Mac OS X, iPhone & Android Development
iPhone
iPad Mad
Apr 5th
The iPad has caused a frenzy already – reviews were out early and the public got in touch with it this weekend past. Without doubt this is a big change for mobile computing. The iPad will be the machine which changed it. While it may not be the only machine out there – it is the one which solidified the idea of a high powered specialized piece of hardware with a HUGE array of applications for free or sale.
Which one am I gunning for? The 32GB iPad 3G. I’ll drop a cheap data SIM into it and have everything I need like I do with the iPhone now – but with a keyboard I can actually type on and applications which make sense. Ever tried using a terminal on an iPhone?
Get your site iPad ready
Mar 15th
Just because we are big fans of the iPad concept, we HOPE that a lot of you will head down the whole html and jquery style website rather than the Flash site. Why? So we can enjoy your site on any device we choose to use!
We have even come across some sites which blog about how the de-Flash is starting to happen – and then the next week launch their own Flash based site! Funny.
Building a site completely in Flash is not something we understand – using Flash to deliver some of the media content seems like a better idea (and even display an alternative if Flash is not detected). Those sites which use Flash for primary navigation need to be changed. Flash for primary navigation of your site just isn’t a good idea. There are a number of things you can do with other (more compatible) technology.
We look forward to visiting your sites on <whatever we choose>!
iPad out April 3 – in the US…
Mar 6th
Yes, the iPad now has a shipping date. You will be able to preorder it on March 12th, but the shipping won’t happen until April 3rd (for the US) and late April for the rest of the world.
At least we have dates now!
Speeding up SQL on the iPhone
Dec 29th
So, while using %LIKE% is a good option for a small dataset, the iPhone doesn’t have the CPU power to trawl through a large dataset quickly. Using PHP with sqlite, we took the large data set which has a description field in it, and split it down to a type of index table. With this, we were able to use the = and get better accuracy.
Example:
Field has index of 34 and a data field of “this is the best movie we have seen”
Our PHP script split this into another table which the main search looks at:
34 this
34 is
34 the
34 best
…
34 seen
As you can see, we could look for ‘best’, get the index of 34 and pull out the result very quickly. We hope this is useful to someone out there!
Numeraders 2.0 update
Dec 12th
Its been a couple of weeks since we talked about a Numeraders update – it is all going well. We are pushing to have it out before the holiday break – but if not, it will be early January. We have a few live iPhone projects on the boil – which is good. We *may* post up a prelim screenshot for you to look at…maybe, maybe not….
Numeraders 2.0 under development
Nov 21st
The very very popular Numeraders is getting a new look and feel, online hi-score list and special stages to give the most handy Numeraders pilot a real challenge. The current thinking is to get the game looking a bit more calculator-like, without looking like a calculator (hard to explain). The hi-score list will be maintained on a website for you to check out how you rank in the world.
But what we are really excited about are the “special stages” which break the continuous level-style game up with number sequences, count arounds and other fun number enhancements.
We hope to have it out before the end of the year – but if you have any suggestions – get them in now! (Just add comments here or email us)
LIKE % makes for a slow SQL search
Nov 10th
For those who don’t know, SQLite has a full text search module in the full distribution – but on the iPhone, it isn’t there. This means that you have to resort back to good old fashioned LIKE %word% in your SELECT statements. Because LIKE doesn’t speed up when using indexes (it is a full text compare) – it is fairly slow compared to a direct =
When planning your SQLite implementations on the iPhone, make sure you have your data structured in the best possible way for LIKE to fly over it!
Its a SQL weekend!
Nov 7th
For those keen on a bit of SQLite for iPhone (or whatever device), check out the http://sqlite.org website.
This is also quite interesting…
SQLlite or Core Data
Oct 14th
One of the arguements of the 3.x SDK is the use of Core Data over SQLlite for any database or persistent data. Does anyone out there have a preference? I know what I think!
iPhone 3.1 dev kit
Sep 15th
Seems like the 3.1 OS has some nice additions for developers to use. I’m just going through the detail and wondering whether we should use 3.1 features in our projects – or keep the dev platform on 3.0??