A friend recommended that I try out Live Poker by Zynga this weekend, the game is a really nice implementation of online Texas Hold-Em Poker, complete with friend codes so you can play with friends etc, very nice but not worthy of a blog post in itself.

What is worthy of the post is the business model that they are using, when you search for Liver Poker by Zynga on the iTunes Store this you get 6 hits ranging from free to £35. As far as I can tell you get the same exact game, the price just determines how much (play) money you start with and how much extra you get for free each week.

What a great idea…

I really should have blogged this before now but Scotty is having a final push on ticket sales for the first(?) independent Mac developer conference to happen in the UK.

It boasts a cracking line up of speakers from the UK and abroad but more importantly it is the place to meet a whole load of people doing Mac and iPhone development in the UK.

I will be there so what are you waiting for, sign up now…

Back at BarCamp Leeds many months ago I gave my first iPhone talk and I decided to attempt to write a native iPhone app in 20 minutes. I really wanted to talk about iPhone development but I also wanted to let people know that it is not hard to get started so I really needed to be able to do “New Project” at the start of the session and with the exception of some copy/paste for the XML fetching code to show the end to end process of building a simple app. Anyway the session went pretty well and I have given it a few other places now like NSManchester, GeekUp Liverpool and NWMUG.

Anyway I never posted the source for it as I said I would many times and yesterday @hereinthehive asked for it, so here it is.

Bear in mind this is the result of a 20 minute coding demo primarily designed to demonstrate the absolute basics of a table view application to people who had never been exposed to Objective C or iPhone development so the structure of the application is intentionally simplified and even the default cell optimisation code has been removed to keep the example simple.

With that said, have at it.

Build an iPhone app in 20 minutes – Source Code (This code is released under a MIT license).

Download: iPhone Screen Design Template.

If you have a UIScrollView containing controls which need to respond to swipe/drag touches themselves rather than scroll the container then just set delayContentTouches to NO. Once this is done the default behaviour is then to immediately pass touches into any UIControl contained within the scroll view instead of scrolling.

Luckily, some talented chaps created BGHUDAppKit which solves the problem beautifully with a set of HUD controls that fit perfectly. Even better, they are not drawn with bitmaps but are all put together with NSBezierPath, NSGradient, etc…

Anyway, all of that is really old news now so why am I posting this? Well I ended up browsing the BGHUDAppKit  source today and it occured to me that this is a fantastic resource for learning how to subclass the standard NSControls and how to create an IB plugin. The quality of the code is great and it is well documented and easy to understand.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who contributed to this. Not only is the kit a joy to use but it is an asset to the community in terms of a learning resource.

I don’t claim to be a good web designer but with the help of COLOURlovers and trusty old Helvetica that is what I came up with.

One thing that I ended up thinking way too much about while doing this was how to describe myself these days. I started with something like “Mac, iPhone and Ruby developer” but realistically while I still love Ruby, I am much more interested in developing in Objective C at the moment (not because of the language, but because of the platform) and so I settled with describing myself only as a Mac and iPhone developer, roll on MacRuby so I can put the Ruby back properly!

So one of resolutions that I set for myself in the new year was to sort out daveverwer.com and start blogging again and here I am doing it. Who’da thunk it! I actually set myself several tech resolutions for this year and as an incentive to actually do them I thought I would list them out here:

• Sort out daveverwer.com. This site has been a disgrace for way too long! All it hosted was an old blog that makes me look like I am doing absolutely nothing new or interesting. Now, I can’t promise to do anything interesting but I want to replace it with something that won’t go out of date instantly, just a contact page and a little bit of information about me will do.
• Blog more regularly. The reason I need to do resolution #1 is that I don’t do this and while I can not promise to blog every week I really want to get back into it and I have a few ideas for posts that have come out of the development of Charades.
• Regular User Group meetings. I really want to make sure that NSManchester, GeekUp Chester and NWRUG have really regular monthly meetings this year. Will Jessop has been really helping with the NWRUG recently and there are some great meetings being planned for that already. I need to keep on top of NSManchester and GeekUp Chester though. One meeting per month, regular as clockwork!
• New version of Speakapedia. I am really excited about this, I am just about to seriously start work on the next version of Speakapedia which will hopefully take it from being a niche app focused around turning Wikipedia into podcasts to a much more generic Wikipedia client. This should be released by the spring with a bit of luck.
• New Shiny Development iPhone app. Developing Charades was a ton of fun and I really took to the platform and I am sure the year will bring lots of work developing iPhone apps for other people but I also want to make sure we release another Shiny Development iPhone app at some point this year.

Right, I am going to stop there because I want these things to be achievable! I will revisit this post at the end of the year but until then Happy New Year everyone.