Just noticed lately, that on iPhone 5, the volume knob touch area was mis-shifted to the bottom of the screen. Funny enough, nobody mentioned this to me after months having iPhone 5 screen size support. Well, I got that fixed and submitted the update to Apple today.
Long time without any update here. One of the reasons is, that I changed jobs beginning this year, so end of last year was full of “hell, all these tasks still need to get done”, and this year is starting with “hell, all this stuff I need to learn, and do”, which in effect leaves me dead at the floor, when coming home from work.
That’s why for the next weeks, there will only be a bug fix Steam Radio update coming up (hopefully this or next week, depending on Apple), but no new features or even new Apps.
But when thing have themselves run in again with the new job, there’s still many ideas which I’d like to see implemented. For the time beeing, if you’re waiting desperately for feature updates, please let me know so I can priorize them. For all others – I’ll be back, no worries 
Came across a strange behavior of Mac OS X 10.8 today, which I can’t quite understand. I wanted to clear up some space on my ever at the limit SSD start drive, by moving the XCode documentation and other data to my larger hard disk. First I used Finder to create a “Folder Alias” (actually I don’t know, if they are called “alias” in the English version, attached screen shot for your reference). 
Now I tried to replace that XCode Developer folder on the SSD with my alias pointing to the “slow” HD. All contents were copied previously of course.
Now XCode did not recognize the folder, and said it was missing the documentation and so on. What the. As I nearly already gave up, I finally tried to create a symbolic link through the command line:
ln -s /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Developer Developer
And guess what: XCode accepted that. So it looks like Mac OS X is making a difference between symbolic links created in Finder, and symbolic links created in the command line. How weird is that?!? (and no, I did not use sudo beforehand.)
UPDATE:
Thanks to @schnitzel: http://julipedia.meroh.net/2007/01/mac-os-x-aliases-and-symbolic-links.html
Together with Alex from who.stolemytweet.com we have developed this neat app, which let’s you check if anybody has copy-pasted your tweets. It is free, go check it out!
A “blazingly fast” week later, we have an update for the iOS Version of Steam Radio, which fixes the awkwardly rotated screen display on the iOS6 iPads. Phew.
Users with iPad running iOS6 should download this update.
If you use Steam Radio on the iPad and with iOS 6, you might have noticed, that there had been an App update lately, which works well on an iPhone, but showed a f***ed up user interface on the iPad. There are more than one reason why this happened. First reason is, that yes, I did not test enough. In my testing, I tried iPhone with iOS4, iOS5, iOS6 both Retina and non Retina, plus iPhone 5 with Retina (and non Retina by accident – yes, on the Simulator, that’s possible!). Then as everything worked as expected, I tested on iPad, Retina and non-Retina. But only on iOS5, assuming that by testing it on iPhone with iOS6, and I did not change anything for the iPad variant, no error could be happening. Wrong! once I had later installed iOS6 on my Retina iPad and downloaded my own update. Shriek!
The other reason in fact, and which I was missing out on, is that Apple changed behavior of iOS in version 6 when it comes to rotating/adjusting your screen display when tilting the iPad to portrait/landscape. The functionality, which was there for 5 years just ceased to exist. Apple replaced it with a complete new set of functions for iOS6. Thus the “rendering” functions for the iPad layout of my App just did not get called anymore. And thus everything just went havoc.
As you might read between the lines, I’m quite pissed off by this. Of course, I should have checked this before releasing. Of course I should regularly check the 5000+ APIs, if anything has changed. But can I do that, whilst doing this as my “third job”, after Family, Full time job? No. Definitely not.
The thing is, that this is not the first time that Apple kicks out fundamental APIs. And with every release of iOS (and Mac OS X!) I have to spend days again, reworking my Apps.
As a software developer, who is writing code for all OS-platforms out there, I must say: Apple, PLEASE learn from Microsoft. As much as you can argue about MS being a monopolist, maybe having not so well designed products and so on – but they know how important compatibility is. They know how important legacy software is. And with Windows, .NET and Visual Studio, they have just made a tremendous job for developers. My piece of code I wrote on .Net 2.0 and Windows XP 10 years ago still runs today on Windows 8! I don’t even have the source code anymore, but I can still use the software today as it was designed _ten_ _years_ _ago_ !
I said please. Let’s hope I’m not forced to be switched to Windows Mobile soon.
As I am writing this, I’m uploading an update for the Mac version of Steam Radio. This time, not only radio stations are updated, but you also (many will say “finally!”) get the possibility to edit station details, such as name, description, streams and logo. Additionally, there’s a minor improvement on importing stream URLs, which will fix import problems for some m3u and pls files.
Hope this time Apple will not take more than 3 weeks to review, as it took last time.
… why there weren’t too many updates here lately:
- my full time job has pretty much covered up all my time and motivation to do anything else with computers after work
- there’s a new app coming up, which I’m developing in the non existant time that I’ve just mentioned
- It’s Twitter related, and in cooperation with another website, and it will be a freemium / ad sponsored app.
- Stay tuned, more in August.
I have to fiddle around with Microsoft Research’s Dynamic Data Display for a project to display measurement data.
It did not take very long until I ran into problems with performance. Using e.g. a DataTable object as Data Source for the Graph would work well for around 100 data points give or take, but when running in fullscreen window and with say 10000 data points, it would just freeze your application and render it unusable.
Now as a lot of folks had similar problem, as stated in many forums, I finally stumbled across the “Simulation” Example project, which did not seem to have such problems. Works like a charm with no lagging whatsoever, and using thousands of data points.
The only difference I could find, is that this example uses a different data source object, the “ObservableDataSource” from DDD DataSource definitions, and it’s adding new points in the chart directly to the data source object. Using this approach, it removed all my performance problem. So maybe it will save your project as well.
Funny, I have’nt even blogged about it, and already updated my “Byte-O-Mat“. Byte-O-Mat was the consequence of my second life in embedded and communication protocol programming, where you always have to deal with byte arrays. And from debugging, you get hex strings. Or you need a hex string. And you always need to convert them back and forth. Now, Byte-O-Mat saves you the conversion hastle. Just copy paste your stuff from any of the formats, and you’ll get your other format right away. The update I did to yesterday’s release was the support of space separators between the hex-bytes.
Have fun, and don’t forget to flattr
