Tech stuff

I think today is Day 13.

So finally I’ve had a chance to sit down and nut this out. First things first, getting hello world to run on the iPhone. Finally I worked out how to self sign a certificate, and get Xcode to build it, then using a custom script I found on the net, sign the code so the iPhone will run it. Yay! Hello World runs on the iPhone!

Next step. Get a GPS app running on the iPhone. After following a pretty good tutorial from http://www.vellios.com/2010/08/16/core-location-gps-tutorial/ I finally got a GPS test app running. (After making some changes so it would run on iOS 3.1). However, this is the end of the good news. So far, as I suspected, the iPhone 3GS isn’t performing well on the GPS. Accuracy of 1km isn’t good enough, that can be achieved with just network location! We need down to about 10m. I’m thinking maybe I will need to upgrade to a newer iOS to see if it’s an issue with the hardware or the software. However I want this app to run on iOS 3.1, so am hesitant to do any upgrades.

The last of the good news is that the Objective-C is starting to make some sense to me, and I’ll now work on learning the major differences, and some more subtle ones, between Objective-C, C++ and C.

I’ve decided to blog this journey of learning and challenge. I am developing a mobile app, initially for iOS and eventually for Android. I have given myself an initial 60 days to get it done, 60 days from getting the equipment.

Being an iOS app, I required an Apple Mac computer to run the required development tools. Tuesday afternoon an iPhone 3GS and a MacBook arrived, curtsey of a friend of Jun’s. First thing I needed to do was download the Lion update, so I could run XCode 4.1. This started Tuesday evening and was finished by Wednesday morning (Day 1). I then prepared a USB Drive to boot the installer from, and went and purchased a new laptop HDD to upgrade the MacBook. By lunch time I’d fitted the new 500Gb HDD and the OS X Lion install was finished. Now started the 6-8hr download of XCode. Meanwhile I spent some time getting aquainted with this MacBook and OS X. No, I’m not converted like some people have been asking, however it probably will be my main computer for the next 60 odd days.

Yesterday (day 2) I wrote a Hello World app in XCode for iOS. It was copied straight from a tutorial on the net, and I quickly discovered that Apple wants $99 from me to be able to even test it on my iPhone! Come on Apple, you already get the money for the MacBook, the iPhone, and now you want more money just so we can test apps on our OWN devices!?!? Eventually we’ll need to fork out this money so we can sign our apps and put them on the App Store. For now though, I think I’ll just jailbreak for testing purposes.
I’ve continued getting acquainted with the MacBook. It now runs Firefox and Thunderbird, iCal is 2 way syncing my calendar. Clementine has become my music player (iTunes, no thanks), LibreOffice is installed. TextWrangler may become my other code editor if it is good enough. Dropbox is setup for syncing between my MacBook and certain folders on my main computer. So far, it’s been nice using this computer, however it’s certainly not better than similar hardware running Linux. For a start, it took me a long time to get network shares with our NAS working well, even though it supports AFP. Eventually it was easier to just setup NFS. I’m getting used to all the keyboard shortcuts, which once learned certainly speed up some navigation. Annoyingly, there have been some things where a keyboard doesn’t work and you have to use a mouse.

Regarding code, it looks like I’ll probably use Git for the SCM as its built in to XCode.

Thats all for Day 3 so far. I need to get some uni work done and we have a busy weekend. I look forward to next week when I’ll have to make this iPhone run my apps!