iOS and Mac developer
I’ve submitted I Can Has Cheezburger 2.0. Here are the changes:
The FastCGI gateway on my server went down earlier today, and as a result the ICHC app stopped working for a while. I moved the feed scraper to a separate user account, so it should be less likely to go down now.
Nginx uses a fixed number of FastCGI sockets (currently 5) for each user running on the server. Certain processes (one of which seems to be the PrMac importer I use at MacMegasite) will cause it to run out of FastCGI connections resulting in a ‘Bad Gateway’ error. By moving the app feed to a separate user, it now has its own set of FastCGI sockets so other processes should be less likely to bring it down.
If you do ‘ps ax’ on a DreamHost VPS shell account, you can see how many FastCGI processes are running:
3927 ? Ss 0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/sampo/.php.sock 3932 ? S 0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/jimi/.php.sock 3933 ? S 0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/newapp/.php.sock 3934 ? S 0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/newapp/.php.sock 3935 ? S 0:01 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/mysites/.php.sock 3936 ? S 0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/newapp/.php.sock 3937 ? S 0:02 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/mysites/.php.sock 3938 ? S 0:00 /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi -b /home/newapp/.php.sock
Pocket Gamer reports that Apple is no longer charging for the 3.x firmware upgrades for iPod Touch. This means that developers can now safely drop support for firmware 2.x and move forward.
I was already planning to make I Can Has Cheezburger 2.0 require firmware 3.x, since Three20 requires it. This makes my decision a lot easier.
With a simple trick you can make a web-based app look and act more native on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
Adding the following tags to your <HEAD> will make your application open in full screen and hide Safari’s toolbars. In addition, if you add it to your home screen, it will appear to open without Safari and no page will be added to Safari.
<meta name="viewport" id="viewport" content="width=device-width,user-scalable=no,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0" /> <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" /> <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black" />
The following tags, which should also be added to <HEAD>, will provide an icon for the home screen and a splash screen to be displayed when it opens.
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://example.com/webclip.png" /> <link rel="apple-touch-startup-image" href="http://example.com/startup.png" />
The first application I’ve seen which uses this trick is Fever.
I finished implementing the last features in I Can Has Cheezburger 2.0 and I’m now looking for beta testers to give it a good workout before I submit it to the app store.
If you’re interested, send me your iPhone or iPod’s UDID through my contact form. You can get the UDID by connecting your iPhone and going to the summary tab in iTunes. Click on ‘Serial number’ and it will change to ‘Identifier (UDID)’. At that point, hit Cmd-C (copy). Although it won’t give any indication, it will copy the identifier as text.
Today I fixed the two major crashes in ICHC 2.0 (one of them, thanks to the server being down). There are only a few remaining things before I submit it, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to take care of them this weekend and submit it next week.
Here are my todo items:
Plus of course more testing.
I also have some features planned for 2.1 which I’ll start as soon as this is submitted, in particular to use the new featured content retrieval API rather than my scraped feed and make sure it’s fully iPad compatible.
Since Classics is now free, I decided to check it out in the app store. I searched for “Classics”, expecting it to be the first thing that would show up. Instead, the application named “Classics” is 6 rows down.
The iPad looks awesome, and of course I want one, but most likely I won’t get an iPad for one reason: it can’t replace either my MacBook or iPhone, so I’d have to travel with three different devices. I would definitely get an iPad rather than a Kindle or Nook, if I did get an eBook reader.
Since the iPad doesn’t have a camera and isn’t usable as a phone, I still need an iPhone. Since it can’t run Mac software I need such as XCode and web development software such as Coda or BBEdit (or MarsEdit, which I’m using now), I’ll still need to use my MacBook.
I did a lot of work on I Can Has Cheezburger this weekend, and I now have it more or less usable, although a few UI features are still missing. I rewrote some of my views to take more advantage of Three20, which dramatically improved the performance.
I reduced the memory usage in the LOL Creator (which was always a problem) by not creating a full-sized preview, but only creating the full-sized image when saving or sending. For the preview, I now create the image only large enough to fit in the view (an iPhone camera shot is 1600×1200, although the screen is only 320×240).
Here’s a sample of how it performs on an iPhone 3GS with a WiFi connection.
I often review UNIEA’s products at MacMegasite, so they will send me a package with some of their newest items. This time they sent me a 10.2″ “U-Sleaf”, which claims to be for a 10″ netbook. The flap makes me think it’s actually designed for a tablet-type device.
