iOS/Web Developer's Life in Beta

Passwords are definitely fickle beasts.  I’m used to juggling a multitude of different semi-incomprehensible passwords containing a mixture of numbers, symbols, upper and lower-case letters, and in some cases unicode characters (letters such as ü, • and §). And for some mysterious reason I’m able to remember these gibberish-filled passwords with ease. But despite all this, when asked to input a 4-digit passcode into my iPhone to be able to lock my phone (a requirement for hooking it up to my company Exchange server), I couldn’t keep that simple password in my head for longer than 8 minutes.

Can you believe that? Numeric passwords are perhaps the easiest passwords to crack. There isn’t enough variance in the values each character can hold to guarantee uniqueness or complexity to be considered secure, yet for some reason bank ATMs and cellphones use them with impunity. Perhaps my problem is I’m so used to being security-minded, that something as simple as 1234 didn’t occur to me.

So now I’m waiting for my iPhone to restore so I can recover my device (luckily I’d backed up just prior to adding my Exchange email account).  But once I finish with this, I’ll have to do the same thing for my iPad with its 12 gigs of WWDC videos; I’m not looking forward to that.

Update: After wiping and restoring my phone from backups I was able to get at the phone without a lock code. Success! Once I checked my Exchange email again, it required me to specify a new pin code. I made sure to type something in that was really easy to remember. Something with a couple 1′s and a 5 or something. I’m not quite sure because after going upstairs for dinner, I came back downstairs and discovered I could no longer remember my new password. I’m restoring from backups yet again, and hopefully this time I can come up with a password I can remember longer than a goldfish can remember a password.

My life is pretty darned busy right now. Transitioning to a new job, travel for work, helping @dccp with her travel arrangements for her academic conferences, my own iOS projects, and my blog. Since the time I have available to work on my own coding experiments is limited to evenings and weekends. I’ve been recently attempting to focus on just one or two projects at a time, since for a while there I was coming up with at least 3 new prototypes per week.  Focusing on myDrumPad has really made it easy for me to give it the extra polish and attention it needs to take it to the next level. However, since I started participating in NaBloPoMo, the National Blog Posting Month, this has been consuming a great deal of my free time.

I enjoy writing about what it is I’m experimenting with, things I’ve learned in my iOS development, as well as other random tidbits that most people likely won’t care about. But writing about those activities have begun to overshadow the activities themselves. I don’t understand how prolific bloggers can balance their online writing, their businesses, as well as maintaining a happy family balance – perhaps they don’t?

I’m going to try to see NaBloPoMo through to the end, but what this is showing me is that either I put way too much effort into my blogging, or perhaps I don’t have as much free time as I formerly thought? Maybe it’s the fact that I got more done on the SkyTrain than I previously thought, and commuting in the car these past two weeks have taken more time of my day, but the progress on myDrumPad isn’t what I’d like to see.

How do other bloggers out there balance their blogging activities with their actual lives? Especially technical bloggers that write about iOS app development, web development, databases or scalability?

For as long as I’ve been a developer, there was only ever once when I had a machine that I felt was an adequate development workstation. That was around 2001 when I had a dual-proc 667MHz P3 768MB RAM and three 17″ CRT monitors. This baby put out enough heat that my home-office didn’t need a heater on during the rainy Seattle winters; in fact, it was so warm in there that I’d wear shorts, a tee-shirt, and left the window wide open.

Since that time though, my computer has typically been limited to a laptop, my biggest since that dual-proc furnace being a 17″ Powerbook G4. Being a developer, there are three priorities that stand out above all others: screen real-estate, memory and CPU speed. Due to my history of being a web developer, only the first item on that list was a big priority. Since becoming an iOS developer, where your productivity is directly related to how fast you can compile your app, and how fast your performance profiling tools can run, I’ve encountered the other barriers developers face.

In the past though, I’ve largely been a cheap developer, opting to get by with what I have, or doing whatever I can to improve my productivity in other areas. However, for the first time since that space-heater with a RAID array, I have an opportunity to get the workstation I’ve been dreaming of.

Since I run my own personal business on the side, I can take advantage of tax deductions that normally wouldn’t be available to me. Computer purchases, like other capital expenditures, can be tax deductible, so the money I would have to pay the Government in the form of taxes, can be deducted from what I owe them. Normally only a certain percentage of that purchase price can be written off per year, in a process called amortization, so it’s effects are only moderately felt.

In Canada, as part of their economic stimulus package they put together to boost small business spending, they instituted a limited-time Capital Cost Allowance for 100% tax deductions on computer hardware and software purchases made between January 27th 2009 and February 1st 2011.

Think of it this way: assume I had a decent year of app sales on the iTunes App Store, and because of my extra income, let’s say I owe the Government $10,000 in taxes. Normally my only recourse is to dig up $10k (which, since I’m a good little business owner, has been sitting in a savings account all year long) and hand it over to Revenue Canada.

But because of this stimulus package, I have an option. I can instead buy $4,000 worth of computer hardware necessary to effectively run my business, and then only give $6,000 to the Government. No need to spread that deduction out over several years, no need to have the accounting hassle of carrying that equipment value over year after year. I see, I buy, I save.

There are limitations of course. Just as with other business deductions, you can’t cheat and take advantage of the system for your own profit. At home I use the equipment in support of my iOS development, web development, and any testing I need to do.

So what do I get for my last year?

This is the last year you can take advantage of this deduction, which really is a shame. But now that my side work is taking me to more and more demanding areas, such as Core Audio, OpenGL, and a little bit of video work, I feel that now is the time to invest in that dream machine I’ve always wanted and needed.

The question is, what’ll it be? Do I add on a cinema display to my laptop? Do I get a fully pimped-out quad-core iMac 27″? Or do I splurge and get both?  Based on my preliminary estimates for how much I’ll be owing in taxes, here’s my shopping list:

I’m probably going to wait until mid-December, or perhaps in January when I get back from my various weeks of travel.  What are your thoughts?  And if you’re a Canadian iOS business owner, what are you going to do to take advantage of the capital cost allowance?

One of the things that’s hard as a developer is keeping your legacy code up to date.  It’s all too easy to fire-and-forget; write your code, debug it just enough so that it compiles, and then forget it until it breaks again.  I’m guilty of that as well.  In fact, just today I discovered that my continuous deployment configuration for Boomle was broken…for the past 3 months.

After merging my code from a private repo over to Github, it still didn’t work.  After updating the Hudson build configuration to point at the proper repos and to respond to the proper webhooks (to get automatically triggered on a new check-in), it STILL didn’t work.  You see, not only does configuration change, but SDKs and APIs shift out from under you.  The iOS SDK had changed out from under my project, and the Xcode configuration was pointing at libraries and SDKs that no longer were shipped by Apple.

The lesson for me here is this: I need to get off my ass every few weeks to at least look at my source code.  Kick the tires a little, hit a build every now and then, and check that everything is still okay.  Because the longer you wait, the more things can fall apart.  Each one of those issues I mentioned above would have been simple to fix, had I addressed them right away.  But the more problems that build up, the more difficult it is to clean up your code.

As it is, I still need to integrate Game Center with Boomle, and refactor its drawing routines to be more efficient.

Now, I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions.  Instead, I believe in making resolutions whenever they’re relevant, and sticking to them without the excuse of a New Year to motivate you.  My resolution is to take care of my projects proactively, instead of forgetting them.  Treat it like the quasi-living thing that I’m anthropomorphizing it to be, because even inactive projects need love too.

I’m a fairly decent web designer.  I’m not great by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not really visually creative.  I tend to express my creativity in the apps I build, as well as in my writing.  So given the fact that I’m really proficient in CSS and HTML, I can make simple web applications look good if I don’t have the help of a designer.  That being said nothing replaces a great UI designer, who are worth their weight in gold!

But when it comes to my blog, I want it to look attractive without having to spend a ton of time on it.  I’ve given up on trying to write content management systems.  To me they’re a solved problem – maybe not solved particularly well, but it is to the point where I don’t feel I’d like to contribute anymore to the field – so tweaking my own website content by hand holds no interest to me.

But seriously, why do the available blog templates out there have to look so damned horrible?  Even the commercial blog templates for WordPress all seem to be lacking in some serious areas.  Is it really too much to ask that I can have an easy-to-read blog template that will adjust to the width of the browser that doesn’t have serious CSS problems on one browser or another?

Over the next few days I may be tweaking my blog’s template a bit, because I’m tired of the standard one-size-fits-none layout that most templates have.  I might even pay for a commercial template, if it means my blog doesn’t look like the sidebar of a print newspaper anymore.

Last night while watching TV I had a conversation with my wife Deanna that made me realize that she is, as far as I’m concerned, a Jedi Knight.

I never really have that much of an appetite, and it’s not uncommon for me to skip meals altogether.  Since yesterday we had a late lunch, I ended up skipping dinner.  Normally it wouldn’t be a big deal, except that I thought I’d forage for a little snack in the evening.  After a cursory scan through the kitchen I didn’t find anything that sat comfortably below my laziness threshold, so I decided to forego eating anything at all.

What followed was a conversation that goes something like this:

Deanna: “Make yourself some food.”
Me: “No, I’m not hungry.”
Deanna: “Make some toast.”
Me: “No, I’m not hungry.”
Deanna: “Make some toast with almond butter.”
Me: “No, almond butter’s too much work…I’ll just have some toast.”

It was perhaps a full 30 seconds before I realized “Wait…what just happened?!”

I’m an avid “Idea Man”.  I love coming up with new ideas; for iPhone apps, for web apps, and even for real-world inventions.  Most of my ideas only sound great in my head, but when I open my mouth the idea seems to turn sour.  A smaller number of ideas manage to survive the thought-to-word boundary.  An even smaller minority of those ideas manage to make it down onto my “Idea Book” that I use to keep track of all the potential projects I’m going to work on.  Admittedly it’s not so much a single “book” as a collection of binders, scraps of paper, and in some cases 3×5 index cards.

Suffice to say amongst all those ideas, some gems manage to stand out above the rest.  A few I’ve actually finished, such as Boomle and myDrumPad.  The end product is seldom what I’d planned when I came up with the idea, but either due to time constraints, or the project evolving during the course of its development, things change.  Mostly I’m pleased with the end result, but there are some things I wish I had time for.  For instance, I’d like to re-implement Boomle using Cocos2D to make the animations smoother, and maybe add some extras such as obstacles, more challenging levels and Game Center integration.

Unfortunately, while I absolutely love myDrumPad, my original plans for it involved the creation of loops and patterns within the app.  Once I built it and started playing with it in real-time, as opposed to my ideas jotted down on paper, I discovered that the interface — while easy to use for quickly tapping out beats — doesn’t lend itself easily to creating loops.  I could create loops, sure, but my goal was to create an app that could be used in live performances, and sadly the interface just doesn’t lend itself to real-time editing of loops.  That’s not to say that I’m unhappy with myDrumPad.  Sales are going fairly well, and I have a few more updates planned.  I’m still adding additional languages to it using ICanLocalize.com (currently it has native support for English, Korean and French, and Japanese and German are following soon).

One of my constant loves for as long as I have been programming has been music and sound production.  And since I’m a rather unconventional thinker, I’d like to try my hand at an unconventional music interface.  I like the idea that someone without any knowledge of music notation or performance can learn to use my apps to produce the music they hear in their head, and to express themselves in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

I’m still formulating an idea in my head, but the loop and patterns features I was planning for myDrumPad are going to be built into a new application instead, with a completely different interface.  Like myDrumPad, it will be an experiment to see if producing music in this new UI metaphor will be successful.  It’s hard to explain, so I’m going to wait until I have a more accurate prototype to show.

But this app idea doesn’t exist in isolation.  In my little book of ideas I have several on-the-go prototypes just itching to get started, but since I still maintain a day job (and will for the foreseeable future) my time is limited to a few hours per day, and weekends.  My web-based space game, my photo sharing web application, my sonar-based iPhone utility app…all these ideas are stuck in my head as fantastic ideas I’d love to pursue, if only I had the time.

I’m sure it will be an interesting adventure to see which idea wins out in the end.  Do I build a web-based MMOG space game set in an infinitely-scalable universe?  Or do I build a Core Audio-based iPhone utility?  How do I determine which project has the highest likelihood of succeeding, or at least have the greatest likelihood of being finished in a reasonable time-frame by a single developer?

In an ideal world I’d build all of them.  Unfortunately, as an idea man, I think of ideas of varying awesomeness faster than I can build them.  As long as I require sleep, I suppose I’ll be stuck in this situation.

It’s too bad I can’t use it at work, but HTTP::Engine rocks my world. It does “The Right Thing ™” for negotiating HTTP requests and their content in a wonderfully transport-agnostic way. That means that if you’re running in mod_perl, FastCGI, plain ‘ol CGI, or even running as a stand-alone development-mode daemon, it will just work.

At my work, we’re building new user interface components to our email security appliance product, and for the first time we’re building a web interface that will be used by a potentially high number of public users. Up until now, all of our target users were internal to our customers, meaning system administrators and a small number of workgroup users. Now however, their customers and the recipients of potentially a high number of emails will be able to interact with our appliance. This means we have to scale a lot higher than we have needed to in the past, all with limited hardware and memory.

So for the first time in eons, since before I started working with mod_perl back in the late 90′s, I’m having to parse HTTP POST data, including file uploads, by hand. Catalyst does it really well, but unfortunately the list of dependancies it has makes it prohibitive to pull in to our build. That’s when I discovered HTTP::Engine. It looks great, it does what Catalyst does for managing HTTP requests in a flexible and extensible way, gives all sorts of great developer hooks to access internal information about the request, and it doesn’t require that you buy in to Catalyst’s way of doing things (of course, when I’m at home, I develop my apps using Catalyst).

Sadly though, HTTP::Engine’s list of dependancies is almost as long as Catalyst’s. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but given our restricted memory limits, I just can’t justify using it. Which really blows, because as CPAN modules go, this one is pretty darned sexy!

I’ve decided to simply write a sub-class of HTTP::Request that does what we need, and tie it in to the Nginx 3rd-party module for file uploads.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to use Moose, Catalyst and HTTP::Engine on our appliances deployed in customer locations around the world, but for now I’ll just have to roll my own.

I’m a big fan of all things Apple, and as you can tell from my past blog posts I’m a big fan of iPhone development. I’ve even dusted off my aging C skills, and have learned to love Objective-C. The one thing I haven’t learned to love, like all other iPhone app developers, is their application release process, and the seemingly arbitrary app store acceptance department.

Don’t get me wrong, I think how Apple fiercely guards the App Store to prevent bad, buggy, or offensive material from getting on there is a great thing. Some of my mother-in-law’s students in the class she works in have iPhones or iPod Touches, and these little 10-year-olds love the little apps I’ve put out. They’re fun, light-hearted, and they get a lot of enjoyment out of these and other apps. It’s reassuring to know that if I install an app, it won’t crash my phone (too badly) or that a child won’t be offended by them (too much).

However, the level of detail they give in their rejections seem both arbitrary and unnecessary. You develop an app and have to throw it over the fence to Apple, after which you wait with no level of detail as to the status, or success, or any sense of progress through whatever queue they have. Finally, you more often than not get a big fat rejection letter that gives you no detail as to why your app didn’t meet their secret criteria.

In my experience so far, this has actually been a virtue. My apps actually did have minor race conditions, or problems on specific platform versions. So, fair enough, I fix my changes and submit them in. But recently, the framework I work with and have been helping develop seems to be under fire from Apple for no apparent reason. And it’s the contradictory nature of their message that is what gets under my skin.

In this long thread on the PhoneGap mailing list, a number of developers writing their applications under PhoneGap have been given rejection letters saying something like:

Upon review of your application, cannot be posted to the
App Store due to the usage of private API. Usage of such non-public
API, as outlined in the iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.2 is
prohibited:

” An Application may not itself install or launch other executable
code by any means, including without limitation through use of a plug-
in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise.
No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application
except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs
and built-in interpreter(s).

The PhoneGap API implemented in your application is an external
framework.

For those new to PhoneGap, it’s a project that gives you an XCode project directory with Obj-C classes pre-made that allow you to develop iPhone apps in HTML / JavaScript. It wraps up several of the iPhone’s native controls and exposes those capabilities to JavaScript. In this way, an application developer could write their app in a hybrid of native Objective-C code and the iPhone’s own native browser control, the UIWebView.

It seems though that Apple constitues the use of their own controls as a 3rd-party library. Apple’s own developer documentation includes code sample projects, much like PhoneGap’s, intended to get a developer started on using their SDK. Is it incorrect to assume that others can do the same?

Additionally, there are 3rd-party companies such as AdMob, Medialets, and a number of others that provide ads, application tracking, and other resources to iPhone developers. Their code is given to you as pre-compiled libraries, that are most certainly not included on the iPhone when you pull it out of its shrink-wrap. So how is it that all these apps are released to the App Store with these 3rd-party libraries linked in, and an app framework whose source code is freely available and uses officially documented features can’t be?

I decided to put an end to the speculation, and wrote a letter to Apple’s developer support on this matter. I’ll give it a chance to percolate through their support department, and if I don’t hear an answer back via email, I plan to call their support department until I can get an answer.

For future reference, and in the interests of keeping the discussion open, here’s a copy of the letter I sent in to Apple.

From: Michael Nachbaur
Date: May 17, 2009 6:04:28 PM PDT (CA)
To: idp-dts@apple.com
Subject: Library classification clarification

Hello, I’m an iPhone software developer, and one of the core developers of the PhoneGap project. A number of users of PhoneGap – a set of Objective-C classes aimed at leveraging the UIWebView to access iPhone-supported hardware features – have reported that their apps have been rejected from the App Store because they supposedly use a “3rd-Party Library”. I wanted to get some clarification about this, as this is not only untrue, it is completely at odds with the goals of our project.

PhoneGap only uses officially-supported features of the iPhone, as documented within XCode’s iPhone SDK documentation. We even make sure that we don’t even use deprecated features of the iPhone, as we want to ensure 100% compatibility. All the software we use is exposed natively by the iPhone, and is in use in many other apps on the App Store.

So I wanted to get an official clarification from Apple as to why these apps are being rejected, and what, if anything, we as the maintainers and developers of the PhoneGap project can do to rectify the situation. We are trying to empower developers with quality starting-blocks for developing their own applications, much as the Apple sample applications do.

So please, if there’s anything we’re doing wrong, we would more than happily change our code to accommodate Apple’s policies. As far as we can tell, we support Apple’s licenses even better than other apps on the App Store, because we don’t import 3rd-party libraries such as AdMob, Medialets, or any of the other ad and tracking libraries that are obviously featured on almost every app in the App Store. And these are quite plainly 3rd-party libraries, and as such should they not be even more restricted than we are?

As a community, of both software developers and of business-people, we are very anxious to hear back from you, and would like to discuss this with someone at Apple to get an official answer, instead of the conversation being one-sided and filled with speculation.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing back from someone soon.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Can anyone reading this find some reason why Apple would target PhoneGap?

Update: I got an update on this problem from Steve, one of the app reviewers, over at Apple.

I think work wrecked my brain a bit today. I have so many ideas running through my head, and just not enough time to catch up to them all. It happens to all of us from time to time, but the thing is I have so much fun with work, that it’s hard to moderate myself. I think I’m going to head home, listen to some Bob Marley, and when I meet up with my wife and her parents at the pub, I’m going to watch the hockey game, drink some beer, and enjoy my evening without technology.

That being said, I’ve recently made some great updates to PhoneGap, and have added some docs. Check out the generated JavaScript documentation and iPhone documentation from my personal branch at Github. I’m sure we’ll get the docs pushed up to the main PhoneGap website soon.