Apple iPad

Steve Jobs claims it will offer the best browsing experience you can have, like “holding the Internet in your hands.” The iPad appears to be answer to netbooks, but combines the best of all iPhone and earlier Apple products.The aluminium-clad rectangular unit is .5 inches thick, 9.7 inches diagonally, 1.5 pounds in weight, and uses the 1GHz Apple A4 chip and 16 to 64 GB in flash storage. It is WiFi-capable (802.11) and can also be accessed through Bluetooth technology.The device will include e-mail, photos, maps, built-in iTunes store and YouTube functionality.

objc[<pid>]:FREED(id): message release sent to freed object="<memory_address>"

Double Release Of Cocoa Objects

After searching through my code, I couldn’t figure out where I was doubly releasing the object. Googling up, I found an article which helped introduce me to a few really good environment variables I could set that would allow me to identify where I was creating this problem. Here are the environment variables:

• NSZombieEnabled
• MallocStackLogging

With these two environment variables are set to “YES” in your executable’s Arguments tab, you then have the ability to figure out where you’re doubly releasing an object’s memory using in gdb:

shell malloc_history <pid> <memory_address>

(Note: To set these environment variables, double-click the executable in Xcode’s Executable’s group, click the Arguments tab and then add the variables.) And there you have it.)

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions '{ "ORGANIZATIONNAME" = "YourCompanyNameHere" ; }'

Flash CS5: Native iPhone Application Development

The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today. Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple’s App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod touch. Developers can deliver applications built with Flash Platform tooling just like any other iPhone application. This will require the developer to be a member of the iPhone Developer Program and follow the program guidelines. iPhone applications built with Flash Platform tools are compiled into standard, native iPhone executables, just like any other iPhone applicatio. Applications can be built targeting iPhone OS 3.0 and later.

After shipping AIR 1.0, many of developers challenged Adobe to open the runtime up even more by, for example, allowing communication with native processes and providing enhanced networking support. With AIR 2, Adobe’s goal from the outset was to remove limitations in the runtime that prevented developers from building their applications.

Some of the capabilities that are coming in AIR 2 include:

• Native process API
  Beginning with AIR 2, developers will have access to a native process API that will enable applications to invoke and communicate with native applications on the local machine. In order to preserve the cross platform nature of the .air file format, applications that take advantage of the native process API must be deployed as native installers such as .exe and .dmg. The AIR runtime SDK will include support for generating basic native installers.
• Support for detecting mass storage devices
  Now your AIR application can detect when a mass storage device is connected or disconnected. An AIR 2 application can listen for when a user plugs in a Flip video camera or USB Flash drive so that it can, for example, automatically synchronize files to the local system or prompt the user to upload photos to Facebook or videos to YouTube.
• Improved support for accessibility
  Runtime dialogs such as the installer dialogs will be readable by supported screen readers such as JAWS. In addition, it will be possible to build accessible Flash-based applications in AIR leveraging the existing accessibility API’s and features available in the Flash Player and Flex SDK.
• Open document API
  Support for opening a document will be possible from an AIR application. With this API, AIR asks the operating system what the default application is associated with the file. For example, specifying a file path to a PDF file will launch Adobe Reader or a .doc file will open Microsoft Word.
• Improved performance
  Applications that run using AIR 2 will consume less memory and use less CPU than AIR 1.5 without recompiling the application. We will share more information about this when we launch the beta.
• Local microphone access API
  Currently, audio must first pass through a server before it can be saved locally. Using the upcoming AIR 2 local microphone API, it will be possible to record audio locally, which can be important if your application is running in a disconnected mode.
• Multi-touch & gesture support
  AIR 2 will include support for multi-touch (Windows 7) and gestures (Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6).
• Faster, more powerful WebKit
  An updated version of WebKit that includes a faster JavaScript engine and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities will be included inside of AIR 2.
• Improved socket support
  It will now be possible to create local servers and lightweight P2P applications with enhancements to AIR’s socket support.

In the coming weeks leading up to the beta, we will begin sharing more information including videos, articles and blog posts about some of these new capabilities. We are extremely eager to get the public beta into your hands so that we can begin incorporating your feedback.

Adobe expects to ship a beta version of Adobe AIR 2 on Adobe Labs by the end of the year. In the first half of 2010, Adobe expects to ship the final version of AIR 2.

Jazz Concert By Saxony

Jazz in the City!  Saxony Youth Orchestra performed at Chowdiah hall yesterday. The Bangalore School of Music, organized the jazz talent from Germany.The Saxony Youth Jazz Orchestra conducted by Rolf von Nordenskjld showcased their unique sound, combining jazzy notes with big band influences. They played a wide range of German and international tunes arranged especially for this concert.

The organisers say in almost 16 years, more then 300 young talented people playing more than 170 concerts have contributed to the ensemble. They have worked together with internationally recognized musicians, such as Jrgen Friedrich, Marko Lackner, Ansgar Striepens, Milan Svoboda, Al Porcino, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, Eberhard Weise and the singer Uschi Brning.

The conductor for the 2009 India tour is the well-known jazz saxophonist Rolf von Nordenskjld from Berlin.  For the orchestras trip to India he conjured up a unique program that combines traditional big band sounds with contemporary ideas.

Great big band standards including pieces by Bill Holman will be played as well as compositions of the bandleader or pieces out of the repertoire of the famous RIAS Big Band Berlin. As a very special greeting from Germany, the ensemble performed a medley of well-known German folk songs, arranged for big band by Rolf von Nordenskjld.

The most liked performance by the 23-member Saxony Youth Jazz Orchestra was their Jazz version of the ‘Jai Ho’ tune from the ‘Slum DOg Millionaire” movie. I loved it the most.

Overall Jazz was not so exciting but it was a good moment to spend with your loved one It was my first Jazz convert and just few days back I had seen the movie “Wake Up Sid” and in the movie there is one particular scene where Konkana Sen says “Jazz is not cool and she doesn’t like it and its boring”. Probably that had an effect on us and our mind was in a blocked state that Jazz wont be cool. The Saxony team did a good job. All the best to them. (Btw sorry for the poor quality of the snap as it was taken from my mobile while i was sitting so far from the team)

Xcode: Loading Stack Frames

Recently I encountered an new error for the first time in XCode. When my iPhone application under development crashed, instead of showing me the stack trace of where the application crashed, it threw an error “Loading Stack Frames” and was struck there indefinitely.  After researching about this for a while, I came to know my application crashed because of a stack overflow due to a non-terminating recursion in your code, and gdb is now trying to load all the stack frames on the stack . Usually, the stack of a application doesn’t get deeper than 50 frames or so (and that’s already a quite deeply nested stack). My application stack had run into 104708 frames which was quite too high.I finally figured out that the crash was due to an race condition.

The new SDK 3.1.2, which now includes Xcode 3.2.1, is available in versions that are compatible with Leopard and Snow Leopard for iPhone and iPod Touch developers.

The update contains general bug fixes for the SDK and Xcode. Dashcode is reported to now support the creation of Web applications that are optimized for Safari on the iPhone, PC, and Mac.

If you’ve used this new update, please tell us about your experiences with it in the comments.

Titanium Developer Meet, Bangalore

The first Titanium User Group meeting took place in Bangalore on 4th September 2009. The event was organized by Mohammad Khan (The guy in the blue T-Shirt in the snap)and others Of Esberi. The event started at 6:00PM and close to 15 people attended the event. It all began with an introduction to Titanium SDK and how to use the Titanium Developer tool to create applications for both iPhone and Android mobile platform. Since I already had played around using Titanium Developer tool, most of the stuff I heard there about using the tool was already known.

The meet was useful in that I got to learn what are the features and API’s provided by Titanium SDK to write applications for mobile. Some of the code samples shown at the meet were encouraging and I would say the code would be familiar to a person who had already worked on say Adobe Flex. Even for beginners, it’s not so tough to learn it.

There was an application demo by Chinmay, college graduate who had built an application using Titanium Developer tool for both iPhone and Android mobile. The application was basically interacting with a social networking website called brightkite (http://brightkite.com/) The application looked pretty good both in terms of its UI design and functionality. It showcased how users can use the GPS data from iPhone and Android mobiles to interact with BrightKite social networking website. Chinmay also explained us the problems that he faced developing his application and how he over came it to win an honour from Appcelerator. Congrats Chinmay for the award..!

Over all it was a great learning experience and got to meet lots of new people especially Mohammad Khan. Wish to see more of the user group meeting in the coming days.

“Code Strong” with Titanium Developer tool

About Titanium Mobile

You Can Build a Native App for That

With Titanium, you get native access to device features like geo-location, local file system / database, photos, and touch / accelerometer controls. Your apps look great because they use native UI elements, styling, transitions, and they run great because we compile Titanium to native code for peak performance.

At Web Dev Speed

Your friends may talk about ‘provisioning this’ and ‘memory allocation that’ but meanwhile you’ve got 5 apps in the store to their 1. That’s because you’re building in Javascript, HTML, and CSS, so you’re running circles around the competition.

Delivered Across Two Platforms

The last thing you want worry about is cross-platform compatibility. That’s why we give you one platform for developing both iPhone and Android apps. The Titanium framework shares common APIs across devices and provides extensibility for each device’s unique capabilities.

More details at:   http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile/