Thanks Adam Curry for featuring Huesic on the Big App Show in a 3 min long presentation! If you haven’t tried out his app already, now would be a good time!

Big App Show on App Store

Let’s see how iAd integration works out – I’m not sure how it will display as during development all you see is a test advert, and iAds aren’t released in the UK until september. If anyone can capture a screenshot of iAds working on iOS 4, please send it my way!

Change log:

- Important bug fixes for iOS 4.0
- Beautiful high-res iPhone 4 artwork
- Multitasking (iOS 4.0 on iPhone 3GS & iPhone 4 only)
- iAd supported so I can keep this app free

With it came the optimisation of graphics to make use of the iPhone 4’s double pixels, which is super easy – you just make a high res version of your image and insert “@2x” before the file extension, e.g. “Default.png” becomes “Default@2x.png”. Clever!

iAds are displayed for iOS 4 users too – let’s see how that performs – there should be quite a large user base now as the app is free.

Huesic on the App Store

Cocoa Touch

The SDK is not all bad. Cocoa Touch is of course, awesome. It gives you plenty of freedom while constraining you in all the right places so you don’t end up with an unusable app. Most developers can’t do UI (look at some J2ME apps and you’ll know what I mean), but most iPhone apps are quite usable. Love the IB tool once you get your head round what it’s actually doing under the scenes. The widgets are customisable enough and using NSFetchedResultsController with a table is an efficient way to bind data to a table. UITouch events are simple to understand and the way messages cascade through view controllers via their subviews is great to work with.

Music Player Framework:

This is an unacceptable interface to the iPod library simply because it’s so inflexible and querying the library using MPMediaQuery and MPMediaPredicates is so inefficient and slow.

For example when you’re searching tracks by various properties you can only do either “exact match” or “contains”. There is no way  of doing a “word begins” search like the iPod does. This would speed up some queries significantly. Furthermore, there is no efficient way to get a list of Artists, Albums, Playlists etc. You’d imagine you could just do something like NSArray *artists = [[MPMusicPlayerController iPodMusicPlayer] artists] that returns a list of artist strings but actually you have to do something really silly. You have to do a query on the whole media library and tell the Music Player Framework to group tracks into collections. These collections can be representative of your grouping criteria – which in this case would be artist. There’s lots of heavy lifting going on here as we have to retrieve all the tracks on the collection – and on my iPhone 3G with around 2GB of songs this takes more than a few seconds.

To get around this problem you can cache the music library, but although there is a mechanism for detecting an iTunes sync while your app is running, there is no way to find out exactly what has changed. There is an API call to get the last modified date of the library, but this time also includes any updates to the library metadata – e.g. track play count, which makes this useless for detecting collection changes. Apple, please do something about this!

Core Data

I started using this because I thought it would be an easy and efficient way to query a large data set with basic math in the predicates (e.g. abs(r-%f) < .28 AND abs(g-%f) < .28 AND abs(b-%f) < .28) but even though the underlying store is SQLite I realise there are so many limitations. If I wanted to fetch 50 random items, I can’t do that. I can only sort by attribute name (e.g. title descending). That’s not very helpful… I might have to go back to the drawing board and use NSMutableDictionaries instead.

Maybe its time to wipe all preconceptions of programming that I’ve learnt from web development and start getting used to the Client API way of doing things. Lots of ups and downs but we’ll get there.

Thanks for reading

Working on an iPhone app! The image gives it away for those who knows me or knew me well enough. Keep your eyes peeled for a preview version! ^_~

I looked at Google’s Chrome browser by going through the walk-through clips, and it actually has some merits! People have complained about an increased memory issue. I can’t believe people actually worry about memory usage nowadays. Even my 2 year old laptop has 2GB of memory.

I’m not here to slag off Chrome (it is ‘beta’ after all), or worship its greatness, but to just adjust my thoughts on the browser according to the hype. What’s important is not how badly it does things other things do better, but how Google has tackled an extremely difficult problem of redesigning a web browser, in a way that it simplifies browsing for most people. Please note, I haven’t tried the browser, as it’s only for Windows right now.

One box for everything

Makes sense. Most browsing tends to start with a search nowadays, even if it’s a site you know address to.

New Tab page

Requirement in every browser. makes sense.

Application shortcuts

Silly. Makes things more complicated. Adding more ways of achiving the same task (loading web page) may confuse people.

Dynamic tabs

Good innovation that I first saw with Safari (3?). Should be there in all tab interfaces

Crash control

lol. reminds me of how Windows Mobile has a task manager. There are simpler ways of task managing and indicating misbehaving apps! E.g. press close on the tab or fade window to show it’s not active.

Incognito mode

Makes sense for secret browsing. Incognito is a bad word to use though. I didn’t even know what it meant at first.

Safe browsing

These big messages confuse people – I remember when designing Firefox 3, the Mozilla Foundation went through loads of different designs for notifying users that a certificate is invalid/to warn people about installing add-ons. The ones rejected for being too scary were less scary than the Chrome ones. Actually, a quick search showed that for managing current-page SSL certificates it still shows a scary box. We’ve all seen it.

Instant bookmarks

Is this in terms of interaction? Because that doesn’t seem so instant to me. Needs to be synced easily and searched via web! I assume, though – and it would make sense – that the address bar also searches bookmarks.

Importing settings

*Yawn. But I agree that it has to be shown as a feature.

Simpler downloads

Now THIS is a worthy feature that I am genuinely impressed with. Even a web geek like me gets ticked off with the complexity of viewing download progress, extraction, finding files.This fixes part of that problem by taking up screen space, which forces you to keep your downloads organised. I guess, same principle as the downloads drawer in Leopard.

I was involved as web consultant and designer for the rebranding of The British HCI Group to “Interaction”. This involved the complete transfer of all content from their old website into the Drupal CMS and redesign based on their new image. This site was optimised for AA accessibility, a simple user experience and of course, SEO. In fact, I’m proud to announce that searching for HCI on Google actually results in my site being second place, after Wikipedia!

Visit the Interaction website.

Just been getting to grips with the CodeIgniter MVC framework built on PHP using the book from Wrox: Professional CodeIgniter. Having tried RoR and ASP.net, and gone through the days of highly productive but low maintenance spaghetti code, worshipping the monolithic PEAR libraries, making my own frameworks around templating engines, I think – why do I even bother? Why not stick to the language you know better than your mother tongue – in my case – PHP. The author, Thomas Myer, makes a convincing argument about this, saying that some people may view this as being an intellectual coward. But if we achieve tasks and make the client happy, why waste their money training yourself to learn a new language?

While I haven’t worked on a proper project with this framework yet, it seems an awesome blend of MVC’s simple-to-understand coding structure with a massive time-saving library of helpers. Never before has web development with PHP seemed so friendly – times have moved on since I was an active freelance developer 3-4 years ago, and is my cue to get my ass into gear and keep up with the times!

What’s the difference between the agile software development methodology and user-centered design I learned so much about in the HCI courses? I guess, theyre both based on the same core concept of letting the client have a core part to play in development and have iterative cycles.