They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. Frankly I think inflation has really taken its toll on the cost of words, but nevertheless here’s a quick view of what’s been going on in my UIControls PhoneGap branch on Github. In that screenshot the UIWebView frame, aka the actual webpage content of the app itself, was automatically resized so the toolbar and tabbar has room to be shown. And yes, those are native widgets for the toolbar and tabbar.

Last Thursday I went down to Nitobi after work for a couple of beer and a chat about PhoneGap before I had to go give a couple lightning talks at the Vancouver.pm Perl Mongers group. My hour chat with a couple of the Nitobi crew turned into over 2 hours, making me late for Vancouver.pm, but I think the effort was worth it. First off, they have good taste in beer.

Like many people before me, and I’m sure many more after, I’ve had an ungodly amount of difficulty with Apple’s iPhone certificate provisioning system. I personally think it’s a brilliant solution to a difficult problem, but unfortunately for us they made it a pain in the ass to deal with. I’ve only run up against a few basic issues with them, and thought I’d document my solutions to them here.

I’ve been working on some pretty fun changes to PhoneGap recently, which hopefully will be merged into the main branch soon. (Brock? Any word on that? It’s now 12 days, and counting) In my branch of PhoneGap I added console logging support, I implemented queueing of commands so they don’t walk over each other, and finally (and perhaps more importantly) improved the JavaScript build system and infrastructure. PhoneGap’s JavaScript Structure PhoneGap is broken up into several different .

So my wife is probably one of the coolest geeks I know. Would you like to know why? We were just watching the intro for a new episode of The Simpsons where Comic Book Guy ate a dinner, and finally was given the bill which showed, among other things, the tax. So, she pulled out a calculator, figured out the food service tax percentage, and went straight to Google to see which state Springfield is in.

I’ve said it many times before, but as programmers we tend to spendthe bulk of our time working with broken software, and we try to endeavor to make it less broken. When it’s not broken enough to keep people from using it on a day-to-day basis, you release your software. Some places do this better than others, and at my day job we’re really good at it. We are very dilligent about our software releases, we have tons of unit tests, system test automation, a nightly test “dashboard” that shows us how well our tests passed, and so forth.

I keep finding amazingly good blog posts or links of interest that I end up bookmarking for my own uses, but I end up having to tell people on a case-by-case basis why one article is good for one reason or another. I end up bookmarking on my Delicious account and sharing blog articles I like via my Google Reader account, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that this isn’t enough.

I’ve managed to avoid C and C++ programming for most of my career of 15 years. I’ve dabbled, and then I’ve run back to my favourite languages. Besides, as a web developer there hasn’t often been a need for me to delve that deeply into the machine. Now that I’m developing iPhone applications, that’s all changing. I’m using PhoneGap to develop my apps, but some of it was buggy, and others just didn’t do what I needed to do.

My wife and I don’t celebrate Valentines Day. This is for several reasons, but the biggest reason is that we don’t like being made to buy overpriced flowers and chocolates, pay for overpriced restaurants, and buy overpriced cards that convey generic and meaningless messages of love to someone I already love and have far more profound ways of expressing it than what Hallmark has cooked up. So basically, we’re both jaded and cheap.

I’m now a registered iPhone App Developer! After the usual waiting, emailing, phoning, and faxing that I won’t bore you with because blogs all over the world are full of people ranting about Apple’s registration process, I now have my developer key. (Personally, I don’t see what people are complaining about…it wasn’t all that painful.) So now that I’ve written two iPhone applications, the first thing I wanted to do was load them on the phone and see how they actually behaved on real hardware.