View high resolution

I finally broke down and picked up a second LED Display with a mix-and-match NVIDIA video card.

And a Magic Mouse.

And a new Apple Remote.

Don’t judge me.

Tumblr iPhone 1.1 Sneak Peek

Now that 1.1 has been submitted to the App Store, I figured everyone would like to know what’s coming in the new version. Here’s a preview!

Video posts. Choose from your camera roll or capture a new video right from the app (iPhone 3GS only).

Native editing. Need to add tags or update a post on the go? Just tap the ‘edit’ button on a post in the Dashboard to load it up in a native post editor.

Search. Supports searching across Tumblr, in your Dashboard or on just your posts.

Built-in web browser. No more losing your place when you tap a link in Dashboard. Now a web browser will pop up and let you investigate the interwebs.

Post upload status. Never wonder how long it’s going to take that Audio post to upload again.

Post geotagging. Even I’m not sure what this is for, but I’m sure that it’s going to be awesome.

Rewritten Dashboard tab (replaces the Sites tab). See all your posts from each of your blogs, including drafts and queues.

Rewritten Advanced Post Options. New support for Save as draft, Add to Queue, Publish on, Custom post URL’s, Send to Twitter and Ask a question.

Dashboard now only reloads on command. Not every time you tap the tab. Sorry about that one :P

Better quality photo posts. Photos are now sent with less compression.

New bookmarklet format for links. More info coming once 1.1 goes live.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where a post that has been saved for later can become corrupted.
• Fixed a bug where Photo posts can cause crashes.
• Fixed memory leaks.

There’s even more, but most of it is stuff you won’t see. Much of the core of the application was rewired, re-factored, re-plumbed, simplified and enhanced. The end result being a snappier, more flexible code base that’s ready for all the stuff coming in 1.2 and beyond.

We’ll let you know once it goes live on the App Store!

On Authoring iPhone Apps via Flash CS5

Ok, maybe I should expound beyond sweet christbabyjesus no. I have a feeling that post could turn into one of those posts that needs more explanation.

Bottom line: you can’t compile Actionscript 3 into an iPhone app. Adobe has written some type of selective AS3 to ObjC translator. Reasons that you don’t want to use that:

• Bugs. It’s tough enough bug testing Objective-C natively, let alone through some black-box made by Adobe. I hope you’re into non-descriptive error boxes.
• Memory management. Do you really want to trust a third party to retain and release objects for you? This is not something best left to someone else.
• SDK changes. Apple moves at the rate of Apple. Keeping up with their SDK changes is vital and waiting for Adobe (or anyone other than you) to address these changes is not smart.
• HIG-busting. I’ve read through the FAQ and it doesn’t look like you get access to UIKit. So you can’t use any of Apple’s excellent interface controls. So you get whatever convoluted mess of a UI the developer wants to cobble together in Flash. I’ll let you think about that for a moment.
• Ability. You don’t even get the whole SDK. Just what Adobe feels like supporting. If you get knee deep in a project and realize that you need access to an Apple API that you can’t get to, you’ll be out of luck.

All those things add up to a non-reliable entity becoming your single point of failure. And lest we forget, Adobe can barely write Objective-C apps themselves. We’re still waiting for an update to CS4 that makes it not crash when you move the mouse too fast. You really want to trust them to manage your memory, translate your code and keep up with Apple’s SDK?

Let me know how that works out for you.

Tumblr for iPhone 1.1

There she goes, off to the magical land of App Store review.

Calling this release just a 1.1 was hard because there’s so many ne–

Well, you’ll see.

Hurry

Rands:

Don’t worry if someone else is already working on your idea. I’m certain they are, but they are decidedly not you and it’s the you that makes your idea unique.

Whether you’re successful or not, it’s a terrific way to get in a lot of trouble. There’s a long list of established rules and regulations that you violate with your creative impertinence, but it feels great, right?

Trusting your gut and charging forward. It can be addictive.

Do yourself a favor and follow these simple instructions at least once in your life. It’s both incredibly liberating and intensely terrifying.

You’ll be sorry if you don’t.

Photo != Movie

There’s more annoying than when Apple does something with their software that you can’t do. They legitimize it by telling you that they want to get the functionality near-perfect before releasing it for general use. I get that. But when they do something that I really need to be able to do and can’t it’s very frustrating.

Case in point: video. The way you get video from the 3GS is really quite odd. You use a class called UIImagePickerController. You have to set a non-obvious property to get it to run in video mode. Then the OS brings up a modal view that allows you to take/get the video.

So what? They’re forcing video to fit into a class it wasn’t meant for. Big deal, right? If there’s anyone guilty of abusing classes it’s me.

But there’s a real problem here. Photos and movies are inherently different. In image mode, the UIImagePickerController delegate gives you back UIImage objects (as the name of the class leads you to believe that it would). UIImages contain all kinds of data about themselves that are critical to have when manipulating images. They contain orientation data. You can do things like save the image to the camera roll. Find out color space info. Etc. When UIImagePickerController is run in video mode all you get back is an NSURL. A location on disk.

There’s no pertinent information I can glean from that. Generally, if you know what kind of file you’re going to be dealing with you can pull that data into a Cocoa Touch object that has all these extra attributes accessors on it (like, say, UIImage). But these video files are different. There’s no UIMovie object in Cocoa Touch. No UIVideo, either. Apple doesn’t want you mucking about with video files on the iPhone so all they give you is the location. And in most cases the location is fine. You can kick off an MPMediaPlayer instance and pass in that NSURL. Boom! Full screen video. It even knows which way is up.

But what if the video was taken upside down or sideways? The iPhone knows which way is up and should tags movies correctly, right? Look at the video uploading functionality in the Camera app. You can go straight to MobileMe or Youtube. You can even run compression on the videos before they’re uploaded (!).

It’s because there’s a private class that Apple wraps around video objects, and me and you aren’t cool enough to use it. And it’s really starting to piss me off.