Software Development Remarks

I decided to start my AppStore experience with iRemote because this utility most clearly shows the direction of my current research in software development from both technological and conceptual perspectives.

iRemote Suite official page gives detailed description on its functionality and features. In this post I’m going to touch architectural aspects and briefly describe application perspectives.

Stack of utilized technologis gives the best impression about core idea of iRemote/Remote PC architecture, from my point of view.

The mainstream of this project is the separation of platform dependent concurrency and networking tools. CommonKit library (which is now in process of active development) was used for building object, concurrent and networking model of both applications (iRemote for iPhone OS and Remote PC for Windows).

Here I’d like to share my plans on iRemote perspectives. Portability is mainstream tendency for now. And the first thing I’m going to do is to publish Remote PC for MacOS X. This is caused by high amount of Mac users among iPhone owners. The development of Linux version of this tool has rather low priority. What concerns iRemote, it is difficult to preffer any mobile platform. I consider the following candidates: Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Android. But I don’t know yet which one should be the first. I think that statistics, on which one of these platforms is the most widespread, does not matter in this case. Besides, I should note that I do not plan to publish desktop client for Remote PC. This is caused by a number of reasons. One of them is that the philosophy of my application stands too far from fully featured control over another workstation (from desktop, not from mobile device).

Of course, porting is not the only tendency of the solution evolution. In nearest time I’ll focus on extending functionality of iRemote for iPhone. Most likely is that iRemote Pro will appear wih extended feature set. These new features will be fundamental (not just a couple of new buttons, hot keys, etc.) but exclusively within application mainstream: remote control over workstation via mobile device based on custom protocol. This underlines the fact that I don’t plan to support any existing interaction protocol (like Remote Desktop or VNC).

Tags: iPhone, iRemote

Looking through the set of tools, APIs and advantages for developers of Research In Motion products it is difficult to disregard the care of the platform. Someone may ask: “Have you ever seen a developer who intentionally decreases potential attention to his product?” Of course, the answer is generally – “No”! But. After having a challenge round the iPhone development I can surely say that it is possible. No matter what the reason was but Apple intentionally locked a set of potentially interesting and popular features to regular developers. Thoughts?

• Paying attention to the quality of the software. Maybe they decided that they can control the quality of the software by giving rights for using private frameworks to individual groups? Wrong decision. It is much more efficient (but more difficult and expensive) to perform at least minimum stability evaluation at the side of content provider (Apple Application Store). Instead of preventing access to important framework they would better to confess and proclaim something like “Do not use Quartz for 2D game development! Use OpenGL!”. Or any other of tons of other confessions they should do.

• Overwhelming desire of getting as much profit as possible. You definitely can use embedded (but locked into private framework) map component if you become their friend. What you should do to achieve such a title? $?

• Anxiety about the future. Maybe they afraid to lose their endless stream of bright ideas. In this case they will probably integrate video calls, video recording, mms,… (other tons of things you would like to add goes here). Have you seen a picture illustrating differences between iPhone (2008) and stone (40,000 B.C.)? (Ask Google for “iPhone vs stone”).

Make sense?

In any case, platform understanding comes in at least mouth or two but even after first glimpse at BlackBerry platform I can express it as “I see what to do attract potential users and to occupy the niche”. Business smart phones in North America is more then just interesting ($) target group.

What really attracts attention from the development point is that the whole stack of technologies is based on existing standards. It looks really stable, reliable and safe. This is a really good example of achieving business benefits through architecture based approach. If you decide to build safe device you have to start with the development of safe platform. Someone may argue that it is too simple and obvious to even notice it. But why do so many of us (starting from platform vendors and finishing with developers) make so much wrong decisions, if so?

Tags: BlackBerry, iPhone, Thoughts

“It is always sorrowful to see a whale dying…” This phrase doesn’t exactly reflect my current state but similar thoughts involuntarily come with understanding that you should not deal with anything for the whole life to do it better than someone who has just got started. It often happens when the beginner cames with bright ideas, clear understanding of the situation and… when the beginner is Google…

Today I’ve reinvented Google Code for myself. After visiting some pages related to projects hosted by this resource I finally decided to create a mirror of Common Kit there. And as the result I’ve just published news at SourceForge on moving the project to Google Code. I’m not going to write a novel on differences between these resources but I want to point some major advantages of the service provided by Google:

• Easy to use
• Lightweight UI
• Complete lack of advertising
• SVN as a code version control system

It is difficult to tell whether the situation is similar to the one occurred with search engines (taking into account that SourceForge is 6 years older and the fact that it hosts approximately 180,000 projects). But at the moment I don’t see any reason to host a new project using this Titan. It is much more preferable to take advantage of Google alternative.

Tags: Code, Google, SourceForge

What is more important?? It’s up to you to decide… but it is indisputably that owners of 1.x iPhones would not be satisfied with firmware update while comparing their device with renewed one which is twice cheaper.

Key features of iPhone 2.0 presentation made by Apple CEO Steve Jobs (http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0806wdt546x/event/index.html) at WWDC few days ago are listed below:

• 2.0 firmware release (with new features embedded in well known software).
• 3G iPhone with GPS onboard.
• Several comments of enterprise clients on platform successfulness were given.
• Several betas of third party software were presented by especially invited developers.
• Application distribution schemes (App Store, Enterprise, Ad hoc).
• MobileMe feature was introduced (this feature is not free(!), but “extremely” useful).
• New service which allows developers to avoid need in background processes.
• Maps application with GPS.

Most of these events, releases and features are timed to the 11th of July.

PS I’m practically sure that second (front) camera will be onboard in nearest future.. Not tomorrow, not next week but it must appear by July, 11.

Tags: 3G, Apple, GPS, iPhone, iPhone 2.0, iPhone OS, iPhone OS 2.0

I’ve recently mentioned the procedure of application uploading and launching on the device. I find this topic worthy of separate post. I involuntarily associate it with a puzzle of especially exotic kind. And what is much more interesting is that there are at least some members of my team who completely agree with me. So.. Let’s get started.

This guide is for launching your application on the iPhone or iPod Touch device. All steps from this guide divided into two groups on the following criteria: steps marked with letter A are performed by team administrators and those marked with C must be complied by your customers (or someone else to whom you would like to provide an opportunity to launch your applications on device during beta period).

I’m not going to describe here the meaning of all terms, software and other stuff. This is just step-by-spep guide for people who has direct access to the platform and is responsible to resolve such troubles.

1. A Add team member.

Follow Program Portal -> Team -> Manage -> Add to add new team member (full name and email address fields are required).

2. C Accept an invitation.

An invitation is being normally sent to your customer via email specified by admin during making request. Check your email and follow provided link to accept an invitation. Just press Submit button on the resulting page to complete invitation procedure.

3. C Request certificate.

Follow Program Portal -> Certificates and perform all required actions to request certificate. You should also notify your admin after you are done with this step to avoid delays.

4. A Approve certificate.

Follow Program Portal -> Certificates and approve new team member’s certificate.

5. C Download certificate.

Follow Program Portal -> Certificates to download certificate once it has issued status.

6. C Firmware upgrade.

You can download firmware for both iPhone and iPod touch from within you approved member’s account. Follow complete Apple guidelines on firmware upgrade (Program Portal -> Development -> Installing OS X iPhone).

7. C Send your device id to program administrator.

You are not able to register your device yourself because the limitation applied each account during beta period (only 5 devices are allowed to be attached to an account at the moment).

Connect your upgraded device and follow XCode -> Window -> Organizer to copy your unique device id. Email it to your admin. You should also specify the name of your device.

8. A Register customer’s device.

Follow Program Portal -> Devices -> Add to register customer’s device.

9. A Add customer’s device and account to corresponding provisioning profile.

You should also specify App Id you want to attach to this profile. You are allowed to associate each provisioning profile with one of your App Ids.

An App ID is a unique digital fingerprint that OS X iPhone uses to grant your application access to a portion of the Keychain and is one part of your Development Provisioning Profile. In order to install your application on an OS X iPhone based device, you will need to create an App ID for each application you are developing.

10. C Download and install provisioning profile.

Follow Program Portal -> Provisioning and download profile (the one with your device and certificate attached to). After you are done, copy profile to “/home/<user>/Library/MobileDevice/Provisons”. You’ll probably have to create these directories.

11. C Connect your device.

12. C Check whether the provisioning profile you’ve downloaded is correctly installed.

Launch XCode and open Organizer window. You’ll probably need to enable the profile you’ve just downloaded (see Provisioning section).

13. C Add application you want to launch to the device.

Press «+» button at Applications section to upload application to the device.

And now I’m going to describe the purpose of various most important steps.

• Achieving certificate. This step is required to have possibility to build your application for device. The certificate is being used on the stage of signing the code.
• Upgrading firmware. This step is required because significant changes can be found even between adjacent versions (beta’s) of iPhone SDK. And it is principally impossible to launch you app under 1.x firmware.
• App signing. This stage is actual only for developers. Customers should not carry about it. Application identifier is being created using administrative account and the project must be correctly configured to be launched on the device with correct provisioning profile installed.
• Provisioning profile. The profile unites information about set of devices, development certificates and application id. As it follows from the definition it is required to launch the application on the device.

And.. If just anything of this guide appears useful it means that I’m right and Apple has thought up a new quest.

Tags: Firmware Upgrade, iPhone, iPod Touch, Setup

I’ve spent last few weeks focusing on team leadership in the area of iPhone development. So I’d like to share some steps of platform submission formation from the point of view of cross-platform C++ developer:

• Everything is completely new and incomprehensible (this stage precedes the moment you launch XCode for the first time).
• The first impression on the development environment can be expressed in single question :”Where are the tabs??” From a position of last time I can tell that the rests can reconcile to all.
• Language syntax is unusual and shapes ambivalent attitude to it.
• Detailed acquaintance with API follows further (in my case it occurred in process of creating demonstration of simple 2D game and LBS application a little bit later) and brings some gusts of wind of change.

And so the verdict is… Impossible to estimate this platform uniquely. It s neither “good” nor “bad” in terms of software interfaces happily (I essentially do not shake the user interface). It is just different… No comments any more.

The only thing I’m going to add is that I was not kept and have built and run tesseract project under iPhone (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/). As it follows from the list of supported platforms “the code should be running on Mac platform”. And it was actually so. There were no serious troubles except several small slips. And here I’ve met the next one moment of my genuine surprise. My colleague (not a developer, but true Mac fan) asked me “What is it?” pointing out the open terminal window. Many thoughts…

The next point of the discussion is involuntary analogy between Cocoa API and .Net Framework appearing at the first sight. And I mean not a set and functionality of program interfaces, but mostly a similarity of concepts, and possibilities given by a platform for construction of superstructures of higher level.

Going into historical background we can see that Microsoft has begun platform working out in the late 90-th, and the release of the first version has taken place in the beginning of 2002. Apple in turn has got NeXT in 1996 and as a result for today all high level frameworks of Mac OS and iPhone OS are implemented in Objective C (now it is already Objective C 2.0). So who is pursued? Does the transformation of a platform with the use of high level API with a doubtful indicator of convenience already becomes a norm?

It is difficult to estimate commercial success of the new platform (iPhone OS), however, hundreds of third-party applications are already published even before the official platform release (visit http://iphoneapplicationlist.com/ for more details).

Nowadays iPhone SDK (beta 6) is free and publicity available from apple.com. An extract from one of Apple press releases is given below:

Apple plans to release the final iPhone 2.0 software, including the iPhone SDK and new enterprise features, as a free software update for all iPhone customers by the end of June. Third party applications created for the iPhone will also run on the iPod touch, and iPod touch users will be required to purchase a software update to run these applications. The free beta iPhone SDK is available immediately worldwide and can be downloaded at developer.apple.com/iphone/program.

At the same time only US residents have possibility to receive the status of official developers for today (during beta period). And only those who has got it, know what that means to pass all stages of the guide on an application launch on the real device

Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone OS, Mac OS, Objective C, Software Development

The idea of this blog came long time ago. I was thinking about a way of sharing solutions to problems I’ve faced with while creating and promoting my software. Last time I significantly changed my approach to software development to cross-platform and open source solutions and this caused need in public resource like this one to share my ideas making the whole process of software development as “open” and “clear” as possible. So let’s see what this will turn out.

Tags: Freedom, OpenSource, Portability

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