Dynamic Typo

Git & Titanium Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 19:33:00 +0000

Up until recently most of my SCM experience has been around SVN and the Microsoft tooling. After jumping into the Titanium eco system I quickly found git was the best way to manage these projects.

Below are two tips I found helpful in reducing my commit noise and better managing my repos.

I also recommend checking out a great wiki article on Spheriki called "Git for the lazy". It is a fast way to get started.

Ignore Build Directories

By adding a .gitignore file into the root of your /[project]/build directory you can avoid having git track the files that Titanium auto generates. You should be versioning your apk and .app files that you send to your testers, but I found that I do so many compiles it is best to have a separate process for this.

Creating your .gitignore file:

Open terminal and go to your project’s build directory. It should be something like [Your Workspace]/[Your Project Name]/build
In terminal type nano .gitignore
The nano edit will open in your terminal session
Add the tmp, android/, and iphone/ entries you see below
Press Control + X to exit
Press Y to save your changes
Press return to finish

           tmp
android/
iphone/

        

view raw .gitignore This Gist brought to you by GitHub.

Tell git to globally ignore .DS_Store files

Another pet peeve of mine is around .DS_Store files. To globally ignore them just open a terminal window and type the below.

          git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

echo .DS_Store >> ~/.gitignore

view raw gistfile1.sh This Gist brought to you by GitHub.

Appcelerator DevLink Blog Buttons

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:39:00 +0000

One of my favorite topics lately has been Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile product. A great and extremely active community has developed around their open source products.

They have Q&A forum similar to stackoverflow so when I was re-theming my blog I wanted to add a button for my Appcelerator’s DevLink profile. If you’d like to do the same below are some icons you can use and steps to get your DevLink setup and find your profile url.

Badge Icons


48 x 48	32 x 32

*Please download instead of linking to the above, the icon locations change every once & awhile.

Getting Your DevLink Profile Url

Go to developer.appcelerator.com
Login and the press the DevLink button
If you haven’t setup your account there is a “Get Started” button at the top of the page that will guide you through the process
Once you have your account setup just find your name in the list and click
This will bring up your profile in a dialog, press the View full profile option at the top and copy that Url. This is the direct link to your profile.

Updated:

Tony Guntharp from Appcelerator provided some official icons that look much better.

Titanium Time Helpers

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:08:00 +0000

For a recent project of mine I have to present different picker controls to the user based on their device time settings. Unfortunately I couldn’t leverage the standard picker control since I need to present the user with only the hour picker instead of the full time picker.

Below is a function that will return a bool indicating if the user’s device settings are configured to AM/PM or to display 24 hour time.

 1 function deviceTimeIs24(){
 2   //Get Time Formatted value and remove the separator
 3   var temp = String.formatTime(new Date())
 4                               .replace(':','')
 5                               .replace(/^\s\s*/, '')
 6                               .replace(/\s\s*$/, '');
 7 
 8   /*If not in 24 hour format the temp value 
 9     will not be a number for example 641PM.
10     If is in 24 hour format it will be all numbers */
11   return !isNaN(parseFloat(temp)) && isFinite(temp);
12 };

Dropping Oracle AQ Table

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:50:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been working on a project that uses Oracle AQ. A procedure call that I’ve found extremely helpful is EXECUTE DBMS_AQADM.DROP_QUEUE_TABLE. This allows you to drop your AQ tables. We use this are part of our build/rebuild scripts when testing.

EXECUTE DBMS_AQADM.DROP_QUEUE_TABLE (queue_table => 'SCOTT.MY_QTABLE', force =>TRUE);

* Just replace 'SCOTT.MY_QTABLE' with your schema and table information.

We also use the below script to reset of build environment.

1 SELECT 'EXECUTE DBMS_AQADM.DROP_QUEUE_TABLE (QUEUE_TABLE => '''||OWNER||'.'||QUEUE_TABLE||''', FORCE =>TRUE);'
2 FROM SYS.ALL_QUEUE_TABLES
3 WHERE OWNER NOT IN ('SYS','SYSTEM')
4 AND OWNER = USER;

JavaScript Julian Day Conversions

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 20:06:00 +0000

Below are some useful JavaScript prototypes to handle Julian Day conversions.

Converting Date to Julian Day

1 Date.prototype.Date2Julian = function() {
2 return Math.floor((this / 86400000) - 
3 (this.getTimezoneOffset()/1440) + 2440587.5);
4 };

Converting Julian Day to Date Object

 1 Number.prototype.Julian2Date = function() {
 2 
 3       var X = parseFloat(this)+0.5;
 4       var Z = Math.floor(X); //Get day without time
 5       var F = X - Z; //Get time
 6       var Y = Math.floor((Z-1867216.25)/36524.25);
 7       var A = Z+1+Y-Math.floor(Y/4);
 8       var B = A+1524;
 9       var C = Math.floor((B-122.1)/365.25);
10       var D = Math.floor(365.25*C);
11       var G = Math.floor((B-D)/30.6001);
12       //must get number less than or equal to 12)
13       var month = (G<13.5) ? (G-1) : (G-13);
14       //if Month is January or February, or the rest of year
15       var year = (month<2.5) ? (C-4715) : (C-4716);
16       month -= 1; //Handle JavaScript month format
17       var UT = B-D-Math.floor(30.6001*G)+F;
18       var day = Math.floor(UT);
19       //Determine time
20       UT -= Math.floor(UT);
21       UT *= 24;
22       var hour = Math.floor(UT);
23       UT -= Math.floor(UT);
24       UT *= 60;
25       var minute = Math.floor(UT);
26       UT -= Math.floor(UT);
27       UT *= 60;
28       var second = Math.round(UT);
29 
30    return new Date(Date.UTC(year, month, day, hour, minute, second));
31 };

William Jefferys has an excellent write-up on Julian days here.

Titanium Working With App Icons

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:15:00 +0000

Titanium is a great tool for developing across mobile platforms. The below shows how add custom device icons and artwork for the Android and iPhone.

Titanium Project layout

After you create a new Titanium Project, you will have a directory structure similar to the below. The Resources folder is the “root” folder for your application. The android and iphone folders allow you to add platform specific functionality.

Titanium Project Application Icon

Titanium Mobile will generate device icons for you using the Application Icon you define under your project properties, shown below. This is the first step in working with your device icons on both the iOS and Android platforms.

Working with Android Icons

By updating files in the android directory you can provide Android specific project features such as icons, splash screen, images, and even code files. In the below example updating the appicon and Default image files allows you to customize the device icon and splash screen for the Android platform.

Working with iPhone Icons

By updating files in the iphone directory you can provide Android specific project features such as icons, splash screen, images, and even code files. In the below example updating the appicon and Default image files allows you to customize the device icon and splash screen for the iOS platform. Also by adding a 512 x 512 copy of your icon named iTunesArtwork Titanium will add your icon into iTunes.

Useful Titanium Mobile TableView Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 03:17:00 +0000

I’ve been using Titanium Mobile for awhile now.I highly recommend giving it a try if you haven’t already. You can learn more at the Appcelerator developer center.

Since most mobile UI’s use some form of a TableView I thought I’d share a few tips for working with Titanium’s implementation of this control.

Getting Row Count

If you allow your user to delete rows in your TableView control it is often helpful to know how many rows are left. To avoid querying the database on each delete, you can simply get the length of the TableView section, such as tableView.data[0].rows.length in the below sample.

Updating A Row With Child Controls

Titanium offers a rich TableView API that allows you to use almost any control within a row. This provides the flexibility to create some pretty amazing UIs but, can provide a change when you need to update one of the controls within the row. Below is an example how of you can use application events to update a row with controls from another window.

You can download the sample project here.

To learn more about the TableView control from Appcelerator’s documentation available here.

iPhone Transportation Toolbar Icon

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 01:14:00 +0000

While building a recent iPhone application I ran into the need for a “Ground Transportation” toolbar icon. I thought this might be useful to others building similar applications so wanted to share.

Since my application was using dark colors the icon itself is white. If you need to change this, I’ve attached the source Photoshop file.

Ground Transportation Icon by Benjamin Bahrenburg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at bahrenburgs.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at bahrenburgs.com.

iPhone Start-up Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:35:00 +0000

Thinking about creating your own business around the iPhone? Already boot-strapping and looking to hear how other’s are doing it?

There are some great blogs and podcasts that have information on that topic.

Mobile Orchard	Blog	Podcast
Uproar	Blog	Podcast
Mobile App Mastery	Blog	Podcast

Startups.com		StackExchange
Y Combinator		Blog
The Micropreneur Academy		Website

Another good resource is .NET Rocks show #522 with Rob Walling and Mike Taber from The Micropreneur Academy discussing boot strapping and starting your own business.

Reducing the size of Titanium Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Tue, 11 May 2010 03:37:00 +0000

Titanium Mobile is a great platform that allows you to leverage JavaScript and other web technologies to build iPhone, Android, and soon Blackberry applications.

All applications are compiled to native ( XCode and Objective-C or Java ) applications. This build process can create 300MB+ files that are only needed during compile time. If disk space is something that is in short supply you can remove a few of the files to make life easier.

In your Titanium project under the build/iphone/Resources folder you can remove the libTiCore.a and libTitanium.a files. This will save you over 200MB of space without causing issues with your Titanium project. It is important to note that these files will be re-generated the next time you compile your application.

I exclude this directory from git and delete the contents when storing on the network or sending my project to another developer.

iHelpTranslate Now Available

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sun, 02 May 2010 17:49:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce iHelpTranslate is now available in the Apple App Store. Although my second app to be released iHelpTranslate was mobile development starting point. Having friends from all different parts of the world I’ve been using this app over the last few months to help me better communicate.

Hopefully you file this translation utility useful. If you have any comments, questions, or would like any enhancements please send them in, I’d love to hear from you.

To learn more about iHelpTranslate check out the information site at AppWorkbench.com/iHelpTranslate

Stick Man Rage

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:32:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that Stick Man Rage my first iPhone app is now available in the Apple App Store.

Stick Man Rage is a very basic punching game where you punch a Stick Man or an image from your gallery or camera.

To learn more about Stick Man Rage check out the information site at AppWorkbench.com/StickManRage

This has been a great learning experience for me. Thank you for all of the feedback and ideas. I’ve already begun incorporating the suggested elements into my next game.

If you are interested in checking out this game click on the iTunes link below.

Why Are Female Cartoons Hard To Draw?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:46:00 +0000

Not really sure I have the answer to why they are so hard to draw. After all I’m just getting shared with form of expression and like the “block” or “Lego” character look.

After creating a few more abstract characters I figured I’d try to create a simple cartoon female. It is actually pretty hard using simple shapes to create something that wouldn’t be purely insulting to any woman. I guess there is something about having a body of a box that doesn’t sit well.

I’ve always thought the reason that many female cartoon characters where over the top was due to their mainly male creators. But after trying create a politically correct cartoon woman it ends up not having any feminine features. Maybe that is why Barbie is oddly proportioned as she does.

In the spirit of sharing please find below the Photoshop template. Feel free to modify to meet your needs. Any link backs or comments would be appreciated.

Just Some Cartoon Guy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:52:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been spending a great deal of time in Photoshop creating assets for my mobile games.

As more of a developer then a design I was grateful to see there are hundreds of tutorials and samples online. Though I’m still all thumbs they’ve helped me get started.

In the spirit of helping each other out I’ve posted this sample cartoon guy and the Photoshop template used to create him.

Feel free to modify to meet your needs. Any link backs or comments would be appreciated.

Cookie Cutter Apps

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:43:00 +0000

Apple recently started rejecting “Cookie Cutter Apps”. I’m left wondering what was the reason for this policy? Maybe Apple had seen one to many Duck Apps and decided to start pushing back.

Although I could not agree more that you need to create an engaging application that provides some kind of value proposition I’m left wondering what this means for the brochure or business card applications.

Does this change the ongoing debate that your business needs to have an iPhone App in much the same way that you need to have a website. This was even a CES panel discussion topic last year.

The rule of thumb that I’ve been using is to leverage whatever platform you are building on. Even if you are developing a better iPhone flashlight try to use some of the features that make an iPhone an iPhone. Such as touch enable a few things, use some advanced scrollview tricks, or how using CoreAnimation to add that extra pop.

At the end of the day, no matter if you are building a brochure app or the next big iPhone game you need to engage your users and leave a memorable ( in a good way ) impression.

Using PositionApp To Help Make Sense Of It All

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:45:00 +0000

Got the next great iPhone App Idea? Maybe you’re working on one or lucky enough to have made it to the App Store already. Either way, how do you track where the market is going?

I’ve been using the magic eight ball approach hitting the web trying to read as many reviews and rates as I could.

Thank you MobileCrunch for your article on PositionApp. This iPhone App aggregates all of the trend data for you and displays it back by country, category, and position. You can even add favorites so you can watch what your app is doing. The graphics are pretty outstanding for this kind of app.

Best part, it is free for a limited time. Not sure what the limited time is so get it while you can.

My only complaint is I wish this was available as a desktop application. It is nice that I can view it on my iPhone anywhere, but if you are doing market research the 320 x 480 screen is alittle small. Or maybe this is just another excuse to get an iPad.

You can download PositionApp from iTunes here [iTunes Link]

Need Inspiration? Read The 4 Hour Workweek.

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:51:00 +0000

Need some inspiration? Give “The Four Hour Workweek” a read. This is required reading for anyone looking create a start-up or change what or how they approach life.

Tim Ferriss has an interesting take on how to focus on what's important in your life and offers techniques to be more effective. In his book, The 4 Hour Workweek, he outlines his life strategy and discusses his success and failures.

This is a great book, I highly recommend that you get the book or audio book. You can read a few sample chapters on his blog here.

He also was invited to speak at TED and has a great talk about how to “Smash fear, learn anything”.

Removing Expired Provision Profiles

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:27:00 +0000

Over the last few days I’ve been getting alerts on my iPhone that my provisioning profiles are about to expire. Being new to the iPhone development process, I missed the fact that Development Provisioning Profiles expire after four months. After updating my profiles I was surprised to see that I kept getting warnings. It seemed now that I had both the new and expiring profiles being synched each time I connected my iPhone to iTunes.

Once the older Development Provisioning Profiles expired my applications stopped working. I found the below steps worked to correct the issue:

Delete the applications from your iPhone
Remove the Development Provisioning Profiles that are expiring from your iPhone. This can be found under Settings –> General –> Profiles.
Remove your applications from iTunes
Remove old Provisioning Profiles under ~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisiong Profiles ( Finder window shown below )
Generate new Provisioning Profiles through Apple’s iPhone Developer Program Portal
Install your new Provisioning Profiles into XCode. The “How To” tab under the Provisioning link in the iPhone Developer Program Portal provides a step by step tutorial on how to do this.
Re-build your application and follow the your standard process for publishing your application to your device.

How To Fix A BlackBerry Calendar Sync Error

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:42:00 +0000

I like seemingly everyone in Corporate America has a BlackBerry. It is a great device for email, but using it for anything else can be painful. A recent example of this would be every time I Sync my calendar, I would get a helpful runtime error that force closes BlackBerry Desktop Manager. The runtime error offered no hint that the underlying issue was corruption in the device’s calendar database.

This can be easily fixed using the below steps:

Open BlackBerry Desktop Manager
Open the Synchronize menu
Once in the Synchronize menu uncheck the Synchronize automatically option
Go back to the Main Menu
Connect your device
Once your device is connected click on the Backup and Restore menu
Then select the Advance Option
Upon clicking on the Advanced option all of your device’s databases will be loaded
Select your calendar databases as shown below.
Then press the Clear button. You will be prompted if you want to clear the databases from your device. Press Yes. This will reset your Calendar Databases on your device. The calendar you are synchronizing will not be impacted.
After you’ve cleared your device’s Calendar databases you should now be able to synchronize without issue.

More Than Words, Fonts

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:56:00 +0000

Remember the old saying “it is just as important how you say something is as important as what was said”?

This truth also applies to application development. Just one quick glance at your desktop to see the different fonts used in the icons alone.

Microsoft’s office suite and even Photoshop are good examples of the branding power fonts can provide.

Like any other design element fonts provides you application with a voice helping your application stand out from the countless others on the web or in the App Store.

A few helpful Font Links:

* Be advised fonts like graphics and sound have their own license agreements.

iPad Photoshop Templates

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:08:00 +0000

Although the iPad wont be available for a few weeks that hasn’t stopped designers and developers from releasing the first few tools to create wireframes and icons.

Here are a few I’ve seen so far:

These coupled with the 3.2 SDK provides a great starting point for iPad development. Now we just need to wait to see if iPad apps look and perform on the actual hardware.

iPad’s Not Out Yet But You Can Design For It

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:15:00 +0000

It has only been a few days since Apple announced the iPad and there is already a GUI design template available. All I can say is Geoff Teehan works fast, the device hasn’t even shipped yet.

Please visit his blog entry to download the template and all about it.

http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2010/02/01/ipad-gui-psd/

Do I really Need An iPhone App?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:24:00 +0000

I’ve been asked this question a few times lately and no one likes to hear the answer, “It Depends”. This question reminds me of the “Do I Need A Website” question that everyone asked in 1999-2000.

Leander Kahney on Cult of Mac had a great article about a similar conversation at CES called “CES: Companies Must Have An iPhone App or They Don’t Exist”. The article is great and the comments are even better.

You first need to focus on what experience you are looking to provide to your customers. After you’ve decided on your purpose and how you want to present this to the user, then you should select your medium. You also need to ask yourself if you are ready to own a software product. Unlike a website you need to worry about versioning, piracy, installation problems, etc.

My recommendations 80% of the time is to focus on optimizing your website for mobile browsing. This approach allows you to target all of the popular mobile devices (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc) without having to build an application for each platform. CSSiPhone.com shows some excellent examples of websites optimized for the iPhone and other mobile devices. With frameworks like iUI and jQTouch you can style your site to mimic native applications using only CSS and JavaScript.

There are several frameworks and articles listed below help get you started.

If you feel you need an app anyway but don’t want to invest in developing and maintaining a software product there are tools/services that help you convert your website into an iPhone app quickly and cheaply. Although I’m not a fan of this approach, it allows you to publish content to a mobile device without any real development concerns. When using these tools/services I would caution that you read their features closely. They almost always provide less functionality then any of the existing apps you are looking to mimic.

Below is a list of a few services that help with this conversion.

Sound, When Words & Images Are Not Enough

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 15:50:00 +0000

One of the joys and challenges of designing mobile applications is using the multimedia features of the device to provide cues on how to use your program. The iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre all provide advanced graphic, video, and audio support.

We all know our applications need to look got to even get downloaded. But, let’s not forget the proper use of sound can be just as important as your visual cues. If you are building a game I would doubly stress the important of sound. If you’ve ever played Mike Tyson’s Punch Out as a kid you most likely can’t remember many of the characters but you can remember the crowd roar and the bell ring.

Apple has made effective use of sound in many of their applications. For those of us who use the iPhone delay the most common example is the sound played letting you know your mail has been sent.

A few resources to get you started:

Before purchasing any media resources carefully review the licensing options. If they are not 100% clear for your situation I highly recommend contacting the vendor for permission and/or details.

Visual Studio 2010 Launch Date

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bahrenburg) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:23:00 +0000

In a recent post Rob Caron just announced that .Net 4 and Visual Studio 2010 will be shipping on April 12, 2010.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft has been able to address the performance issues found in the earlier betas. Visual Studio 2008 sets the bar pretty high, it will be exciting to see if they can raise expectations again.