A few months ago, I bought a nice shiny bike in Shanghai, pictured here:

I had it for a whole 7 days before it was stolen from the bike rack in front of my building (the “building gate men” [cannot call them guards, as guard things they do not] proved little deterent).

I had made two mistakes.  The first was assuming the 2 free locks I was given from the shop were any good, and the second was that it looked too attractive. The lock issue really pissed me off, especially when I went back to the shop and the guy proceeded to tell me how shit the locks were (he used a scissor snippy motion to show me just how easy it was to cut).  It’s one thing to give a guy a free lock, but surely you can give a disclaimer at the same time (and I had a chinese speaking friend with me so it wasn’t a comms issue).  He then offered me a $1 discount on a new bike (yes, $1), so I pretty much stormed out of that shop never to return.

Two weeks ago I bought a new bike.  Again this one was a shiny red color (unfortunately this model had no other colors, and the other models were granny bikes).

Here it is:

And now with some modifications :]

My plan is this: make the bike look shit, and lock it up with 2 huge-ass locks (ones designed for expensive mopeds).

I think it worked… was at my local coffee shop (yes I found a sweet western style independent coffee shop in my area, how cool is that!?), and one of the customers (they are all fairly affluent) rode up on his shiny black bike.  Later someone asked him if my bike was his, and they all had a good laugh.  So… show off with it I cannot, but at least it won’t get stolen – and under all the crap, is actually a brand new bike, shimono gears and everything, that rides very smoothly.  Even if it looks like your average 10yo grampa rust-bucket.

So far so good… lets hope it lasts.

This is one valid reason for a “crapification” filter (unlike others, looking at you HDCP).

Running PHP on a production server with no visible error messages?  This is good for security, but a real pain when debugging.

In my mantis install, I had to put these two lines in constant_inc.php:

date_default_timezone_set(‘Australia/Melbourne’);
ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);

To fix the default timezone warning, and display errors when they happened.

I’ve long stopped caring what OS *other* people use. But to me, this describes the 3 of them perfectly (from the Android Developer manual):

Setup your system to detect your device.

• If you’re developing on Windows, you need to install a USB driver for adb. See the Windows USB Driver documentation.
• If you’re developing on Mac OS X, it just works. Skip this step.
• If you’re developing on Ubuntu Linux, you need to add a rules file that contains a USB configuration for each type of device you want to use for development. Each device manufacturer uses a different vendor ID. The example rules files below show how to add an entry for a single vendor ID (the HTC vendor ID). In order to support more devices, you will need additional lines of the same format that provide a different value for the SYSFS{idVendor} property. For other IDs, see the table of USB Vendor IDs, below.
  Log in as root and create this file: /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules.
  For Gusty/Hardy, edit the file to read:
  SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″
  For Dapper, edit the file to read:
  SUBSYSTEM==”usb_device”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″
  Now execute:
  chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

There are many legitimate reasons to downgrade iPhones. As a user, perhaps you just don’t like the new OS.

As a developer, I have a need to test my App on all OS versions my users may reasonably use. I even have a spare iPhone I use just for testing. Alas, Apple only allow the very latest OS to be installed, even if you are a developer.

Apple also don’t ship old OS versions on the iPhone Simulator anymore, so that can’t be used to verify that you’re not calling any new methods either.

For a recent release, this meant I actually could not test it properly. I did the best I could by using the iPad 3.2 * simulator* (a very poor man’s substitute), crossed my fingers, and released. It was a nail-biting day…

Not all users upgrade immediately. Upgrading requires iTunes, yet normal day to day usage of an iPhone does not (you can do everything, buy/upgrade apps, buy music, etc). Actually I believe this is a pretty common use-case, especially for a key audience of mine: travellers. In fact, with my App, at least 10% of my active users (ones using the export server) are not yet on iOS4! That also means 10% of my potential customers. No way am I going to ignore them.

A bug has been reported to Apple on this issue.

To summarise, there are many legitimate reasons why people are on old OS’s, and why (especially developers) have a need to downgrade to old OS’s.

Fortunately there is a solution. And it doesn’t require doing anything illicit to your iPhone either.

Download The Firmware Umbrella. Plug in your iPhone to USB, and press a button.

What the Firmware Umbrella does is cache the iTunes server OK response to your firmware installation request, allowing you to fake this response in the future (to allow the downgrade). Only catch: you can only cache responses for the latest firmware, so do it today!

Important TIP: tick “Advanced Options” and change the “Request From” option to “Apple” (Cydia is for jailbreaking). Optionally, you can do both.

Caching the response is easy. Using it a bit harder – but do yourself a favour, cache the response now, and if you need it in the future, you’ll thank yourself.

When you port your App to the iPad, one of the first choices you get is whether to create a separate product, or a fat (i.e. “universal”) binary.

It seems that many folks on the App store, including several apps in the GPS/travel space have gone done the separate-product route.

Perhaps I understand why they did this. After all, it is not trivial to port an App to the iPad (basically your UI needs a complete re-think). For some apps, they have gone so far as to offer a totally new UI, using real life metaphors like “pages” and “books”.

I still think it’s a bad idea. Why? For two main reasons:
1) customers don’t like paying for the same product twice
2) how many people will actually buy both versions anyway?

Yes the iPad version costs you money to make. BUT, it will hopefully get you more customers. New customers who buy it for their iPad.

Historically I know of several products that used to ship with multiple targets. Warcraft 3 is one, and Adobe’s suite is another, both supported both Mac and Windows. Many steam games now support Mac as well (and don’t require re-purchasing).

So my theory is most users won’t buy the App twice. Some will buy it for the iPhone, some will buy it for the iPad. If you have the one binary to support both, a few will run it on both, and find that useful. If you sell it separately, I doubt most people would buy the counterpart, simply because they would use one device more than the other. Furthermore, users that have already bought the iPhone version get that installed to their iPad anyway, which may be enough.

So rather than trying to milk your existing customers to pay for the port, think of it this way: You get new customers (those who have never used your app, and want to use your App on the iPad), you add value to your product (by allowing use of both devices) which may give you an edge. And you’re doing the right thing (ask yourself, do you like paying for the same thing twice?).

I think so few customers will buy the app TWICE, that you actually de-value your product. I suspect that the number of additional people who buy your App because it supports both, will outweigh the number of people who would have bought a second copy, and that both categories of users represent only a small percentage anyway.

And please, don’t try to claim “but the iPad version is different”. I don’t care if it has a fancy book UI, a re-arranged layout, or up-res’d textures. If it performs the same function, it’s the same App.

GPS Log for iPad. Coming soon. Free for existing users.

Will

We all know if you buy a cheap, non-refundable ticket, then chance your mind you’re pretty much boned for getting a refund.

And maybe fair enough, you knew it was non-refundable, and this is how the airline can make it so cheap (or so they say).

However, this BBC article makes an extremely good point: you should be entitled to a refund of the TAX component, after all, this is not airline revenue.

To me this makes perfect sense. The taxes and “surcharges” surely are only paid out if you actually take the flight. Airport tax is per-passenger. This was never revenue for the airlines, so why should it be if you cancel your ticket?

Given the huge amounts the Airlines charge in this category (some no doubt is legit, but who knows what is in the mystery “surcharge” category), perhaps this would also encourage more honesty in the break down of fares.

For me personally, I hate how airlines split the fare, and applaud Virgin Blue for not doing this. The total amount is the only amount I care about. But if in fact they want to be so careful to detail this tax component, then perhaps they can do us the courtesy of paying it back if they don’t pay it to the government.

Thanks for listening…

Will

Not a bad take on it I think.

Think rugby union’s governing bodies are being a bit square – Will Carling’s 57 old f*rts if you like.
The Tri Nations series has already banned them, and now the World Cup in New Zealand next year is following suit, as befits an old school tie/public school sport.
The vuvuzelas are more common, culturally speaking, to the community-minded Third World nations and peoples who love to celebrate life noisily and together.
The stiff shirts that watch rugby, eat prawn sandwiches, enjoy corporate hospitality, and often sit in silence have no interest in that kind of thing.
Personally I think it all adds to the atmosphere of the sport to have the vuvuzelas and they should be encouraged.
Anyone who wants to sit in silence can watch TV!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/606/A70019840?s_fromedit=1&s_type=15&s_sport=football

Tony Abbott says something right for a change!!

“This is a bad tax,” the Opposition Leader said during a visit to Tasmania.

“We already have a profits-based tax; it’s called company tax. We already have a way of ensuring that the people get value for non-renewable resources; it’s called royalties.

“We don’t need any new taxes, we don’t need any different taxes, we don’t need anything which kills the mining boom.”

NSZombies is great for finding references to deallocated objects (a common crash issue). But it is less useful when trying to debug a crash in autorelease, especially if the object in question is very common.

For that, you can enable malloc logging (in the simulator) and really trace where the object in question was allocated.

As stated in this excellent post, with NSZombieEnabled, MallocStackLogging and MallocStackLoggingNoCompact enabled, you can get the PID of the simulator from your debug console, and then run shell malloc_history from the debugger to get the stack trace.

More great articles:
iPhone Memory Management & Debugging
Debugging Autorelease (not iPhone specific)
More on this topic
not directly related, but a favourite on the topic of objc_msgSend bugs

I’ve been learning more about Android recently. I like what I see. Seems like cool hardware, some cool Apps, and a good philosophy behind the whole thing (open source OS, “democratic” app approval process).

However as far as making money is concerned, I’m really not convinced this is the place to do it.

I’m not sure just how much is being bought and sold on the App store, but there appears to be a really big deficiency. And that is you can only sell your apps to 13 countries. Not only that, but the rate at which countries are added seems very slow (no additional ones in over a year).

Here is a bit of a deal breaker for Australian developers, they cannot legally sell Android Apps.

Compared to Apple, which can sell to many countries. As one person puts it “Apple is running out of map” when trying to find new countries to sell in. They recently launched support for Botswana, amongst others.

There is a big discussion here

Interestingly anyway can view how much money an App has made (as a range). This is public information! And is used as a shit-filter (like Apple failed to do with star-ratings). As a user, that is cool, I’m interested to see what Apps have done well. As a developer this is terrible! It means a rival developer is able to make a very accurate cost-benefit analysis of whether copying my App would be profitable!! Not so good…

My thoughts for now are: Android is a fine place to create a freely distributed app (which you possibly make money off another way, a.l.a drop-box, or via ads), but as for paid-Apps, it seems that Apple is not only king, but it is a much bigger king with heaps more moolah.