iTunes Connect allows iPhone developers to see sales/downloads numbers from all over the world, but there's currently no official way to look at all reviews. These reviews are an interesting source of feedback from actual users though, so I made a script that allows me to look at all reviews of the Netlog iPhone app.

As I don't understand every language that's being used in the reviews, I added links to Google Translate, which might not be perfect, but at least it helps me understanding a bit better what's being said.

Then I thought it would be useful for other developers, so I turned into a page where you can enter your own application ID:

http://lievendekeyser.net/reviews

Enjoy!

I needed a way to work with EXIF data on the iPhone. There is already an Objective-C library called iphone-exif, but this is only available under the GPL license, which basically means you cannot use it in closed source projects.

libexif is a plain C library created by Lutz Mueller and others, released under the LGPL license.

I didn't manage to get it to build for the iPhone with the provided configure scripts and makefiles, so I created an Xcode project. As a side effect, it can now be more easily integrated with other Xcode projects: just add a dependency, add the folder to your header search path and link to the built product, and you're off.

Download (480kb tgz file)

You can read more about the changes done to the original code in the libexif-iphone.txt file that's included.

Initial reaction to the Netlog iPhone App has been incredible so far!

On the Belgian iTunes store, we're currently #8 in the top free apps (update: make that #5)

Reviews of people all over Europe are overwhelmingly positive. The app is getting mostly 4 and 5-star ratings and I'm learning superlatives in all kinds of languages.

Of course, this doesn't mean we'll get lazy, as we're already working on fixing some small bugs, adding new and improving existing features. But for now it's fun to see the app doing so well. I hope it will also bring Netlog to the attention people who have overlooked it until now, as it's really one of the best social networks out there, and I'm not just saying that because I work there

I took the liberty to copy some of the reviews here:

Quote Maestro_D on the Belgian store :

Marvelous application! Finally my favourite social network Netlog is available on my favourite phone. It works very well and has some really nice features. Now I can share everything, no matter where I am. I really like the direct photo upload and the shouts.

Quote yvesm007 on the Belgian store :

Best app I have ever seen! Finally, netlog has a very good application for the iPhone and iPod touch! I absolutely love it!!!

Quote Ptidam on the French store :

Aussi complet que le site, en plus simple, un petit coup de coeur pour la geolocalisation...

Quote Amolent on the Italian store :

Ottimo programma...

Quote lj-mic on the Swiss store :

Das beste app, für Sociale Netze. Die Erweiterung für alle Netloger. Das App ist die Erweiterung, die jeder haben muss. An alle Flick, Myspace und Co User, wechselt zu Netlog

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...