Flexible Code

This one has to be listed (more honestly) under the title “Networking on a Mac (which includes iPhone)”. But this is a seriously worthwhile read. There are several projects we are looking at that may need this kind of communication.

Cocoa for Scientists (Part XXVIII): Bonjour and How Do You Do? | MacResearch

Cocoa for Scientists (Part XXVIII): Bonjour and How Do You Do?
By drewmccormack at Tue, Oct 7 2008 3:45am |

* Tutorials

Author: Drew McCormack
Web Sites: macflashcards.com, macanics.net

Many of you will have noticed that last week Apple lifted their NDA on the iPhone SDK, which means we are now free to talk about it. You will undoubtedly read a lot about what is in the SDK, on blogs, and in Apple’s own documentation, but one aspect of iPhone development that I found to be poorly covered was networking. I don’t mean downloading a web page, or copying files from an FTP server, I mean the low-level stuff. How do you find and talk to another iPhone or Mac? The options available on the iPhone are also available on the Mac, so it seemed like a good topic for this series.
Low-Level Networking

One of the reasons you won’t find too many articles about low-level networking in Cocoa is two-fold:

1. There are good high-level networking options — on the Mac.
2. Low-level networking is quite hard.

The Mac has a technology called ‘Distributed Objects’ (DO), which makes it quite easy for one process to talk to another, even if it is on another computer. The downside of DO is that it works only on Macs, not on iPhones, and not on any other platform. If you want to communicate iPhone-to-iPhone, Mac-to-iPhone, iPhone-to-PlatformX, or Mac-to-PlatformX, you will need something more low-level.

This brings us to point (2): low-level networking can be a little tricky, which means you will probably want to build your own ‘Messaging Library’, to reduce the complexity and chance of bugs. This is a set of functions and classes that allow you to easily send messages — chunks of data — from one system to another, without having to think too much about it.

It’s coming! We just need to keep pushing on Apple to support it. This could make a huge difference!

Flash Magazine > News > Flash for the iPhone confirmed at FOTB

Flash for the iPhone confirmed at FOTB

Flash for the iPhone confirmed at FOTB

At the Flash On The Beach (FOTB) conference in Brighton, Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems Paul Betlem, confirmed that Adobe is indeed developing a Flash Player for the iPhone. However, Apple calls the shots as to when it’ll be available.

The Town Hall meeting sessions are usually a great source of Adobe information and the one at this years Flash On The Beach conference was no exception. The session was full of nuggets for Flash users, but the most relevant piece of information for others was about Flash Player for the iPhone. Upon a direct question from the audience, Paul Betlem for the first time publicly confirmed that Adobe is actively developing a Flash Player for Apple’s popular phone. He said (not direct quote) “My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.” He noted that Apple makes all the decisions, so in other words, the ball is in Apple’s yard at this time. If Apple says yes, Adobe will have the player available in a very short time.

After an interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan, the rumour mill got into high gear. Now we know that the Player exists within Adobe. Apple may have many reasons for not allowing Flash onto the iPhone, but if anyone has a good shot at getting their technology into the device, it would be Adobe. There were several other nuggets in this session, but we’ll get back to those in our FOTB conference reports.

In just GREAT news for the iPhone developers out there we hear that Apple has dropped the NDA that developers signed as part of the Apple Developer Program. This was the thing that kept us all from posting code, creating support groups, and even conducting training programs.

The NDA was reasonable (perhaps) during the Beta, but since the SDK’s official release it’s been nuts to keep it alive. We all hoped this would happen. Now it won’t be NEARLY as difficult for new developers.

Bring on the APPS!

Apple Drops iPhone Dev NDA || The iPod Observer - Now Playing

Apple Drops iPhone Dev NDA

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 11:20 AM - by Jeff Gamet

Apple unexpectedly dropped its controversial nondisclosure agreement for iPhone software developers on Wednesday. The move means third party iPhone app developers, authors, and trainers can finally discuss the software development environment and share information with others.

It turns out that only moments after the first install of GameTrack
came the first bug. It wasn’t a hard one to find the bottom of, but messy that it got out in the first place.

The scenario was that adding something to your “wish list” from the detail page didn’t save between restarts of the application. Adding something to the wish list from the list itself worked just fine.

Ah well, fun and squash. Awaiting Apple’s review and repost now.

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