I have been thinking about some New Year’s resolutions for 2010 so I have composed the following list.
1. Learn to use my Canon 450D properly
2. Finish my iPhone apps and get them in the app store
3. Attend SXSW in March (flights and platinum badge already purchased)
4. Attend WWDC in June
5. Experiment with more software development design patterns
6. Get digitalrobotsoftware.com up and running
7. Produce better quality blog posts
8. Develop a desktop application for OS X
9. Run more often
10. In 2009 I have met a lot of great people so I aim to meet lots more in 2010
As New Year’s resolutions are notorious for not being maintained, I have made this list realistic and by the time we reach 2011 hopefully these goals will have been achieved.
If you are planning on developing applications for the iPhone chances are you will be familiar with object oriented programming. Design patterns promote code and design reuse along with making an entire application easier to understand and why a certain structure was adopted.
It is important to note that a design pattern is not a blueprint for an application that just has to be written in your development language of choice, but rather a blueprint for how to implement your code in order to enable stronger code maintainability, testing and to avoid a wide range of issues that could otherwise occur with unstructured (spaghetti) code.
The iPhone platform makes use of the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern.
Model – Manages the data for the application and how the state of the data should be updated.
View – Will handle how the data is displayed on the screen.
Controller – Deals with the inputs from the user such as utilising all the available on screen elements such as buttons and keyboard functions.
With the MVC design pattern it means that when developing for the iPhone you will have a better way of maintaining and testing your applications. Overall this should mean that better quality applications are created.
On a side note I used Balsamiq Mockups to create the above diagram, I would highly recommend giving it a try. This has quickly become one of my favourite applications.
Updated: Diagram updated to show two way relationship between model and view (well spotted by David Rice)
Last week I received the Adobe CS4 Web Premium software which I won at the Build Conference, a massive thanks to Giant Training and Adobe for this.
The following is the complete story:
On November 5th I attended the Build conference in Belfast, during the event Ian Sayers from Giant Training held a prize draw for the chance to win a copy of Adobe CS4 Web Premium or Design Premium worth a whopping £1500. I was extremely lucky when Eric Meyer pulled my name out of the box, I seriously couldn’t believe I had won and opted for CS4 Web Premium.
With CS4 a wide range of new and exciting opportunities have presented themselves. I am currently developing several iPhone applications which will now have their entire interface redesigned in PhotoShop which will give them a much more professional presence.
As an amateur photographer I will now have the ability to add a new dimensions to my photos in addition to designing and developing a new website to showcase them.
These tools will significantly help me on a daily basis with all my personal development and design projects.
Many thanks to Giant Training and Adobe!
Jonathan Cusick
On the OS X operating system you can read NTFS external drives but you will not be able to write to them by default. There is a simple solution for this that comes in the form of a couple of applications MacFUSE and NTFS-3G.
Utlising these tools makes writing to NTFS drives seamless and you won’t have to worry about performing any complex configurations, the NTFS drives will just work as with any other HDD.
Best of all both of these applications can now be installed from a singe source over at SourceForge as part of the Catacombae project.
Enjoy!
I have had an incredibly lucky streak this year where I managed to win an iPhone 3GS at Refresh Belfast which was provided by Ecliptic Labs and then a CS4 Web Premium applications package at the Build Conference from Ian Sayers at Giant Training.
Jase Bell has now created an iPhone app proposal that I feel if developed should be implemented in competitions across the land!
Although in all seriousness I have been extremely lucky at these two events and I am putting both the iPhone and CS4 suite to very good use. Hopefully there will be a post here in the not to distant future referring to the launch of an iPhone application.
If you want to extend the video files that QuickTime can support on OS X a great little component to install is Perian.
Perian also known as ‘The Swiss-Army knife for QuickTime’ is open source and supports a wide range of formats, as stated on their site:
File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO
AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
Subtitle support for SSA/ASS and SRT
The Perian control panel can be accessed from the ‘Other’ section of your system preferences.
Enjoy!
In OS X there is a very easy method that can be used in order to show and hide hidden files.
First open a terminal from your Applications->Utilities folder:
Once you have a terminal opened enter the following command to show all files:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
If you want to hide the system files again simply change the ‘True’ parameter to ‘False’ when entering the command into the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
This may require you to log out and log in again to see the results.
In OS X if you ever need to burn a variety of disks and don’t have a large budget, a nifty and free tool that can be added to your software arsenal is Burn.
Burn is a simple and yet full featured disk burning package that offers burning data, music, video and disk images.
The Burn menu makes utilising these options as easy as a single click.
Sub menus can also be used in order to narrow down exactly what format of disk you require.
For the more advanced users there are also an array of features including being able to use custom ffmpeg files, allowing overburining, selecting audio codecs along with the video and audio bitrates.
Burn has many the features of high end alternatives, so if you are looking for a free lightweight and easy to use disk burning utility I would highly recommend checking it out.
Windows users utilise the famous ctrl + alt + del command to allow them to quickly lock their screen and leave background applications running. On the Mac using OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, I will show you how this can be as easy as a single mouse click.
First enter the system preferences:
Next click on the security options icon:
Then under the general tab select ‘Require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins’:
Once you have done this go back into the system preferences menu and click on the option for ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’:
From here select the button on the bottom left side of the screen called ‘Hot Corners…’:
Hot corners enables you to set the screen saver to activate by clicking on a corner of the screen, you can select any or multiple corners by picking the option ‘Start Screen Saver’ from the relevant drop down menu:
Now when you click on your selected corner(s) your screen saver will start, you will then be prompted for your password when you next use the machine and all your background applications will still be running.
Lookaly is a new service that has been developed in order to act as a gateway for people based in Belfast and Northern Ireland to share their experiences of goods and services provided by local businesses.
When you first visit Lookaly the first thing that will standout is the design, this has clearly been taken very seriously and a lot of thought placed on making the user experience as smooth as possible through a clean and well structured interface.
The businesses that are available for browsing have been placed into a range of categories which include:
Automotive
Eating, Drinking and Nightlife
Financial and Legal
Leisure and Sports
Public Services, Education and Careers
Travel and Transportation
Once you have located the business you are interested in you can simply view all the reviews, photos and contact details that are associated with it. If you own a business or have an experience you want to share I would highly recommend adding it to their directory, so far it has helped me several times on choosing where to go for lunch in Belfast.
Lookaly also provides a blog which covers topics such as local events, products and of course businesses.
Another nice feature from Lookaly comes from utilising the social networking platform Twitter, they will often tweet a summary of reviews that have been posted, so it is a good idea to follow @Lookaly if you are a Twitter user.
Overall I think Lookaly is an extremely useful service and I am looking forward to seeing it grow as more businesses are added to the directory.