hackSignal .. my hacking diary

Ideas by Khang: A new type of web browser for the iPhone

I always have tons of ideas that would come and go, but recently, I have been doing a lot of iPhone stuff and so naturally ideas that popped up in my head are mostly iPhone related. The mobile safari is one of the best mobile browser I've used and without doubt the iPhone has one of the best mobile web browsing experience. Recently, I started seeing an increasing number of sites that support iPhone's safari browser native resolution, 420x320 or vice versa. However comparing to the vast majority of sites out on the internet, it's probably a really low percentage of sites that does support iPhone's format. My guess is around 1 - 3 percent of websites has built-in support for being friendly on the iPhone.

What's my idea?

An iPhone application that reformats CSS/HTML on the fly so it shows well on the iPhone screen resolution of 420x320 or 320x420. I've seen iPhone applications that uses the UIWebView API to implement a full screen browser with a bunch of features that were not available on Safari. In addition to just reformating CSS/HTML, it also recognizes domain names and so clicking on such urls would fire up any preferred native apps, for example TweetDeck if it was a twitter.com hyperlink or the Facebook app for Facebook.com. Opening 3rd party applications is possible if applications register custom URL scheme for their application and publish their schemes. That's just another example that you can provide a more utilitarian browser that not only renders content better but has these nice built-in feature integrations.

So how to make money?

There's actually a few way to monetize this. The first is obvious,

1. Sell this in the appstore for a price. "Wow, that's insane!", you might think. No, it's not. I'm sure you can price this at $2.99 and get a good amount of downloads.
2. Offer a free version but it displays in-app ads. Monetize the cheap bastards!
3. This might not be possible, I haven't thought it through yet but  since you are reformatting HTML/CSS, how about inserting your own ads into the web page and removing the site's ad.

Love this , hate this ?

With everything, there's love and hate, so if you think this is brilliant, I would love to talk to you more personally. Hate this? Tell me why, I love to hear and see this from every angle.

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So you want to be a mobile developer?

As a software developer, the world of technology is evolving so fast. In less than 2 years, the iPhone has completely change the mobile device industry. Before, there was no device that only has a full touchscreen, multi-touch was no where close. With the iPhone as the current leader in this "class" of device, I'm not talking about mobile phone, Android was announced shortly and then the Palm Pre.

I made a career change from developing world class consumer electronics for brands like Sony, Bose and Samsung, to now developing games for the iPhone. I consider that a huge leap from embedded systems to game development. So here's a personal advice to any developer out there who is thinking of taking that leap, which platform should I go with?

Indeed.com has a nice job keywords trending feature and I used the keywords, iphone, android and palm pre, and guess what, the answer is pretty clear.

iphone, android, palm pre Job Trends

iphone jobs - android jobs - palm pre jobs

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=iphone%2C+android%2C+palm+pre&l=

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Meeting the Woz at the IPhone launch party

The rumor was that the iPhone launch party will top all WWDC parties this week. Yeah great job guys! I referring to the guys from toucharcade.com and macheist.
 
This is really the party to be at. Golden tickets, taco line, that got all the people talking. I was cool enough to get a golden ticket which means I got in at the priority queue. Yeah there's a damn queue even if you have a golden ticket.
 
But hey, it's all good since the party needed greeters to greet the VIP, Steve Wozniak. Steve showed up in a limo and I got a picture. You think that's cool? Read on.
 
I got in pretty quickly since I was the first few in the golden ticket line. First guy I wanted to talk to is Woz. Yeah he was surrounded by geeks from all directions. The opportunity came when he was walking outside to the lobby to chill out and get some air. He saw our rockem sockem robots and was all excited. Everyone whose old enough to know this classic tabletop game personally just becomes a kid instantly.
 
Steve and Janet were both extremely nice people and we got to play rockem sockem. We told them about smackBOTS and Steve got his hands on my iPhone and had a great time. Woah, that is the best reward I got for working on smackBOTS. What else could top Steve Wozniak playing your game at the iPhone launch party! So yeah iPhone launch is the best party ever for WWDC 09.

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Robot App: Our IPhone Game Development story

It's been a really crazy 4 weeks of coding and hacking Robot App (we've got a name for it but we're just holding it back till the app is accepted by Apple). Robot App is our first and a robot fighting arcade style IPhone game. You basically start off as a tincap robot, whatever that means I just coined that up, and beat the hell out of other robots in an arcade style setting. So think Street Fighters but with retro style robots. Derek is the mastermind behind all the artwork, graphics and the main concept of Robot App. He is one talented illustrator.

I got to know Derek through ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com through a posting that he wrote looking for a programmer to collaborate on IPhone apps. I left a comment on his post and the rest is all history. We started brainstorming and by early April, we settled on the concept of Robot App.

Along the way, we stumbled into many potholes such as things like blurry pngs that appear fine on our Macs but came up blurry on the iPhone (both simulator and hardware). That set us back a couple of days trying to figure out what's wrong. Then we stumbled on AdHoc distribution like many developers did.

I took extra time to read up on all the documents for Adhoc distribution just to make sure that I do not get into an endless loop like many other developers were experiencing with trying to send out test builds using AdHoc Distribution. That didn't help. We still ended up burning a few days trying to get the adhoc builds "work" on Derek's phone. The build was installed on his IPhone but it just crashes on start. We went through iterations of debugging and transferring of debug logs.

Our IPhone AdHoc Distribution
He was able to install the app, it's just when starting the app, it terminates and goes back to Springboard. In the end, we figured out that his phone had some funky configuration and installed the application with some weird permission settings. We tried many different ideas, like resetting the phone, restoring to a clean state and restoring in iTunes. All those did not work. It was only till Derek suggested booting over to windows and tried using iTunes in Windows did an AdHoc install and miraculously that works. We're still not really sure why iTunes in Windows had installed the app properly.

There's so many things that we've learned throughout these couple of months and I would end to share more in the upcoming days. But I'll end this post with some project stats and will definitely post more on our adventure on developing our first IPhone game.

Robot App Project Stats
Project Folder created: April 9th 2009
Lines of code: 5032 lines
Number of files: 30
Application size (compressed): 6.3MB
Revision control for our project resources: dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com)

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Having fun with NSTimer?

NSTimer is the new thing that I'm trying to conquer

Below is the standard timer kill code. I've even thrown in a nice #define for it....

if (pressTimer != nil) {
  [pressTimer invalidate];
  pressTimer = nil;

}

#define KILL_TIMER(q) if (q) {[q invalidate]; q=nil;}

If your timer is set to only fire once (repeats:NO) then you must make sure to include pressTimer = nil; in your timer function to flag that the timer is gone.

If you want a setup where a timer fires 5 times then invalidates, you use repeats:YES when creating your timer, then use the userInfo data to keep count, then call invalidate in the timer function when the count in your userInfo object reaches 5.

Yes, in this case userInfo must be an NSObject subclass! So you need to create a really simple class to hold your data. Something like this:

// TimerCounter - a simple class to assist countdown timers
@interface TimerCounter : NSObject {

	int countdown;
}
@property (nonatomic, assign) int countdown;
+ (TimerCounter*)timerCounterWithCount:(int)count;
- (id)initWithCount:(int)count;
- (BOOL)decrementAndTest;
@end

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My Hacking essentials = Planters cashew nuts + Pepsi Max

Sent from my iPhone

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robots are fighting on our iphones

Robot app from LeftRightStudios

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