app and see if it worked

After this five steps you should be up and running with most of your apps (syncing Things is as easy as that). Unfortunately Socialite requires some extra steps if you are using Twitter (and who isn’t these days), because it keeps the OAuth authentication tokens in the keychain, so that you need to sync them too. Fortunately this isn’t a big deal, because now you know how to sync your data, so go ahead and…

1. Quit Socialite
2. Open your Keychain and create a new keychain called Socialite and save it within your Synced Application Support/Socialite folder
3. Right click the new Socialite keychain, edit the settings and uncheck the checkboxes so that you won’t be bothered with authentication request every now and then
4. Use the search bar at the upper right corner to search for twitter.com and move all items used by Socialite to the new Socialite keychain
5. Start Socialite and see if your Twitter services are still working – if not: Delete all items in your Socialite keychain, remove the Twitter services from Socialite, restart Socialite, add them again and move the freshly created twitter.com items in your Login keychain to the Socialite keychain.

Okay, that’s it, I hope it’s helpful to some of you and I also hope that someday syncing will be baked into Socialite, though Realmac Software currenty doesn’t have any plans for implementing that.

Im Rahmen der WebTechCon in Karlsruhe fand heute der iPhone Dev Day statt, auf dem Arne Harren, Johannes Fahrenkrug, Tammo Freese und ich jeweils Sessions rund um die iPhone-Entwicklung gegeben haben. Hier findet ihr die Folien und den Demo Code meines Vortrags zum Thema “Asynchronität mit dem iPhone SDK” und ein paar Fotos zu den Sessions. Ich freu mich sehr über das positive Feedback, sowohl zu meiner als auch den anderen Sessions. Falls Interesse besteht, kann ich den Vortrag gerne mal bei einem der lokalen CocoaHeads Treffen wiederholen.

Die WebTechCon war sehr gut organisiert, die Unterbringung, Essen und Atmosphäre top. Unterm Strich eine sehr nette Konferenz die Spaß gemacht hat und auf der ich viele nette Leute getroffen hab – unter anderem habe ich endlich auch mal den Rest der Railslove Gang persönlich kennen gelernt. Fazit: Vielen Dank, gerne wieder!

This iPhone tutorial about encapsulating authentication logic in a separate controller was planned as a chapter for an upcoming iPhone Recipes Book, but unfortunately the book got cancelled. As I had written most of it and already finished the example code I thought it might be of interest for some of you and I would like to share it before it gets dusty.

Problem

Most applications that deal with users registered on a backend (like webapps) are likely to verify
the user credentials. This recipe explains how to extract the authentication functionality that
handles the workflow of prompting the user for credentials and verifying them at the backend.

Solution

A separate (Modal View) Controller that acts as the apps AuthenticationController and gets called by other controllers. This controller encapsulates the authentication logic so that it is cleanly separated from the rest of the app. The provided code is compatible for all iPhone OS from 2.0 on.

The code for this recipe is available on GitHub and it contains an example app that features authentication with the Twitter API (HTTP Basic Auth, keepin’ it simple) along with explanatory notes in the README.

One thing I recently struggled with was how to build and deploy apps for outdated OS versions. After upgrading to the new iPhone SDK 3.0 the build options for iPhone OS minor to 3.0 seem to be gone.

The solution to this is pretty simple, but I spent some time searching for it: Open your Project Info (double click the project icon) and adjust the build settings. You need to set the Base SDK to something prior to OS 3.0.

Having done that, the build options for older versions reappear. I hope this little trick saves some of your time

Tonight Apple sent out a mail to all developers enrolled in the iPhone Development Program prompting us to test all our applications with the soon to be released SDK 3.0. Though the apps must be compatible with the changes in 3.0, they currently are not allowed to be build with the new SDK. This requires developers to keep both instances of Xcode during the transitional period. So be sure to install the new Xcode to a different location (the neccessary steps are described in the accompanied README).

Happy beta testing and quick app approvals to all of you!

Working on iOctocat I had to integrate Gravatars. Therefore I wrote an Objective-C GravatarLoader class that I would like to share. You can use it like this:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
   [super viewDidLoad];
   gravatarLoader = [[GravatarLoader alloc] initWithTarget:self andHandle:@selector(setGravatarImage:)];
   [gravatarLoader loadEmail:@"your@email.com" withSize:50];
}

The gravatarLoader needs to be an instance variable of the class that’s using it as it loads the Gravatar asynchronously. You initialize the GravatarLoader with a target object and a selector. The selector works as request handle and gets passed an UIImage when the Gravatar is loaded. After initializing it you can load the image with the email address and the square size.

Download the GravatarLoader source.