Have you tried turning it off and on again?

iPhone dev tip of the day:

If you get some strange error when trying to run something on your iPhone when it normally works – or if your App (or someone elses) is crashing in an unusual way – reboot your device by holding the power switch.

This normally fixes the dev issue – and for the second? It’s probably memory fragmentation – and this fixes that too. Good idea to reboot the device once every few weeks just to clear out the cruft.

Neonscape 1.1.2

Neonscape 1.1.2, a mostly bugfix release, has hit the App Store – grab it while it’s hot.

In this release:

• I have adopted Rhys’ suggestion to improve the Calibration UI, and the high score UIs
• The calibration is more effective (shameful I know… but the previous calibration code had one rather large (yet simple) flaw which rendered the averaging useless).
• Non-latin characters can be submitted to the global leaderboard (congrats to ?? [ed: it seems however that they can't be submitted to WordPress! [ed: ok, fixed, just had to update my database]] 巴士 for the first user to utilise this)
• Anti-cheating methods have been implemented on the global leaderboard

The App is pretty stable now I think. Neonscape 1.2 is in the works which will have a pre-game options screen for the user to tweak the starting speed (amongst other things), and potentially a new graphics theme and new sound. The price will be hiked for the 1.2 release – so grab it while it’s cheap!

Manual iPhone Backup / Extract

Confused about exactly what happens and how regarding the iPhone App data backup?

Firstly, read Apple’s FAQ

To initiate a backup (these are by default automatically done regularly but sometimes you want to do one anyway), right click on the iPhone in iTunes and click “Back Up”

Essentially, the iPhone backups are stored in a compressed SQLLite format on your HDD (on mac, /Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/). So if you want to backup your backups, backup that directory. It’s in your home directory, so Time Machine will normally grab it unless manually excluded.

Now if you’re a developer or just a curious individual, you may want to peek inside those files or extract the data manually. This is quite possible because they are just SQLLite data files. Check out this awesome iPhone backup extraction software for mac. Be sure to send this guy a few bucks as a thank you. You can also do it the old fashioned way with a perl script. I found the perl script however didn’t convert all of my backup.

Actually modifying the data and sticking it back on the iPhone however I don’t believe is possible as it cryptographically signed to protect integrity (which is good for us developers).

Remember as a developer you chose to store files in the users “Documents” or “Cache” directory. Be nice and put anything that doesn’t really matter in the “Cache” directory to save the user’s backup time when syncing with iTunes.

Sharing the Internet to your iPhone from your MacBook (securely)

OK so the iPhone doesn’t use your computers internet when connected via USB. Why? I dunno it’s one of the sadly lacking features on an otherwise awesome device.

Sharing the net however via ad-hoc wifi is easy. In System Preferences, go to “Sharing”, select Internet Sharing (don’t tick it yet), tick ‘Airport’ then tick ‘Internet Sharing’.

After you’re done – go into the Network Settings -> AirPort, and create a new network with a password (to stop those leechers). By default it is shared without a password which is dangerous (unless you’re in the desert or something). This new network should have the sharing on it if you did it right – but go back to the sharing tab and double check that it’s still enabled. Then on your iphone connect to your new ad-hoc network and enter the password.

Update: at least in Snow Leopard there is a button on the Internet Sharing settings named “AirPort Options” which allows you to setup the Wifi password in a better (more permanent) way than the one I described.

Update2: I have had some issues with sharing certain networks in Hotels – the iPhone can connect to my computer, but not the internet. One option is to install the proxy server Squid. This isn’t easy, and unless you are a developer with bash experiance I don’t recommend it (if you know what you are doing though it’s easy – just install the unix build tools, download squid, then ./configure, make and run it… default settings are fine – and just set the proxy IP in the iPhone to be that of your computer)

If you have no Wifi card (e.g. on a PC) then bad luck. If you’re on windows I’ll leave it up to you to figure out I’m sure there’s a way :-)

Fowarding Contact Info (iPhone)

The iPhone really really needs the ability to forward a contact (or part thereof) to someone by SMS (or even email). The ability to forward an SMS might be nice too (or the ability to copy/paste text so as to do it manually, not to mention other things).

The SMS feature is one of the iPhone’s best – chat style display really really works (reviewing old messages is awesome – how did Nokia not think of this?) – but this is sorely lacking, I hate having to pull out a pen and paper just to forward a number.

iPhone Call Divert

The iPhone doesn’t have a nice GUI to set/change Call Diverts (why not?? most people have voicemail right? more on that later perhaps). Here’s how to do it manually (enter into the keypad).

Call Divert – all calls – activate *21*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – all calls – to check *#21#
Call Divert – all calls – to cancel #21#

Call Divert – on busy – to activate *67*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – on busy – to check *#67#
Call Divert – on busy – to cancel #67#

Call Divert – on no reply – to activate *61*(Number to divert to)#
Call Divert – on no reply – to check *#61#
Call Divert – on no reply – to cancel #61#

source, and more codes

Neonscape

Announcing Neonscape – a retro puzzle/arcade game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This is my first foray into iPhone game dev.  I teamed up with my mate Ben Kosmina to create the game with me doing the coding, and him creating the original concept and doing many other aspects like the sound and sprites.  It was great fun to create; learning objective-c, workshopping the idea with Ben to add some cool goals and dangers (watch out for the dreaded über tanks!).

So far sales are a little sluggish – but the Neonscape publicity machine is just cranking into gear so hopefully the press will drive some sales and help pay for my RTW trip ;-)

Grab it on the iPhone store now for only US$1.99 (or your local equivalent).

iPhone Video Mac

Two very useful tools for getting video on an iPhone:

KeepVid – Lets you download iPhone compatiable (and high quality) MP4 files direct from YouTube – just wack the YouTube URL in the box and you’re done. Thanks Pete.

MPEG StreamClip – it’s not often you find a useful and free video tool – but this is one. Drag-drop, convert to MP4 and click “iTunes” for one of the iTunes presets. Pretty straight forward. Mac only.

iPhone dev

I wonder if apple saves all app-store searches and mines that data for ideas on new apps that people want? Would be interesting to see, maybe they should sell it.

Any app/game I make will have to satisfy two goals:
- something I will actually use myself (in the case of an app)
- something I can knock out a proof of concept for in ~8h

I have some ideas – stay tuned.