It has been a bumpy road for us both, maybe we said some things we didn’t mean, I hurt you, you hurt me. Now that I have my new toy in my arms I think we need to put this difficult time behind us and move on.
For anyone that is wondering, yes, the iPad is amazing. I wasn’t convinced before but now that I have seen one face to face, I am converted. Now if only I could get it back from my wife….
Stu
OK, so now my venom is aimed at UPS. I no longer blame Newtownabbey, it was just a pawn in the game that UPS are playing with me.
Stupid brown van driving, brown jacket wearing iPad stealers.
It isn’t that I have anything against Newtownabbey, it is just that my iPad has been stuck there since 21:43 last night. To begin with I wasn’t that excited about the iPad but now that launch day is here I want to play with all the cool new apps.
Knowing my luck it won’t be delivered until late tonight. At least I will have it tomorrow, I can use it as a distraction while my wife forces me to watch the Eurovision.
Stu
As you may or may not be aware, Derry~Londonderry in Northern Ireland is down to the last four in the selection process to become the UK City of Culture 2013. Paper Bag got the opportunity to work with the guys behind the bid and build an iPhone/iPod Touch app to support their campaign.
The ‘UK City of Culture 2013′ app is Free and now Live on the iTunes App Store. For full details please read the press release at the City of Culture 2013 website.
Alternatively you can click this link to go directly to the app on the App Store.
Paper Bag would like to take this opportunity to wish Derry~Londonderry every success in their campaign to become UK City of Culture 2013. All is left now is for the judging panel to “Just Say Yes”.
After fighting with the Graph API for a few weeks we seem to have finally tamed the beast. We are using the old Facebook Connect API to log into Facebook and then calls to the new Graph API to get the data.
The idea of using the old system for log-in came from http://github.com/ryanscott/bamboo/. The reason we used it was that just using Graph for logging in had problems with the sessions expiring after 1 hour and making the user log in again. There is probably a better way around the issue but we needed something quickly.
Stu
In an app that we are currently working on we are using a UIWebView to log the user into Facebook. We have had a host of problems with the FB integration which I will go into another time but one problem we had was that login details where being cached within the application. This meant that whoever was the first person to log into the application stayed logged in whether they liked it or not. Even trying to open another UIWebView to the FB logout page didn’t work. What did work however was to delete the cookies that FB had stored with the Application directory.
Here is the code to do it.
NSHTTPCookieStorage *jar = [NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage];
NSArray *cookies = [jar cookies];
for (id cookie in cookies) {
[jar deleteCookie:cookie];
}
It might seem like overkill to delete all the cookies rather than just the ones related to Facebook but I couldn’t get it to work for just the FB domain, I had to delete them all.
Stu
Before I go any further, I have a confession to make. Gary (@garygall155) sent me a link about it ages ago and I completely ignored it. My only defence is that Gary sends me about 10 emails each day with things I should look at. If I did look at all of them I would get nothing else done.
Due to the fact that I ignored the email I am extremely late to the party but this morning I finally downloaded the MockApp template for PowerPoint and so far I am really impressed. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our design and development processes and I think that this will fill a gap for us.
MockApp is simply a collection of PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentations that allow you to cut and paste from a library of iPhone UI elements to create a mocked up app UI. The mocked up UI can then be presented to a client either as a series of screens or you can link the UI elements to specific pages in your presentation so that they get a feel for the navigation through the app. Clients find it hard to visualise apps based on wireframe or sketches so this should help us confirm that we have in mind for an app is similar to what the client expects to see. Most importantly it gets something in front of a client quickly so if we are wrong about their requirements we find out. As the old saying goes, Fail Fast, Fail Early, Fail Cheap.
Hopefully we will have a few opportunities to use this in the near future so I keep you posted on how it is working out.
Stu
if you ever have to set up SVN on a ubuntu server this is the guide to follow. There are loads of different places to get the information but this is the one that finally cracked it for me.
http://www.howtoforge.com/subversion-trac-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-server
Stu
In a past life I was responsible for admin of several Linux servers. Why is it that now that I need to do it again I have forgotten almost everything I ever knew?
This is where I start asking myself if it would be more cost effective to just pay for a managed service and just concentrate on my main job of writing iPhone apps.
I will keep you updated on my progress.
Stu
