For the past 2 months, I've been working on the Netlog iPhone app, and now it's finally live!
Thanks to Lensco for the design, and the rest of the Netlog team for prototyping, testing and more testing!

To celebrate the downfall of the NDA and in response to a tweet from Fraser Speirs, I've written some sample code to swipe through a list of UIImages.

SlideShow.zip (155kb zip file)

I took a different approach than what Fraser seems to be doing. Where he's using a UIScrollView, I just used 3 UIImageViews (current, previous and next image) which are swapped out after each swipe.

The code is pretty basic and contains no comments at all, but some of you might find it useful...

Enjoy!

I just updated the layout of this site a bit. It now has one of these fancy side bars of which the contents are updated a lot more often than the site itself, so this should make things a bit more interesting.

There are probably still quite a lot of layout -issues, especially on Internet Explorer, but only about 15% of my visitors are using IE and even then, I guess most of them stumble upon this page by accident...

I had promised to write some things about my trip through the southwest of the USA, but we haven't had much luck with internet access up until now.
Right now, we're in the middle of nowhere, otherwise known as Kayenta, Arizona, near Monument Valley. Everything is going great, we've already visited San Diego, Los Angeles, Joshua Tree National Park and Grand Canyon. Next up: Monument Valley, Zion and Bryce, Las Vegas, Death Valley, Yosemite, and finally San Francisco.

I'll upload some photos to my Netlog account. Peace!

From the wikipedia entry:

cscope is a console mode or text-based graphical interface that allows software engineers or developers to search source code. It is often used on very large projects to find source code, functions, declarations, definitions and regular expressions given a text string.

cscope is installed with the Xcode Developer Tools and it was originally intended to index C-based languages, but it can be used for PHP or Java code too. It's not perfect, but it can be useful when working in large code bases.

I've written some scripts to use cscope from within TextWrangler:

Update Index.scpt
Find Definition.scpt

Same drill: put them in your TextWrangler Scripts folder and edit for configuration.

I've got mixed feelings about PHP development. On one hand, it's ubiquitus and thus a very handy platform to create web apps for. On the other hand, it's an ugly language. PHP 5 fixes a lot of shortcomings of earlier versions, so I kind of tolerate it, but I can never escape the feeling of not being absolutely certain about the code I write. In compiled languages, I've come to trust the compiler to warn me when I'm about to do something stupid. I miss that when doing PHP development.

Luckily, the php command has an option ("php -l file") to at least check for syntax errors, and Jon Gruber has written a script to use it directly from my favourite free text editor. I've been using this for a while, but I couldn't get rid of that unconfortable feeling.

At work, our web devs use Zend Studio Neon though, which is an extended version of Eclipse with support for PHP development. One part of Zend Studio is the code analyzer, which goes a bit further than just a simple syntax check. It also shows warnings about common mistakes like using a variable that has not been initialized. The problem with using Eclipse is that it's a slow, buggy, completely non-native memory hog on Mac OS X, so for me it wasn't worth it to switch...

Luckily, the Zend code analyzer has a CLI interface, which allows one to use it from other applications and after a bit of struggling with AppleScript, I can now use it from TextWrangler!

If anyone is interested, here's the script:

Check for PHP errors.scpt (30KB AppleScript file)

Just put it in TextWrangler's Scripts folder and edit it to point to the correct location of your ZendCodeAnalyzer.

Same code, same Interface Builder file, both built from Xcode.

How? Cocotron!

Building and deploying was fairly easy. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of unimplemented features (even NSAlert is unimplemented right now). I also noticed some ClearType glitches in the textfield while typing, but I'm pretty impressed as it is. If only this project was backed by some large organisation, us poor Mac developers with cross-platform daytime jobs would have a decent tool to use...

I wonder how it compares to GNUStep...

Starting with Leopard, you can now add custom views to menu items. So in theory, it should be possible to put anything in a menu you would normally put in a window.

Great! Let's try this out in a real-world scenario!


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Something found on Wil Shipley's blog: (it's actually an old post, but still very relevant)

Don't gloss over anything. Write every line to be bulletproof. Write every method as if every other method was out to get your code and try to make it crash, and your job was to make sure it wasn't going to happen in YOUR code. Assume the user is going to hit keys randomly. Assume the network is going to get disconnected. Assume the hardware will fail.

I wish more developers would have this attitude towards coding..

My first band was called Sjanell. We played mostly covers but we did have a few songs of our own.
While cleaning up my closet yesterday, I found a CD with some recordings. As CD-Rs fade over time, I couldn't copy the voice track from one song, but the others are still complete. I thought it would be a good idea to put them online before more of it gets lost. Not that it's all that spectacular, but just for nostalgia's sake, you can download the songs from:

http://lievendekeyser.net/sjanell/