Tuesday 22 February 2011

I've written my first app - iPhone development

So I've embarked on the endeavour to write an iPhone app. Well just over a week of effort and I'm done! I feel very excited, though its not really finished until it gets released in the App Store.

So steps to go are;
1. Sign up for the Apple Development Programme.
2. Get the app running on my iPhone
3. Fix the memory management - I bet I've got memory leaks
4. Upgrade dev tools to latest OS and upgrade the code for the latest OS
5. Fully test on iPhone
6. Go through Apple Approval process - hope this goes well!
7. Update webpage with details of app

Oh yeah and I'll probably get some friends to give some feedback on it. And I'll probably optimise for the retina display too.

Tonight was awesome, I implemented a splash screen, did all the artwork, created an information page, setup an email address and webpage, and got the info page to open a new mail or open the webpage.

Yeah looking at that list above, I'm not finished yet :-)


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Windows 7 upgrade went well

I upgraded an aging Windows Vista running Samsung laptop to Windows 7 and it went well.

Don't waste your time sorting out any Windows Vista issues, like trying to fix the antivirus (Norton 360) or increase the size of the disk partition. It all kind of went wrong and required a system restore, undoing hours of work :-(

Compatiblity check told me perhaps not enough harddrive space and not enough Ram (only 1GB). However deleting some old files, and a google for performance with this size of Ram gave me confidence to go for it.

So I took the plunge and went for it. Choose the custom install; this does a full clean install moving the old windows and programs folders into a Windows old folder.

It went in almost painlessly. Only issue was Wifi was not working afterwards, but then I noticed it had stopped working for all other wifi devices in the house, so I suspect maybe an ip conflict had caused problems perhaps? Anyway a router reboot fixed that issue.

I remembered that I needed to do a system restore (Control Panel Instructions to create a Windows Restore point) and expanded the size of the partition by using the built in partitioning software (Contol Panel, search for partition). To expand my C partiton I had to delete the next partiton, expand C and then create the 2nd partiton a new.

Having upgraded, none of the previous software was installed, so this needed doing, the advantage here is that all the Samsung crapware is now gone. Unfortunately Norton 360 wasn't installed anymore. First step was to download the free trial from the Norton site. Annoyingly mynortonaccount wouldn't let me download it so I had to put my bank details in again...

However after installing, it seemed to activate it against my existing Norton subscription(s), so that was relatively painless.

The laptop is largely used for viewing the internet and iPlayer, and that it does amazingly well compared to Windows Vista, and that's with just 1GB of RAM. Overall the upgrade went really well and I'm most pleased.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK

Sunday 13 February 2011

Time machine interface was slow

I had an issue where Time Machine on Mac OS Snow Leopard, on a MacBook Pro connected to TimeCapsule was going very slow. I.e to change dates was taking 30 sec plus.

Googling found others with the issue, but no solutions, apart from one piece of advice suggesting turning off TimeMachine. Which made me realise it was probably trying to back up whilst I was using it.

Now I just make sure its not backing up whilst trying to use the interface, and the interface works at the correct speed, phew!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:UK