Entitlements, verification, and the woes of iPhone ad hoc distribution. Seriously.

By tiffani | Published: May 24, 2009

Ad hoc distribution for the iPhone allows you to, in a way, slap that infamous “BETA” tag on your iPhone app for up to 100 people  (see the controversy involving this here, though).  Ad hoc distribution essentially allows you to test your app before it hits the store.  This is immensely helpful and necessary, but ad hoc distribution on the iPhone is fraught with ridiculousness–especially for Windows users.  Wrapping up this last iPhone project (screenshots, soon!) was a hoot after we discovered the client couldn’t install the app on his iPhone.  He was getting the infamous app verification errors.  Clearly, that was a problem.

I ran across all kinds of posts on this issue and solved the problem thanks to this post. Note, however, that somehow the .ipa file still caused the install to fail, so I only went as far as zipping all the necessary files and sending these out for testing. Then, the user would unzip the file, drag the .app folder over to iTunes and ad hoc distribution would be a success on Windows. On the Mac, the process wasn’t so clumsy. Hm.

The issue presented here is worth making a note of, also. Especially:

On OS X that creates a zip file that includes a resource fork, which is extra stuff that’s not needed in this case. When the zip arrives on your tester’s windows laptop that Mac resource fork just looks like a normal folder to Windows, and it can prevent iTunes on Windows from recognizing the folder as an app… leaving your windows tester baffled as to why they can’t just drag and drop the file into iTunes as you instructed them to.

When the process works, it’s great, so I don’t imagine Apple will be doing anything to change it–especially when it involves the Windows folks.  What do I think, though?  Get a Mac! (You should have known that was coming, haha!)

Posted in iPhone | Tagged , , |

Just in Case We Web Folks Weren’t Already Deemed Wacky Enough…

By tiffani | Published: March 18, 2009


Auto Tuning from Casey D on Vimeo.

CSS SS SSSS S SSS …lmao.

Posted in Hilariousness, life, video | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Conferences and Events I Want to Hit Up for 2010.

By tiffani | Published: March 16, 2009

The right conferences are always a bundle of joy to go to. You meet interesting people and hopefully, follow up with them afterward. I’m completely cash-poor for 2009, but with some work that’ll turn around for 2010. Where will I be dumping conference dollars?? Here goes:

  1. RailsConf Anybody that knows me knows how I feel about Rails.  I mean, for crying out loud, I had my chemical engineering roommate checking out Rails and interested in Ruby for a bit.  Rails is a tool for good and I’d like to at least once show up amongst all the other Rails geeks.
  2. RubyConf See #1. Ruby is the business.
  3. SxSW This was a hoot during the last few days on Twitter and a lot of us had to settle for just tweets.  Next year, I want to be in the thick of it all and make a trip out to Austin.  Should be fun. :)
  4. FOWA. This is another biggie.  I like to think that my work with Pencil You In represents interesting and meaningful work within the business software realm.  I don’t think there’s any reason why you can’t pick and choose features and treats from consumer apps to dump into business-focused apps.  Why not have a business app that works as smoothly as Facebook used to? (I say “used to” because, boy, they’ve done a number.  Missing out on that Twitter acquisition was a huge FAIL.  But, that’s another post for another day.)  FOWA is the place to go to see some of this stuff.
  5. TechCocktail DC. I was signed up to go to this one this year, but the trip fell through.  DC has a vibrant startup community and it’d be nice to looped into that considering I went to school up there.
  6. Women 2.0 events. Most of these events listed here will be white-male dominated endeavors.  It’s like folks have said before, that probably won’t change anytime soon.  In any event, Women 2.0 events are for women (obviously) entrepreneurs and provide a great community for women of the techset mindset.  Guys can come only if they bring a female co-founder.  Hehe.

This list represents thousand$ of dollar$ worth of plane fares and hotel costs, but we’ll swing it.  Can’t keep watching from the stands. ;)

Posted in life | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The iPhone Experiment

By tiffani | Published: March 16, 2009

Over the past four or five days, I’ve been tinkering around with the iPhone SDK for the second go ’round.  When it first came out, I and several people from school were enthusiastic about it, but I put on the backburner until graduation.  I tried to put together a horrible little app after graduation, but left it alone after really seeing what a lame idea it was.  Nobody needs anymore Urbanspoons.  Urbanspoon is just fine. lol.

In any event, my friend Patrick sent me some new iPhone stuff to read and again, I tried to wave off having to put an iPhone app together.  Danielle hosted a birthday shindig up in Raleigh last week, though, and I came from that with an app idea.  It’s something very simple and useful.  I’ll drop what it is after it gets accepted/denied from the App Store.

Putting an iPhone app together isn’t terribly difficult afterall, though.  The biggest hurdle was Objective-C–which after years of Java, C++, and whatever other languages I knew at one point or another, really wasn’t a hurdle.  Sure, the language looks a little funny (brackets).  Furthermore, my code is probably structured very badly, but it works. lol.  Here’s what I think about throwing an iPhone app together so far:

  • Learn Objective-C to know what the hell you’re looking at. Sure, you would think that that was a given, but for some reason, I like to rush headlong into things without stacking the building blocks.  I did the same thing with learning Rails and spent two months mindlessly following examples in the Agile book without having learned a thing.  Don’t do this. lmao.  Take the time to acquaint yourself with The Objective-C 2.0 Programming language, a nice guide Apple has provided to make sure you can stomach their code samples.  Objective-C isn’t terribly difficult to learn (especially if you come from an OOP background thanks to C++/Java/etc.) and that guide will give you a nice footing–without scraping your toes.
  • It’s okay to start off doing a throwaway app. You don’t have to have some groundbreaking idea to get started.  Just think of something simple or heck, even do a rehash of something someone’s already built to perhaps get a sense of how they did it.  My app could be a throwaway app, but either way, it got me acquainted with the APIs and that’s the important part.
  • Despite what it looks like, there’s plenty of documentation out there for putting an app together. Yes–even despite the NDA.  The NDA did a damn good job of keeping most things pertaining to actual iPhone code out of Google, but iPhone OS is built on Cocoa (Cocoa Touch, to be more specific).  And there is plenty of Cocoa to go around.  Here’s why I say that:  I had a problem with getting file uploads to work.  Checking out Google for possible examples based on searching for “NSURLConnection iPhone” and other terms left me with very little.  But, if you take things from the OS X/Cocoa standpoint, you’ll get a ton of results back.  Check the Cocoa mailing lists and message boards when you need to do something that isn’t 100% iPhone-specific.
  • It’s fun and consistent. Walking down the street to test your app is a great feeling–one that I never really got as a JavaME/PalmOS developer. lol.  The whole system for putting an iPhone app together is so well-envisioned that I’m surprised more people don’t check into learning how to do at least one app.  The fact that everything is a system is what’s valuable.  I remember my PalmOS developer internship and it was hell because the tools weren’t all that great for putting an app together.  I don’t even need to talk about the horrible idea of putting a JavaME app together.  Device manufacturers couldn’t even agree on using the standard JavaME interface, so you’d have different support for different things from one device to another.  Trying to write a simple backup utility (my effort from October 2006 to January 2008) was a pain.  Non-uniformity was a serious reason why.
  • Interface Builder is the business. Once you figure out how to wire up all the connections between interface elements (outlets), Interface Builder really shows its worth.  IB really speeds development so you can think of something, draw it out (if you want), line up all the bells and whistles in IB, and depending on what you’re doing, have a working app very quickly.  I’ll bet that’s partially responsible for some of the crappy apps we’ve seen in the App Store (remember the $1,000 app that did absolutely nothing??), but it’ll be the spark for a lot of great apps that have yet to hit the scene.

In short, after overcoming the “what the heck is that line for??” stupor, putting an app together isn’t bad at all.  If you can code (and you have a Mac), why not check out putting an iPhone app together?  Just don’t make anything like this.  :P

Posted in iPhone, software, thoughts |

Credit Crisis–Whaaaat?

By tiffani | Published: February 25, 2009

For those who are still confused as hell about what’s happened with the credit crisis, this video is an awesome explanation.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Posted in business | Tagged , |

Pencil You In Runs on Passenger

By tiffani | Published: February 24, 2009

People always talk about how easy Rails makes everything when it comes to writing a web app and yeah, I have to admit, I’ve been fortunate to have chosen Rails to build Pencil You In.  I’d been confused, though, by the myriad of options when it came to deploying a Rails app.  There was nginx, lighttpd, Apache clustered with Mongrel, and some other stuff people had once used, too.

Last night, however, I did a test run of Passenger–the new hottness when it comes to Rails deployment.  I had a couple of issues with permissions and somehow my asset host was fudged from the start (the problem was fixed, but I’m still wondering how Rails knew to pull from where it was pulling images, but anywho…), but otherwise, I was able to go to sleep knowing that when the big day comes, Pencil You In will get off to a rockin’-good start.  I still have a lot to learn about Apache itself and I really *do* want to know how Passenger works, so I’ll be spending increasingly more time reading about the two.  Next thing is to get Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition running on the Solaris box. This could be fun!

Posted in Pencil You In, Ruby, software | Tagged , , , |

All the Pretty Faces…

By tiffani | Published: February 18, 2009

I usually don’t make too much of most Twitter apps unless I’m recommending TweetDeck to somebody (I don’t need yet another way to display my tweets), but I ran across this and thought it was pretty hott.  ’tis a mosaic of all the peeps who follow me.  Most of these folks I follow back.  :)

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Neat, eh?

Posted in life, microbloggery, software, twitter | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

“Up In Da Club” and Proof That LEGOs Trump Clubs Anyday

By tiffani | Published: February 15, 2009

I ran across these thoroughly awesome shorts on Youtube from Wong Fu Productions.  A guy’s been invited to the club by one of his hott co-workers and he doesn’t exactly know what to do.  I’m not much of a clubber (that’s almost deserving of a post but not today), so I totally understand the nervousness that ensues.  I’m not going to spill all the beans, but this is Part 1 of a four part series.  

It’s worth noting, too, that stuff like this really reminds me of why Youtube is brilliant–not every video is a cheesy flick with teen girls dancing to Soulja Boy in their mom’s living room.  People who are really on it with their creativity and cameras have a worldwide audience now and don’t need big studios anymore to produce great stuff.  Between Youtube and iTunes cable TV is a washout for me and has been like that really since college.  Of course, that was somewhat due to the lackluster channel selection on campus, but the web really blew it apart.  

In any event, Youtube has some really good stuff!  It’d do them some good to push that stuff to the top more often.  Here’s my attempt to aid the push.

LEGOs are the business.  You’ll get what I mean soon enough. ;)

Posted in Hilariousness, life, video |

On Setbacks & Epiphanies

By tiffani | Published: February 15, 2009

“Whaaaaat???   (unintelligible mumbling)”

:: sigh and hang up the phone ::

That was all me this week as I learned a few things concerning Pencil You In that normally, I would have considered to be terrible setbacks worthy of ringing somebody up and kvetching for as long as I possibly could. I made a commitment a while back (kind of) to not be such a whiner and a nag, so I decided that, instead of whining about how I didn’t get the funds I *thought* I was going to get in order to do a couple of things for Pencil You In, I’m going to just press on without them. In all honesty, it’s more than likely a blessing in disguise. I may have been moving entirely too fast to try to do what I was going to do with the money anyway.

The big thing for the last few years is getting a startup off the ground with very little money, so I intend to go along with that.  More importantly, I got ahold of a copy of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, a book recommended back in August at BarCamp RDU.  I started skimming through it back in August thanks to Google Books, but I didn’t start reading it officially until 2 or 3 days ago.  Verdict thus far?

It’s good!

The Four Steps to the Epiphany basically lays down the idea that successful startups get out and make sure they really have an audience first.  No facts exist inside the building is the idea.  We’re at the point in the book where Steve Blank, the author, says we should be out talking to customers to find our cadre of earlyvangelists and find customers that are interested in Pencil You In as it stands now.  This Customer Development model, for Blank, is central to a startup’s success.  Indeed, reading this stuff has kept me from, in the last few days, getting on the horn and asking people to rattle off features they want.  That’s just not the way to do it according to Blank.  It makes sense and I felt kinda cheesy doing that anyway. lol. :D

I’ll have more on it later (after I really start to put a bunch of its recommendations to work), but it’s definitely worth picking up.  Working through the first few chapters has already led me to rethink what I’m doing with Pencil You In and how I should definitely be talking to my future customers more.  I gave my beautician back in DC a call to pick his brain, but thanks to this book, I’m definitely not finished.  I’ve got at least 60 more people to give a ring.

…thank God for rollover minutes.

Oh yeah, these slides (PDF) are from the author himself and dig into his Customer Development model.

TAB+.
Posted in Pencil You In, business, life, software, thoughts | Tagged , |

On Bookstores and Quality of Life

By tiffani | Published: February 6, 2009

Can you judge the quality of life you’ll have in a place by the quality of the used bookstores nearby?

I say used bookstores, too, because their inventory is often the product of what folks in the neighboring community have consigned and thus, reflects what they’re into and reading.  A chain bookstore like Barnes & Noble or Booksamillion can pop up anywhere, but a decent used bookstore?  Yeah, sure.

Just a thought.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , |