Thoughts on Appcelerator Titanium
Appcelerator Titanium is a product that bills itself as the easy way to create cross-platform, native, mobile applications. It’s a lofty goal. After several months of development on a decent sized application, I can say that currently the platform falls short of meeting that goal, way short. A promising start.. I was drawn to Appcelerator because of the idea of being able to write straightforward JS and get native widgets. This would allow me to focus on the logic of my application, and not making sure I hadn’t forgot to track the retain/release counts on my objects correctly. Initially I... Read more
April 03, 2011 | View Comments | iphone, ios, javascript, painMy Weekend Project
Once upon a time there was a website, a website that catered to the lowest of lowbrow humor. It was aptly named, lowbrow. Then, for no real reason, it vanished. Those of us who were fond of it made varying attempts to resurrect the bits of it that were available to us, and ultimately we all failed. But just as suddenly as it vanished all of those years ago, it reappeared on a new domain. But this time with something new, almost unfathomable for lowbrow, an API. Let the gears begin turning… After playing a bit with the API I... Read more
March 07, 2011 | View Comments | iphone,lowbrowMy 2011 Quest
Background I got a PDA (A Sharp Zaurus, running Linux to be exact) in 2001. By 2003, I was on my third PDA, my cell-phone could act as a bluetooth modem, and it had a camera. Skip forward a few years, and there’s Palm’s, Blackberry’s, and Android devices. In 10 years I’ve gone through a dozen PDAs and cell-phones, each with more features and capabilities than the last. But in 2011, I’m moving backwards, I traded my Android phone in for a $20 nearly-disposable flip phone. This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, I’ve been plotting, and thinking, and... Read more
January 17, 2011 | View Comments | randomNow, with more GitHub
When I setup this blog, I set it up as a GitHub repository so that I could write my posts in vim, track them in git, and publish my changes in a way that’s extremely similar to how I deploy all of my other apps. This was, and still is, an extremely appealing process. But sometime in the last couple of months post-receive hook script has busted. It doesn’t error, it runs fine when I trigger it manually, but doesn’t seem to work when called via git. I spent an hour or so trying to figure out what was going... Read more
August 13, 2010 | View Comments | randomUsing httpriot on IOS
One of the things that surprised me when I first started with iPhone development is the verbosity of the built-in classes for making HTTP requests. (see: Using NSURLConnection ) So I quickly started looking for a wrapper library that simplifies this process. I found two candidates ASIHTTPRequest and httpriot. For no reason other than some familiarity with the Ruby library that inspired it, I chose httpriot. It turned out to require a BIT more code than I had expected, so I’ve documented my setup, and hopefully some of my reasoning here. I’m probably wrong in some of this, but there’s... Read more
July 31, 2010 | View Comments | development, iPhone, iOS, tutorial