If it had been any other time, the very first of the pale-faced, putrid undead would have stuck out like sore thumbs in polite society and been hastily disposed of by the city’s overfunded and underutilized (and thus rather bored) police force. End of story, as they say. As it was, however, the first victims of the highly-infectious RNA virus that transmogrified otherwise mild-mannered accountants and supermarket checkout clerks into flesh-hungry zombies blended in perfectly with the less ravenous participants in the Fifth Annual Zombie Pub Crawl, providing entertainment for the onlooking crowd as they attacked each other and caused all manner of mischief. Some in the audience even remarked at how real the screams of the other zombies sounded before adding their own to the rising cacophony as the infection spread from flesh to flesh. And that is how it came to be that the zombie horde swelled its ranks as it made its way through the previously-uncannibalistic (and sometimes even sunny) sea-side town of Brighton.

It was October 31st, 2009 and the zombie virus had picked the gay capital of the United Kingdom to make its debut. Not that it mattered. The virus didn’t discriminate.

* * *

Feel free to continue the story in the comments

You may have been wondering why I disappeared off the face of the earth for the past month after announcing that Evolutio – which I thought was going to be my first iPhone app – was going into Alpha.

Here's the reason: I realized that Evolut.io is going to need a good deal more work before it is ready for prime time and I also realized
that I really want to get an app up on the App Store. Thankfully, this coincided with an idea that I thought I could whip up "in a
weekend". So, about a month later, I'm at the point where I'm announcing it before embarking on a very short beta and then submitting it to the App Store (woot!)

The app is called 'avit. Watch a screencast of it in action at http://avitapp.com.

So what does it do?

Well, in a nutshell, if you're subscribed to Safari Books Online, you can scan the barcode from a book and start reading straight away. That is, if they have it (have it, 'av it, get it? Oh, the wit, the intelligence!)

If they don't have it, you can compare prices online (with automatic location detection that sends you to one of the three localized sites that Google Product Search supports in the UK, US, and Germany).

OK, so I'm not going to repeat everything that's in the screencast here. Check out the 'avit screencast here.

I'm going to be talking about lessons learned while developing it, the User Experience considerations, workflow/process etc., at BrightArray this evening (7pm at The Skiff, so come along if you're in Brighton).

I'm also flying to Denmark tomorrow to give a workshop on iPhone dev at Noma (Nordic Multimedia Academy) in Kolding so this is going to be one heckuva busy week!

So there you go, this is going to be my first iPhone app and I'm really excited. I hope you guys like what you see and I can't wait to see it up on the App Store!

• Negative space in logo design | Logo Design Love
  It’s hard to beat a clever use of negative space in logo design. Here are 35 or so logos I enjoy that use white space well, along with the designers and agencies who created them.
  (tags: logo design negative space)

Demoing iPhone apps during presentations is a bitch because Apple hasn't (yet) given us a way to mirror the screen like Steve Jobs does during his keynotes. The alternatives all suck to various degrees: use a camcorder, an Elmo (the projector, not the Muppet), or the iPhone Simulator. The iPhone Simulator is the easiest option and is fine unless you're trying to demo features only found on the device (like GPS, etc.) or make a demo video of your app being used in the field.

Although there isn't an Apple-sanctioned way of mirroring the screen via the Apple A/V cable (apart from for the iPod app), Rob Terrell shared some code a little while back that enables TV Out on a per-app basis based on Erica Sadun's discovery of an unpublished class in the MediaPlayer framework.

Rob's class worked like a charm (and still does, under 3.1), however The Evil Boss took it one step further today by releasing some code that displays touch indicators and rotation changes on the mirrored output. Watch his video, above, and read the full post, iPhone Video Output, for the details and to download the code that you can add to your app to enable this functionality.

Just make sure, however, that you don't accidentally submit your app to the App Store with this code enabled or it will probably mean a quick refusal.

Big thanks to both Rob Terrell and The Evil Boss for making this possible.

(PS. Apple, if you're listening, please, please, please enable the ability to mirror the iPhone's screen for any app in the next release. Just think of how much the quality of the demo videos for apps will improve and how much that will translate to increased sales. Oh, and why did you remove the private openURL:asPanel: method on UIApplication in 3.0? If we still had that we could actually demo apps that launch Safari for some bit of their functionality via this method.)

If you're with GoDaddy, just follow the instructions on Tender. If, however, you're running your own WHM (Web Host Manager)/CPanel setup and managing DNS yourself, read on.

Setting up Tender to use your own domain with WHM is pretty simple:

1. Sign in to WHM and select Edit DNS Zone
2. Choose the web site that you want to add Tender support to and press the Edit button
3. Scroll down to the Add New Entries Below this Line section and in the first empty box, type the subdomain you want to use for Tender (e.g., support)
4. For TTL, enter some value (I use 3600)
5. For Record Type (the "in" bit), choose CNAME from the drop-down list
6. In the Hostname box that appears, type tenderapp.com. (don't forget that trailing dot, it's required).
7. Press the Save button and you're done!

Don't forget to enter the domain you just set up in your Tender admin area under Site Settings → Site Configuration → Custom Domain.

Enjoy!

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSInvocation setArgument:atIndex:]: index (2) out of bounds [-1, 1]'

While using: UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum

I was passing in a selector that didn't take any arguments along the lines of:

UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum([UIImage imageWithData:self.bytes], self, @selector(photoSaved), nil);

Which, if I had read the docs, I would know is wrong, since the function has to conform to the form:

- (void) image: (UIImage *) image didFinishSavingWithError: (NSError *) error contextInfo: (void *) contextInfo;

Not entirely intuitive perhaps (my expectation is that if a method expects a selector, it shouldn't dictate form and otherwise it should use a delegate; but this being a C-style function we don't have that luxury) hence this blog post in case anyone else runs into the cryptic error and is left scratching their heads.

Solution found courtesy of this post in Japanese (yeah, code's universal!)

• ASIHTTPRequest Documentation - All-Seeing Interactive
  ASIHTTPRequest is an easy to use wrapper around the CFNetwork API that makes some of the more tedious aspects of communicating with web servers easier. It is written in Objective-C and works in both Mac OS X and iPhone applications.
  It is suitable performing basic HTTP requests and interacting with REST-based services (GET / POST / PUT / DELETE). The included ASIFormDataRequest subclass makes it easy to submit POST data and files using multipart/form-data.
  (tags: library cocoa http https untrusted ssl)
• There is no hiding the source (and use SSL while you’re at it) « Pwn Home Research
• TippingPoint | DVLabs | Reverse Engineering iPhone AppStore Binaries
  An article demonstrating how to reverse engineer an iPhone app. So, even though it may not be as easy as reverse engineering a SWF, the lesson here is don't hide stuff in your iPhone app (API keys, passwords, etc., thinking that they'll remain private).
  (tags: iphone security)

• Apple rejects Tesco iPhone app - 22 Sep 2009 - Computing
  “Tesco has just taken a big dump on our heads by announcing the creation of an official iPhone app for Tesco,” said one developer, who wrote to Computing on condition of anonymity.

  “I don't know how many other developers were looking at iPhone solutions but I was certainly one of them. Fortunately I had only invested about 20 hours so far in a project I expected to take 400-600 hours, but I think Tesco has sent a clear message to developers that as soon as a market looks like it might have mass appeal they intend to stomp all over the little guys by writing an official app of their own. That is not how to foster creativity with an experimental new API.”

  (tags: apis dangersof open data notreallyopen walledgardens)

To make Git ignore these files, you need to remove them from Git's cache.

An easy way to do this is to go through your .gitignore file and compile a list of the files that match your rules. For example, you can create a simple shell script with the matching file paths. e.g.

find . -name \*.pbxuser -print > git-ignore-these.sh
find . -name \*.mode1v3 -print >> git-ignore-these.sh

Then, simply append git rm --cached to the start of every line:

sed -i 's/.*/git rm --cached &/' git-ignore-these.sh

Now, let's make a little Bash script from this by adding a sha-bang:

sed -i '1s/.*/#!\/bin\/bash \
&/' git-ignore-these.sh

(Note: that's an actual newline in the command.)

Followed by:

chmod +x git-ignore-these.sh

Run it:

./git-ignore-these.sh

And Bob's your closet-cleaner's fourth cousin's third chambermaid's ex-cricket partner's first pet hamster's second owner's godfather.

(Note: if you get fatal: pathspec '...' did not match any files errors, it's just because your .gitignore kicked in for those files and they weren't tracked in the first place.)

If you just want to remove single folder, for example the build folder, you can also do it all in one line thanks to the magic of Unix-style pipes. e.g.,

find build/ -name \* -print | sed -e 's/.*/git rm --cached &/' | sed -e '1s/.*/#!\/bin\/bash \
&/' > git-ignore-this.sh

I wish I had time to write an automated script to take your .gitignore and create the git rm --cached commands from it but it's approaching 1AM, I need sleep, and I gotta work on my app tomorrow morning

• Page rank checker
  (tags: osflash alexa pr pagerank)