AppleTV + iPhone Better than Mac for AirTunes

As I described in my last post, I've setup an Airport Express and a ceiling speaker to deliver music to my bathroom. This is cool technology, but after a week of it, it had the feeling of technology which was not going to become part of my daily routine. The major problem being that I had to remember to start the music playing from my MacBook before heading to the shower, and remember to shut it off afterwards. Several times, my wife made a special trip downstairs just to close the lid of my MacBook.


Then I realized this is just the sort of thing the Apple Remote app for iPhone is supposed to make easy, as I can control the music from wherever I might be in the house. And I further realized that I didn't have to leave my MacBook running all the time. The AppleTV in the living room is always on, contains my complete music collection, can be controlled by the Apple Remote app, and it can be told to send music to any AirTunes speakers on the network, including the Airport Express hooked to my bathroom speakers.


This has the major benefit of giving my wife equal control over the speakers as her iPhone can control the music as well as mine, and in a simple form her technological indifference won't mind.


So yeah, this seems right.

iTunes to Shower Speakers

[Update: I've posted a video about installing a bathroom speaker using an Airport Express as part of an Amazon review of a
SpeakerCraft CRS6 One in ceiling speaker. If you like it, I'd appreciate helpful votes.]

As I’ve mentioned before, the big new thing at the house the last year was a much improved moderately large shower in the basement. It’s become a locus of activity, as the babies have taken to bathing there making ad hoc bath basins out of plastic toy bins.


One thing missing would be a source of music. It occurred to me that if I could get an Airport Express mounted near the ceiling over the shower, I could use its AirTunes capability to stream music while I bathed. This would have the advantage of also allowing my wife to stream music or radio programming from her computer as well. Refurbished Airport Expresses go for $79 at the Apple online store with free shipping. Plus, I’d have another wireless N source.


[Update: Did you know that if you have an iPod Touch or iPhone, and an Apple TV, and an Airport Express, you can configure the Apple Remote for iPhone to tell the Apple TV to send its music to the Airport Express. And yes, I have all those things, and yes, Apple makes more money off me than the State of New Hampshire.]


According to the AVS Forum’s speaker section, a good in-ceiling speaker for the high humidity environment of a shower's ceiling is the Jamo 6.52DVCA2. I have done no comparing, so I cannot personally attest to how it sounds versus other in-ceiling products. It sounds fine to me, and it turns out is easy to install due to its well thought out mounting hardware. This speaker integrates both a left and right channel, so I only needed the one, and made do without much separation. This was found online for $78 shipped. [Update: Be sure to point both tweeters at where your head will be. I made the mistake of pointing one at the tiled wall, resulting in a muffled, echoey sound. Also, you might want to put some silicon sealer between the dry wall and the plastic bevel of the speaker.]


Finally, I needed a small amplifier to bridge the unamplified output of the Express with the 8Ω inputs of the speaker. Again, I am not an audio person, but I found a small 2×15 W stereo amplifier on Amazon, a Pyle Pro PCA1 Mini 2×15W Stereo Power Amplifier for $36 shipped. I didn’t suppose the small enclosed space of the shower would need any more power than that. And I was right. The system is plenty loud with the volume knob set at one quarter maximum. The amp's inputs are male RCA jacks, requiring a female RCA to mini jack adaptor. I wrote a short Amazon review on this amp, and I'd appreciate any helpful votes.


Remember, the Airport Express is not a "line out" analog device. The loudness of the output can be controlled via the volume slider in iTunes or the Apple iPhone Remote app depending on the setup. While this results in somewhat less than optimal sound, it is extremely convenient.


My original thought had been to install an electrical socket in the space above the shower and plug both the amplifier and the Airport Express there. But the only advantages to that plan would be to marginally improve my home’s WiFi coverage, and to limit any noise caused by runs of analog signals in stereo wire. Neither reason was compelling enough to justify the added expense and hassle of dealing with household current and possible building code problems. As it happened, I had a wall socket in my laundry room which was 20 feet of stereo cable from my shower's ceiling, and there is where I placed the amp and WiFi hub.



So the total required hardware:

• 1 Airport Express $79
• 1 Jamo 6.52DVCA2 In-Ceiling Speaker $78
• 1 Pyl Pro PCA1 Amplifier $36
• 1 30 foot Cat 6 Ethernet cable $5.40
• 1 Mini Jack to RCA Adaptor $0.65
• 50 feet 16 gauge stereo wire 8.80
• Shipping on cables $8.92
• Total Hardware $216.77

That does tend to add up quickly, doesn’t it? Well, maybe you needed a new 802.11n wireless hub anyway.


In retrospect, I should have gotten 4 conductor in wall stereo cable instead of 2 conductor. The added complexity of dragging two cables had no benefit.


I went to Lowe's and purchased a drywall saw, safety goggles, and a dust mask; all of which made the task of cutting out the speaker mounting hole painless. It is amazing how easily a hand drywall saw cuts through drywall. The hardest part was finding a place to cut the hole where there was plenty of space in the void above the ceiling. I'd have preferred a more symmetrical arrangement with the ceiling light, but the geometry of the joists was such that my options were limited. I used gluestick to temporarily stick the provided paper template so I could very precisely mark out the hole in pencil then started cutting with the saw; very easy. The JAMO speaker easily screws into place with a hidden mount.



And now I have my shower music. Time will tell if it was worth the expense.


[Update: Energy usage. I attached everything to my Kill-A-Watt, and while playing the Airport Express and the amplifier together draw 7 W, while not playing they draw 5 W, and with the amplifier turned off the Airport Express by itself draws 3 W. So, at 5W idle, it costs much less than a dollar a month to power the system. Also, while playing my unibody MacBook draws around 17 W with its screen asleep, so a system which played music 24/7 would cost on the order of $3/month of electricity.]

Mythtv + HDHomerun + SheevaPlug : Connecting the Dots

Marvell just announced a 5 W Linux box with a USB 2.0 port and Gigabit ethernet, the SheevaPlug. This is a full Linux server with a 1.2 GHz processor in a box the size of a large wall wart power supply for a price of $79 US. Presumably any geeky person reading this has a dozen things they could do with such a product, and here is one: MythTV backend.


One of my problems with MythTV has been the old Pentium 4 Dell desktop I use as a backend. The monster draws upwards of 100 W. 24/7. Just to record 5 hours of TV a week and serve out videos.


Well look at what we can build now:

• SheevaPlug 5W ($79)
• HDHomerun 5W ($159) Dual HD TV Tuner
• 1.5TB USB Hard Drive 10 W ($110)
• 20 W for $348

The hard drive cost and the dual tuner are constants when building a MythTV system. I'm not counting the cost of an ethernet switch, as I assume most of us would have an extra port regardless. The major point is using a SheevaPlug for a MythTV backend would be much cheaper even then using a NetBook $250, and would very rapidly be cheaper than even re-using an old desktop $10/month electricity versus $0.50/month for just the SheevaPlug.


And it should be quiet.


On the down side, it would be useless as a frontend, and probably not up to the task of re-encoding videos.

When An App Rejection Improves An iPhone App

[Update: Lullabies is now in the app store. Check it out.]

I recently submitted Lullabies an iPhone App to Apple. They reviewed it for a few days and rejected it. The basic design had been that a user would choose a soothing animation/song and that animation would play to completion, and only at that point the user could choose to replay the song, or go back to pick another. Apple didn't like that. The reviewer wanted a mechanism to go directly back to the root view without waiting. Otherwise I was in violation of interface guidelines.



I did not argue. I gave them what they wanted. Touching the screen brings up a small button which will return to the animation picker.


I had been thinking that if the parent handed a child the iPhone, the child would navigate around like my own children do and not settle into being relaxed. However, it's true that they will probably hit the main button to kill the app if they are inclined, and I don't want the app to be thought of as children only. I find the app relaxing too; my brother has a great voice, and it's calming watching bubbles bounce around. And adults don't need or like boundaries in their iPhone apps. So Apple was right. It improved the app.


The second improvement came from the added time for testing the rejection gave me. Now that it was easier to go back to the root view, I actually tried it and found severe resource management problems. First, I found my animation views were not releasing. Then I was leaking animation objects every time a bubble disappeared. Then I found that animations in the root view were taking a huge amount of time while hidden, to the point where touches became non-responsive. A whole long series of problems when I just wanted to get the app out the door. But, you never get a second chance at a first impression. iPhone apps which are branded as junk rarely get their reputations back. If I put my name on a piece of software, it means I think it is a quality piece of software.


I spent most of my debugging time in the Object Allocations and CPU Sampler Instruments figuring out why my little app was misbehaving. Developers, remember that the Leaks Instrument will not find a Leak if an object is attached to the run loop, as an animation is likely to be, instead look for classes of allocations that keep having net growth over time.


That one little button Apple requested blossomed into a series of improvements, cleanups, and learning experiences. And in the end, I have a much more responsive app, and code which I'll be able to reuse in future projects.


So, thank you anonymous Apple reviewer. You did me a huge favor.

Writing a Lullaby App for the iPhone

[Update: Lullabies is now in the app store. Check it out.]


I have 2 young children, and the familiarity and dexterity they show in using their parent's iPhones continues to amaze me. They can unlock the phone, find the YouTube app, and press on a video to play. And they are only 3 and 2 years old.


I have a brother, James Howes, who is an amazing singer, trying to make a name for himself singing opera in the Midwest. I would love to do something to advance his career.


One night, I came up with the idea of an app to help make babies sleepy, a lullaby app. Restful animations would play while Jim sang something sleep inducing. Originally, a friend of mine was going to do the animations, but he was too busy and I ended up doing the animations using CALayers and Core Animation, which was a first for me.


So here are some ideas about using CALayers on the iPhone. The first thing I did was open up Photoshop Elements and create a 320x480 document. I like Elements because it has simple vectored tools, its Save For Web... function creates excellent PNG files, and most importantly it is a layered editing program. Thus I can mock up my animation before I ever write a line of code to see what parts I need. So for a toy clock, I can combine, a background, a pendulum, a spinning moon dial, a spinning sun, and some foreground artwork. These are all exported from Elements as PNG files. PNG is the proper choice as it has decent compression while still having a transparency, and full color.

To form a toy clock of the kind one might see strapped to a crib.

If I add a layer of shadow—easily created with Element's color to transparent gradient tool—I am able to animate its opacity over the course of the animation ending with a night time scene. I like this gloaming effect better than simply making the whole scene uniformly dim.

Now that I had my parts together, I loaded each into a CALayer as so:

UIImage* moonsImage = [UIImage imageNamed:kMoonsName];
self.moonsLayer = [CALayer layer];
self.moonsLayer.contents = (id)moonsImage.CGImage;
self.moonsLayer.name = kMoonsName;
self.moonsLayer.opaque = NO;
[self addSublayer:moonsLayer];
self.moonsLayer.zPosition = 2;
self.moonsLayer.contentsGravity = kCAGravityResizeAspectFill;
[self.moonsLayer addAnimation:[self spinningAnimation] forKey:@"transform"];

Note, I made use of the zPosition to make sure my parts are drawn in the right order, and that I have a method that creates a CABasicAnimation spinningAnimation. I made a variety of CABasicAnimations to rotate the moon layer, spin the sun and swing the pendulum. You might have noticed that the center of the sun is the center of the moon dial is the center of the clock as a whole is the rotation point of the pendulum. This is not a coincidence; it makes figuring things out a whole lot easier. The pendulum graphic I used extends from the rotation point to the tip of the pendulum, although most of it is transparent.


I also made animations of snow falling, and bubbles bouncing. The hard part was simulating a bubble's iridescence (rainbow effect) in the Core Animation on the iPhone, believe me it would have been easier if Apple provided support for a proper masking layer as they do on the desktop.

It was darn hard getting my brother's audio tracks. Singing lullabies is not part of his normal repertoire—Rossini is more his speed—and he had no easily available recording facilities. The first tracks he sent me sounded like they were sung in an oak closet (better known as my cousin's kitchen). But after a very long time, he delivered the tracks I wanted, and I think they sound pretty good:
Down in the Valley. Note that any imperfections are caused by my amateurish editing skills; Jim is a singing machine.


Thankfully, Apple brought out the AVAudioPlayer class in the 2.2 SDK. It makes playing music much easier than the previous method of messing with AudioQueues. So actually playing the music was falling off a log easy.


So that's that. It was great learning about Core Animation, and I've ended up making good use of the skills in a per hour job this last month. And I hope to make more children apps in the future. I just hope this one makes a little money along the way.

How I Drive Around With My iPhone

If you insert your iPhone's headset into your iPhone, and then plug an iPhone to USB connector into the bottom connector, the phone has a very useful set of behaviors. Regular audio such as music or podcasts will go out the bottom connector—which in my case ends up coming out my car's speakers—while phone conversations will go through the headsets. Also, the click button on the microphone works to pause (single click), answer (single click), hang up (single click) and skip to next track (double click).


Therefore, when I get into the car for my commute home, I plug my headset into the phone, put the right—microphone—ear bud into my ear, and then plug the phone into my car's stereo system. The order this is done is important. Then, as I'm driving around, if someone calls me, I can answer the phone, hang up, and skip tracks all without looking. Be warned, might be illegal in your locality.

A Tech Support Mystery

Last week, my co-worker Gerald came to my cube saying his PowerMac G5 was consistently locking up after starting up and bringing up Entourage. He had come to me as I am the Mac programmer on staff, and therefore considered to know all things Macintosh.

I went down to his cube to find the G5 unresponsive to mouse clicks; locked up just has he had said. Very odd. After a few seconds of futzing around I realized that the machine did respond to right clicks. And a few seconds later, Gerald mentioned in passing that every time he restarted, the optical drive ejected. I immediately knew what the problem was. Can you solve this mystery? Answer below.
















The left mouse button of his Logitech mouse was stuck in the clicked state. Thus the machine was non-responsive to mouse clicks, and as everyone should know, holding down the mouse button while restarting will eject the optical drive of a Mac. I went and got a Mighty Mouse, plugged it in and the machine worked perfectly.

Patience Needed for Switching .mpg Application

My MythTV records over the air broadcasts as .mpg (MPEG) files of several gigabytes each. My preferred mode of viewing them these days is to open up a SMB share on the MythTV box, copy the file over to my MacBook while I'm working and then view it later. Amongst the many annoying things about this process—inefficient SMB transfers, avoiding having Time Machine back up the show, OS X not letting me watch a partially transferred file—a small one is that Quicktime owns the .mpg extension, when it'd be nice if VLC did. But every time I would open a Get Info window on a .mpg file the whole Finder would lockup, apparently generating the preview. And then I'd relaunch the Finder after a minute or so. So I never was able to click the Change All... button.

Turns out that the Finder will eventually, after several minutes, give up with creating a preview, and you can change the Open With application to VLC and then click the Change All... button. So be patient.

Sleep Advice for Geeky Fathers

As a father of young children, I have some advice for my fellow software engineers in similar boats who want time for their side projects. At some point, if you are lucky, your children will be sleeping from their bedtime of say 9:00 PM to maybe 7:00 AM depending on their natural needs. My advice is to work within this framework when it comes to your own sleep schedule.


Every day, come home from work, play with your children till their bedtime, fall asleep as they do and wake up naturally. For me, falling asleep at 9:00 PM will mean waking up in a quiet, empty house at 4:30 AM with 2½ hours of time to work on my software projects and catch up on my TV watching before the children awake. I will spend the rest of the day fully rested, and at my peak performance. Compare with the alternative strategy of staying up after the babies' bedtime which if I "get on a roll" might keep me up till 12:30 AM, with no margin for error. What if the babies wake up at 6:00 AM as they sometimes do? I'll spend the rest of the day under a sleep debt: low performing and grumpy.


Also, my recommended strategy allows you to pay off your sleep debt. If you do this and wake up later than expected the first few days, you had an accumulated sleep debt you needed to pay off before reaching peak efficiency.


I'm basing this advice on this Google Tech Talk which I highly recommend watching:

When Is A Leak Not A Leak

I was sent a bug report on some software I had written a while back wherein it would become less and less responsive over time till it just sort of died. Sounds like a leak.


But when I hooked it up to the Leaks Instrument, I saw no leaks. No red peaks at all. Must not be a leak then.


But one more look. The net objects allocated were going up and up and up. This should not happen, the application should have reached an equilibrium point of net objects allocated, and oscillated around it.


So, I let it run for a while in the Objects Allocated instrument, and then examined the blocks which were being allocated and not deallocated. Turns out I had an object, an audio player, which had a scheduled NSTimer associated with it. When I released the player, it was still being referred to by the NSTimer, so it did not get deallocated. And in this case, I was creating one of these every second or so (probably not a good idea), which meant that not only was the memory leaking, but all those timers were adding overhead to the event loop. No wonder it crawled to a halt. So remember to invalidate unwanted timers.

Debugging a Shower

The big extravagance at the house this year is replacing the cheapest looking vinyl shower you ever saw with a very nice tile and glass block version. A friend of my wife's built it over the course of a month; it's beautiful. The babies have been learning the joys of showers over baths, and I've been spending much of my time pondering development problems from the built in granite seat.


Unfortunately, it's started leaking and in tracking down the leak, I've realized how broadly applicable the skills we pick up debugging software can be applied to the physical world.

Initial Bug Report.

After a lengthy bout of baby cleaning, my wife noticed a wet spot growing from the hallway wall shared by the new shower. She reported the bug to me as a high priority.

Observation of Bug's Behavior

The bug only manifested itself after a shower. And a shower of the babies.

Initial Conclusions

If the copper pipes inside the shower were leaking, then using the shower would be irrelevant; it would leak regardless of use. The only exception to this would be a leak in the pipe from the valve to the shower head. So no need to rip out the walls to get to the water pipes.

Experimentation

Working on the assumption that if the shower was leaking, it was doing so near the wet spot, and most likely at the most complicated part of the shower: the granite seat. So, I took my morning shower with the spray pointed away from the seat. Result: No wet spot. Conclusion, the seat was not properly sealed. There was a seam through which water could get through and into the outside world. This meshed well with the initial bug report, as the babies would tend to stand on the seat and have the spray directed at them there for long periods.

Rejected Alternative Hypothesis

Someone suggested that perhaps the flow was overwhelming the drain and a path to the outside was being reached from the bottom. This seems unlikely as the flow into the drain should be the same or less when the spray was pointed towards the seat. And 15 minutes of water directed directly at the drain disproved it.

Final Conclusions

Have to reseal all the joints, and re-grout the tile beneath the seat till we find the bad seam.

Visual Studio 2005 C++ and the ? : operator

One thing you want in C++ compilers is consistency with other C++ compilers. Especially if you are doing cross-platform development work. I want the VS C++ compiler to interpret what I tell it to do exactly the same way that gcc interprets it. That way, I don't have to special case my compilations, and I don't create a bunch of platform specific bugs in my platform neutral code. And usually, the two compilers do agree.


However, I discovered today (Friday) that if you compile something like:
double x = (false) ? 0 : 1.4;
that x will not equal 1.4 as most people (and the gcc compiler) would think, but rather it will equal 1.0. Why? Because it sees 0, interprets it as an integer and decides that if both halves of the : have to have the same type, then that type will be integer. The fact that this is in the middle of an assignment to double means nothing.

In order for x to equal the expected 1.4, you have to write:
double x = (false) ? 0.0 : 1.4;


I'm not even saying that Visual Studio is wrong. It's different from gcc which leads to platform specific bugs, and it's unexpected so the unaware coder will type in the unwanted form and not know something could possibly go wrong.

[Update: Russell Finn goes into more language lawyer parsing of this, and believes VS C++ is wrong. (I don't know Mr. Finn, I just like to read my Site Meter page to see how people get to my blog.)]


[Update 2: And don't let me get started about how VS C++ allows you to put the closing angle brackets of a nested template declaration without a space, as in:
vector<pair<string, int>> myVectorOfPairs;

]

News of the Not News: People Like Free iPhone Apps

This is one of those blog posts where the author has two data points and has to write an entire entry about those points. Here is the data: My iPhone app to help HDHomerun users align their antennas, Signal GH, went 5 days without a sale. This despite getting a favorable mention on a well known podcast on Friday. So I temporarily started giving it away to boost exposure and reviews. A day later, I had 205 downloads from the U.S..

So $2.99 equals 0 unit sales per day == $0.00 profit
And $0.00 equals 205 unit sales per day == $0.00 profit

At least I'm breaking even.

I believe a large number of these downloads are pointless, as you have to have an HDHomerun to do anything at all with Signal GH. There are people who troll the back pages of the utilities section of the App Store, downloading everything free. I just hope these people don't write reviews.

Thankful to be a Cocoa Programmer

The company I work for is interested in Microsoft's .NET framework; I am not. But, I was scrounging for free content on iTunes the other day and came across the .NET Rocks podcast, and out of idle curiosity downloaded a few episodes. They are well done, and put together by friendly people with an unflagging enthusiasm for Microsoft technologies. And they make me very happy to spend much—unfortunately not all—of my time working on Macs and iPhones.


Apparently, the target audience is comprised of developers putting together custom business applications; the kind of vertical apps corporate America (and apparently Dubai) consume by the megalines of code. Not the general purpose, high degree of finish, large user base applications I've spent much of my career writing, but database frontends and the like. It's the Bizarro world out there, where right justifying labels is considered a major advance in GUI development.


Any iPhone developers would be well served listening to the recent cast on Windows Mobile. As someone who was scrounging for work when the Mac had 3% market share, I can sympathize with the pathos of a product manager for Windows Mobile trying to put a brave face on disaster, but come on. This exchange pretty much sums up the level of wishfulness and straw grasping:
Host: So let me ask the question a different way: the next version, whatever it's called; should Apple be scared?
Rob Tiffany: Very scared.
Hosts: (laughs) YES!
Rob Tiffany: Very scared.
Hosts: I knew it.
Rob Tiffany: Yeah, yeah, we're working on some secret sauce out there.
Host: Not too secret anymore!

I will congratulate the hosts for not being blind to WinCE's current flaws: they gave Rob a hard time about how the phone app on their phone was glacially slow; I'm just amazed they think it will get better. That old saying about a second marriage being the triumph of hope over experience..


And the episode on complying with the corporate governance rules of the Sarbanes Oxley law... If I had to do that sort of thing, I'd seriously consider going to work at Home Depot. How does one show up at work every day doing that sort of thing?


And that's the thing. I'm nearly always happy either going into work—assuming I won't be spending the whole day fixing OLE bugs on the PC—or pulling out my MacBook and add a refinement to an iPhone app. Life is sweet. I get to work in an application framework which was designed right from the start; light weight and powerfully elegant. I'm not one of a hundred cogs living in a condo in Dubai; I'm a sole practitioner, or an unblended part of a small team. I write software people don't have to be paid to use. I don't have to wait for the secret sauce which never comes. I am a Cocoa programmer, and for that I am thankful.

The Loss of Homogeneity: iPhones on the Network

Developing for the iPhone and iPod Touch is nice: limited hardware differences leads to reliability. If it works on my iPhone running the 2.1 OS, it should run well on your iPhone. They are pretty much the same. Homogeneity is good when it comes to testing for program errors.


So your iPhone is the same as mine, but your network is not.

I submitted a new version of Remote Remote GH for OS X Touch to Apple a week ago. It had been gradually gestating and stabilizing has I had time to improve it. The last several weeks, it had been quite stable, and had never been much of a crasher to begin with. Thursday night, Apple notified me that the new version was available for distribution on the App Store; Friday morning RRgh crashed on me on launch. Wha?

Backing up. I had been playing with the XBox Media Center (XBMC) for the AppleTV, and last night I had tried turning on its UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) server and client. The new RRgh's big feature is support for auto-detecting MythTV frontends via UPnP, so having another UPnP device on my network meant my code had to check to see it wasn't a MythTV. Unfortunately, this revealed a latent crashing bug where I was expecting a string, got a NULL pointer instead, and boom, boom crash. (No actual audio percussion, just a silent quit.)

An early updater experiencing (what I assume is) the same problem figured out my e-mail address and let me know that I wasn't the only one.

So, I had to quickly remove RRgh from distribution pending a 1.1.1 release, as I have no wish to get a deluge of negative reviews from whatever small fraction of the populace would be affected by this. Which means, there is no RRgh currently available for download, as I don't have the option to revert to the 1.0 binary.

If you are one of the people who downloaded 1.1, I hope it isn't crashing on you, but I've submitted an updated binary which should be out within the week.

News of the Not News: QuickDraw Printing is Dead

As I occasionally let on, my day job is the care and feeding of an ancient, semi-well known, Carbon application (and worse its Win32 doppleganger, and worse still its Win32 doppleganger's OLE interface). One "perk" is the occasional confrontation with the living dead. The dead in question is how we print. We print using a very old and elaborate system of QuickDraw calls spiked with embedded Postscript. This creates very nice output. On Postscript printers. From PowerPC Macs.
For Intel Macs, not so good. Why? Because there is no embedded Postscript in Quickdraw printing support for Intel Macs. It didn't make the cut of creaky technologies Apple bothered porting over during the Intel transition. So, yes, text and polygons look OK, if imprecisely positioned, and that's most of our output; but anything splined based is bad as there are no splines in QuickDraw only very big polygons.
So, users of ancient Carbon applications: check out the printing on your shiny new Intel box.

How I Didn't Get Rich Via my iPhone App

I think we've all seen the stories about some guy in New Zealand making $6K a day for a Choplifter clone, or another fellow making $250K in two months reimagining Tetris. What you don't hear about are the flops. And I have a flop on my hands. My application to monitor over the air digital television signal quality, Signal GH has sold 10 copies. I had had no illusions that it would be a big seller; the target market is small at the intersection of iPhone owners and HDHomerun users; I just assumed there were a few thousand such people and they would all want my app.


Apparently not.


Unlike a lot of apps getting shoveled onto the App Store, Signal is competently coded; performs a useful service, launches quickly, doesn't leak, doesn't crash, and has only a smattering of bugs. Maybe prospective buyers would like to know this, but I have had no reviews so far.


Part of the problem was that Apple mistakenly lists its release date as the day I submitted it to them for testing, instead of the day they actually released it to the public, so I got no time on the front page of the Utilities page. And part is probably too high a price point, maybe $5 is just too much even for niche market apps. Again, I'm flying in the dark here because I've gotten zero feedback.


I also don't know where HDHomerun users hang out. The forums on Silicon Dust seem fairly low volume. Maybe if the HDHomerun were buggier, people would be filling their forums but dang it if the HDHomerun isn't the most reliable gadget on my network. And, I don't want to make commercial announcements on public forums anyway; nobody likes that sort of thing. I'm not a marketing wiz, I am a fairly good Mac coder.


Oh well, I only wasted a couple weeks of spare coding time. I've learned my lessons about targeting larger markets. I learned a thing or two about iPhone development, and hopefully my next post on the subject will be "How I Did Get Rich Via My iPhone App."

UPnP with Cocoa

Needing a license compatible implementation of UPnP I could use to locate MythTV frontends, I made the mistake of using the C++ version of CyberGarage's library. This was a mistake as the C++ version (1.7) is old and filled with bugs and leaks. The proper version to use is the C version (2.2) which is much less buggy and even comes with an Objective C wrapper class.

If you are writing an iPhone app and need to locate a UPnP device, this is probably the way to go.


Oh, and one thing to consider is that if you look through the code, you will see that the library avoids opening up connections with network interfaces that have the IFF_LOOPBACK flag set—for obvious reasons. You might want to also avoid network interfaces with the IFF_POINTOPOINT flag set, as that is as like as not the cell network radio, and you probably don't want to make UPnP inquiries over the cell network.

[Update: Looks like TCM Port Mapper might be the preferred library, but I haven't tried it.

iTunes 8 is still not Cocoa

Earlier in the year, I posted a blog entry about how Apple, obviously, must be getting ready to release a new version of iTunes based upon the Cocoa framework, and not the Carbon framework. While I still believe this to be true, iTunes 8 is not that product.


A quick look through the application's bundle shows all the signs of a product still deeply welded to Carbon.
A quick glance through the Info.plist:

• No Principle Class so no NSApplication at launch
• The HIWindowFlushAtFullRefreshRate flag is set indicating at least a few Carbon windows
• Application requires Carbon environment flag is set

There are a few .nib files in the bundle, but all the ones I looked at were Carbon.

Localized strings are still kept in a resource (.rsrc) file! What in the world.


In fact, there are no obvious signs of any Cocoa use at all.



As someone who's day job involves maintaining a Carbon app that "should" be transitioned to Cocoa, I can sympathize. But it is concerning as Apple wastes development time adding features like Genius to a straight Carbon application. Anybody writing new features will know that their work will have a shelf life of about 9 months; and will have to be reimplemented—at least the GUI parts—in Cocoa. And the sooner a Cocoa iTunes comes out, the faster it will become a mature, bug-free product.

Revamping a Dated Cocoa Application: InCDius 2.5

iPhone development has re-energized my love of programming. My day job requires me to do too much Win32 coding, and that is soul deadening for a Cocoa programmer. The combination of corporate priorities, and the fact I can add features much more quickly and with fewer bugs in Cocoa, leads me to spend a huge fraction of my time in Visual Studio, when I'd rather be in XCode. It's been draining.


I released InCDius 2 back in 2002, and it never got out of beta, although beta 16 was quite stable, and I apparently have a number of loyal (yet put upon) users. It is just an Audio CD database, not a personal media database like the well regarded Delicious Library. It was fast, and pretty darn stable, although a few users have had database corruption issues—please back up to XML people. I knew for years that I should release a new version, but could never quite muster the energy. It embarrassed me having this old, non-Intel application, gradually getting less stable with each OS release application; and I was considering my options for killing it entirely.


But my Remote Remote GH for iPhone application makes heavy use of the SQLite database, so I felt confident I could transition InCDius away from the Berkeley DB database. This transition had been the most daunting of the reasons keeping me from releasing an update.

My first impulse was to refactor the whole application using Core Data, but that would not have added anything but development time; the GUI was wired up quite well; the application was already scriptable. All I needed was a new database backend, and Apple ships OS X 10.5 with SQLite 3 right in /usr/lib. By choosing SQLite, I was no longer responsible for compiling and upgrading my database library; I can rely on it being there and just working. I tried using the QuickLite SQLite wrapper, but it was not capable for the task, as it creates a large number of objects maintaining its internal cache, to the point of locking up my Mac. No, I had to call the SQLite C API directly. As long as I minimize random access into the database, I get good results.

I also wanted this to be a release that could live on its own for a very long time; who knows how long I'll go without finding the time to update it. I wanted code which would last a very long time. This meant not only transitioning to Intel, but compiling for Intel 64-bit, and removing every deprecated API or framework message I could root out. I decided to make the minimum OS X version 10.5 (Leopard), and to transition the codebase to Objective C 2.0, although it isn't quite all there yet. I'll have to work on the garbage collection, but I am using both Objective C 2.0 fast enumeration loops and properties where appropriate.

Forward thinking means removing the past, so out went a few features tied to old APIs. I had been allowing users to import information from Classic Mac OS's CD Player preference file, but that involved using old school Resource Manager calls. Anybody ever going to use this feature again? No. Then out it goes, along with the Resource Manager.

I had 2 separate ways to play Audio CD tracks. One used QuickTime; one used Core Audio. Kept the Core Audio.

NSTableView has a new (to me) way to deal with selections with NSIndexSets, and deprecated the messages I had had been using. Goodbye old messages.

My own Objective C objects were filled with ints, unsigned ints, longs, and even the occasional unsigned. Hello NSInteger, NSUInteger and 64 bit computing.

I had been using a custom version of NSTableView to draw blue stripes. Goodbye custom class, hello check box in Interface Builder and grey stripes.

Obviously, I had been using .nib files for building my GUI. Time to upgrade everything to .xib files.

A user sent me his database (as a .zip archive of XML files) of 15,000 individual disks. Wow, and I had been thinking InCDius was zippy fast and ready for release. Massive performance tuning and the decision to load the database at runtime instead of upon the first search. Much simpler and reliable, and lets the user do something else while everything gets ready.

Take time to remove all the warning messages. You will save yourself a huge amount of hassle in programming, but especially in Cocoa programming if you eliminate all the compile warnings. You want to know right away if the compiler doesn't know if NSView responds to "releese". Do not let warnings build up. Fix them. Fix them all.

A Google Tech Talk by Linus Torvalds inspired me to change the unique identifier key I had been using to lookup disks in the database; he uses SHA1 hashes to avoid corruption in Git, and it seemed to me that a SHA1 hash of the Audio CD's Table of Contents would be as close as I could get to being unique; although there will be rare instances when 2 CDs cannot both be in the database.

So after all this, what do I have? A fast, reliable(?), clean, focused little application, which I can send out into the world; spend the next few months fixing the occasional bug and adding the occasional feature, and which people can use for a good long while.