Be aware that the iOS 5 SDK actually ships with a version of protobuf, but it’s a bit old, being version 2003001. And it only ships the binary, not the headers.

To compile protobuf, grab the latest source (which is 2.4.1 at the time of writing this) and run the following script (download script):

After running this, you should have a directory called /tmp/protobuf/arm that is compiled for your iPhone or iPad with the armv7 architecture. Copy that into your project and start using protobuf

Kalenderen viser tydeligt, at julen atter nærmer sig med raske skridt. Vi skriver i dag den 4. søndag i advent og der er nu mindre end en uge til juleaften. Julegaverne er da også indkøbt og juletræet er købt, sat på fod og pyntet, hvorefter Silver har pillet de kugler og julehjerter ned fra træet, som han kunne nå. Som et af billederne viser, er vores juletræ således mest pyntet fra toppen og ned til midt på træt. Men det ser nu også meget sjovt ud med en kat, som kommer rendende med et julehjerte i munden eller bruger en julekugle som bold

Silver er også en flittig gæst på klaveret, når vi spiler julesalmer, ligesom han elsker at sidde i sofaen sammen med os og se julekalender på tv. ”Ludvig og julemanden” har faktisk vist sig at være en overraskende god julekalender, og et par enkelte nostalgiske kig på Nissebanden på Grønland er det da også blevet til…

Den første weekend i december stod også i julehyggens tegn, da Niklas og jeg var på en weekendtur til Lübeck, hvor vi selvfølgelig fik både smagt og købt en del hjem af det berømte Lübecker marcipan. Desuden erfarede vi, at tyskerne er rigtig glade for juledrikke med en del spiritus i, hvilket medførte, at vi måtte vente et par timer ekstra med at køre hjem fra Lübeck om søndagen, da stort set alle de drikkevarer vi fik fat i på julemarkedet om eftermiddagen havde en del alkoholprocenter…

Sidste weekend bød på julefrokost, tangoworkshop, juletræspyntning, familiebesøg og den næsten obligatoriske gåtur til dyreskoven for at fodre dådyrene og kronhjortene med æbler, gulerødder og rugbrød. Desuden gjorde Niklas en god gerning med julehjælp i JCI regi; det er altid godt at kunne hjælpe de familier, som har det hårdt med lidt julevarer her i december.

I denne weekend har vi for alvor påbegyndt julefejringen, da Christinas mor og far, Hanne og Kjeld, havde inviteret os til ”førjul” i deres hyggelige sommerhus på Sjælland sammen med Christinas storebror Rasmus, svigerinde Anne og niecerne Freja og Emma samt vores tilsammen 2 katte og 1 hund. Dejligt at være samlet igen, og fint at kunne sprede julefejringen over flere dage.

Selve juleaften og 1. juledag tilbringer vi sammen med Hanne og Kjeld i Hjerting sammen med vores to katte, Dumbo og Silver. Den 27. december kører vi om morgenen af sted til Norge for at fortsætte julefejringen med Niklas’ familie og venner, som vi også fejrer nytårsaften med inden vi atter sætter kurs mod Danmark den 2. januar.

Det bliver dejligt med en lang juleferie efter et travlt år, der har budt på mange spændende oplevelser både privat og arbejdsmæssigt. På hjemmefronten med huset og vores ferier til Nice, Sardinien, Korsika og Norge samt vores fritidsinteresser, hvor dans fylder meget. Arbejdsmæssigt har Niklas skriftet arbejde, og er nu i Århus et par gange om ugen, mens han i det nye år skal starte en Esbjerg afdeling op for IT-firmaet Trifork. For Christinas vedkommende har det i efteråret og i december stået på omorganisering i kulturafdelingen, og efter adskillige timers oprydning og flytning rundt på næsten alle personers arbejdspladser, bliver det spændende at se hvad det nye år bringer af nye samarbejdsrelationer og opgaver.

Ligeledes bliver det spændende om der kommer sne igen i år til jul eller om regnen og blæsten fortsætter? Om ikke andet kan vi vel håbe på en hvid nytårsfejren i Norge med gode skimuligheder

Uanset om vi får tilført julestemning via sne eller ej, ønsker vi jer alle sammen en rigtig glædelig jul samt et godt og lykkebringende nytår.

På gensyn i det nye år!

Kærlig hilsen

Niklas og Christina

The man-page says this: “ubd is the ubiquity server process. It is primarily used for “Mobile Documents. There are no configuration options to ubd, and users should not run ubd manually.”

First of all, I use GitHub and Beanstalk for source control, depending on what client the work is for (for my own projects, I use GitHub). Mercurial is nice, but git and svn just work with XCode, so I stick to that.

Since I have source control, I can have continuous delivery. For that I use Jenkins. Jenkins is not good enough. It’s not great. It’s not beautiful. It’s not intelligent, easy, friendly, intuitive, or all those other nice words. But it works! I use the Clang Scan-Build, Github OAuth, Github, Pre SCM BuildStep, Redmine, SICCI, SSH Slaves and Xcode integration plugins, even though I’d get most things done by just adding a shell script. That gives me a build per commit, which is nice and reliable and brings the pain forward. Jay pain!

Of course, having this infrastructure in place begs for tests. Now I think tests for iPhone applications suck. Bigtime! The reason is that I hate deployment cycles. It takes time, and that time I’d rather use writing code, thinking about the application, solving real problems for my customer, preferably before he knows about them. If not that, I’d rather drink coffee, do chores in my home, or clean my pipes, rather than waiting for build cycles. It’s just an enormous waste of time. And tests for iOS drain time, as there’s no such thing as a unit test for iOS. Everything is an integration test or a user acceptability test. You always fire up the entire application before running any test.

So now I have that rant done, it’s great that I can leave my tests to Jenkins. It will perform them, and the output will get converted to what looks like a JUnit test so that it can get picked up by Jenkins’ tooling and be presented nicely. Jay!

Then we get to deployment. My clients communicate with me. A lot! This should be different like so, I changed my mind about this, I’ve found a bug if you do like this and that. It’s great! I love my users for this! It creates such a momentum! So how awful wouldn’t it be if I said “I’ll collect everything and give you a beta in three weeks”? Continuous delivery isn’t just delivery to me, it is to the users as well. For this I use HockeyApp. They’re a great bunch and really responsive, and while they just don’t support iOS 5 well enough yet, there is so much good there. My app gets auto-deployed up there and my client sees the new release, hits install and boom! Now he’s running the latest build! Crash reports get sorted by build numbers, and the guys at HockeyApp have told me they’re working at making the crash reports even more awesome! Jay!

So how do I follow up on these things? I have to admit, I’m a cheapskate, so I use Redmine. I would use Basecamp, and I hope to be using it, it’s so awesome, but so far it’s not been worth the extra cost. The day it is, I’ll run and buy it quickly. My problem with Basecamp and Redmine? I just haven’t seen how I’d integrate it with my scrum sprints. Yet. I’m sure they both can, and I hope to learn from people that are wiser than me in this regard.

Finally, after a deployment to the appstore, I use Flurry to keep track of where my users are at, both in version of the app (why don’t they upgrade! This new version is awesome! I need to tell them more about it!) and the OS (really? They’re still on iOS 4?? iOS 5 has been out a month now! Oh well, not everyone is like me). Also, I’ve rolled my own crash reporting that, should I have failed horribly, the users can get in touch with me or the client, with a detailed log of what went wrong.

So, that’s my work setup this far, and I’m quite happy with it. It still needs better scrum integration. It’s still too many pieces that don’t talk sensibly together. But it’s getting better knit together, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Trifork does it, how I can improve based on what they have to teach, and how I can improve the way they’re doing it. It’s going to be great! Those guys are brilliant, and I love working with brilliant people.

Finally, if you’re in the Esbjerg area, working with iOS, get in touch with me. If you’d love to start working with iOS, get in touch with me! There’s an NSCoder Night coming up soon, biweekly I hope.

The way I see Dart, it’s another language for doing client-side web application programming. Luckily, it’s not another Flash or Silverlight with its plethora of languages. It would like to be a part of the browser, but for now it contends itself to being a language that compiles down to JavaScript. That puts it together with CoffeeScript and Objective-J, to name but a few. See a long list here. As you can see from the list, this is nothing new.

The only problem with Dart is that everyone had their hopes up for the perfect language that would contain all their pet features. And of course, the set of preferred combinations is probably as big as the number of developers in the world.

What I find to be one of the strong points of Dart is that it uses the actor model as its concurrency model. I remember it well from my days at uni, thinking it was a model leading to waaay to much overhead. Surely, the Smalltalk guys must be mad! But as time has given us more power, I’ve come to believe that this is a great model, which has lead me to Scala and Akka. Although GCD is very powerful, I find myself looking into using actors in my language of choice, Objective-C, all the time.

So where does Dart go from here? Well, that depends on what kind of backing it has from Google. Google hasn’t been very clear on how well the Dart support is grounded in the organization. But if it gains a good community of libraries and evolves a good community, it could become the preferred way of writing Android apps, letting developers re-use code for their web-app and mobile app. If not, it could become shelved like Go.

Personally, on this front I’ll brush up my ancient JavaScript skills and look more at SproutCore the next couple of weeks, probably along with CoffeeScript. Then in a month or two, if there is any momentum going for Dart, I’ll probably write something where I can exploit Darts actor model and see if we become good friends. 2011 will be interesting still.

iPhone 4S / Canon 5d MKII Side by Side Comparison from Robino Films on Vimeo.