The decision reverses an earlier pledge in which it said it would help get Flash working on the gadgets.

Closed tools

In mid-April, Adobe released software  Creative Suite 5 that contained option to export Flash applications into native iPhone applications. Shortly before the release, Apple updated the terms and conditions of the license software developers must sign to create iPhone and iPad applications. The revised terms placed strict restrictions on what developers can use to create these applications and effectively banned them from using 3rd party tools such as Creative Suite 5.

At the time Adobe wrote that it still intended to deliver the feature. Now it has said it will halt development of future export tools for Creative Suite.

“We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5,” wrote Mike Chambers, Adobe’s principal product manager for developer relations, on his blog. “However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.” Mr Chambers also commented on Apple’s revision of its terms and conditions. He wrote: “…as developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at any time.”

Apple responded in a statement to technology news site CNet in which it described Flash as “closed and proprietary”. Apple preferred to support more open standards which replicate everything Flash can do, added the statement.

Mr Chambers wrote that now Adobe will concentrate on Google’s Android smartphone software and ensure that its Flash technology works well with that. “Fortunately,” he wrote, “the iPhone isn’t the only game in town.”

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.

Update: Apple has bowled out Adobe’s effort to get iPhone application development on Flash platform with introduction of new clause in its iPhone SDK 4.0 license agreement which makes developing iPhone application using tools other than from Apple as illegal. Check more details about whats new in iPhone SDK 4.0 and its implications at http://www.macoscoders.com/2010/04/09/new-features-in-iphone-os-4-0/

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/

iPhone OS streams movies and audio using HTTP over EDGE, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks. iPhone OS uses a native application to play back video even when video is embedded in your webpages. Video automatically expands to the size of the screen and rotates when the user changes orientation. The controls automatically hide when they are not in use and appear when the user taps the screen. This is the experience the user expects when viewing all video on iPhone OS.

Safari on iPhone OS supports a variety of rich media, including QuickTime movies. Safari on iPhone OS does not support Flash so don’t bring up JavaScript alerts that ask users to download Flash. Also, don’t use JavaScript movie controls to play back video since iPhone OS supplies its own controls.

Safari on the desktop supports the same audio and video formats as Safari on iPhone OS. However, if you use the audio and video HTML elements on the desktop, you can customize the play back controls. See Safari DOM Extensions Reference for more details on the HTMLMediaElement class.

Follow these guidelines to deliver the best web audio and video experience in Safari on any platform:

• Follow current best practices for embedding movies in webpages as described in “Sizing Movies Appropriately,” “Don’t Let the Bit Rate Stall Your Movie,” and “Using Supported Movie Standards.”
• Use QuickTime Pro to encode H.264/AAC at appropriate sizes and bit rates for EDGE, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks, as described in “Encoding Video for Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE.”
• Use reference movies so that iPhone OS automatically streams the best version of your content for the current network connection, as described in “Creating a Reference Movie.”
• Use poster JPEGs (not poster frames in a movie) to display a preview of your embedded movie in webpages, as described in “Creating a Poster Image for Movies.”
• Make sure the HTTP servers hosting your media files support byte-range requests, as described in “Configuring Your Server.”
• If your site has a custom media player, also provide direct links to the media files. iPhone OS users can follow these links to play those files directly.

Sizing Movies Appropriately

In landscape orientation on iPhone OS, the screen is 480 x 320 pixels. Users can easily switch the view mode between scaled-to-fit (letterboxed) and full-screen (centered and cropped). You should use a size that preserves the aspect ratio of your content and fits within a 480 x 360 rectangle. 480 x 360 is a good choice for 4:3 aspect ratio content and 480 x 270 is a good choice for widescreen content as it keeps the video sharp in full-screen view mode. You can also use 640 x 360 or anamorphic 640 x 480 with pixel aspect ratio tagging for widescreen content.

Don’t Let the Bit Rate Stall Your Movie

When viewing media over the network, the bit rate makes a crucial difference to the playback experience. If the network cannot keep up with the media bit rate, playback stalls. Encode your media for iPhone OS as described in “Encoding Video for Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE” and use a reference movie as described in “Creating a Reference Movie.”

Using Supported Movie Standards

The following compression standards are supported:

• H.264 Baseline Profile Level 3.0 video, up to 640 x 480 at 30 fps. Note that B frames are not supported in the Baseline profile.
• MPEG-4 Part 2 video (Simple Profile)
• AAC-LC audio, up to 48 kHz

Movie files with the extensions .mov, .mp4, .m4v, and .3gp are supported.

Any movies or audio files that can play on iPod play correctly on iPhone.

If you export your movies using QuickTime Pro 7.2, as described in “Encoding Video for Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE,” then you can be sure that they are optimized to play on iPhone OS.

Encoding Video for Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE

Because users may be connected to the Internet via wired or wireless technology, using either Wi-Fi, 3G, or EDGE on iPhone OS, you need to provide alternate media for these different connection speeds. You can use QuickTime Pro, the QuickTime API, or any Apple applications that provide iPhone OS exporters to encode your video for Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE. This section contains specific instructions for exporting video using QuickTime Pro.

Follow these steps to export video using QuickTime Pro 7.2.1 and later:

1. Open your movie using QuickTime Player Pro.
2. Choose File > Export for Web.A dialog appears.
3. Enter the file name prefix, location of your export, and set of versions to export as shown in Figure 8-1.
   Figure 8-1 Export movie panel

   

4. Click Export.QuickTime Player Pro saves these versions of your QuickTime movie, along with a reference movie, poster image, and ReadMe.html file to the specified location. See the ReadMe.html file for instructions on embedding the generated movie in your webpage, including sample HTML.

Creating a Reference Movie

A reference movie contains a list of movie URLs, each of which has a list of tests, as show in Figure 8-2. When opening the reference movie, a playback device or computer chooses one of the movie URLs by finding the last one that passes all its tests. Tests can check the capabilities of the device or computer and the speed of the network connection.

If you use QuickTime Pro 7.2.1 or later to export your movies for iPhone OS, as described in “Encoding Video for Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE,” then you already have a reference movie. Otherwise, you can use the MakeRefMovie tool to create reference movies. You can download the tool from:

• http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/quicktimeintro/tools

Also, refer to the MakeiPhoneRefMovie sample for a command-line tool that creates reference movies.

For more details on reference movies and instructions on how to set them up see “Applications and Examples” in HTML Scripting Guide for QuickTime.

Creating a Poster Image for Movies

The video is not decoded until the user enters movie playback mode. Consequently, when displaying a webpage with video, users may see a gray rectangle with a QuickTime logo until they tap the Play button. Therefore, use a poster JPEG as a preview of your movie. If you use QuickTime Pro 7.2.1 or later to export your movies, as described in “Encoding Video for Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE,” then a poster image is already created for you. Otherwise, follow these instructions to set a poster image.

If you are using the <video> element, specify a poster image by setting the poster attribute as follows:

<video poster="poster.jpg" src="movie.m4v" ...> </video>

If you are using an <embed> HTML element, specify a poster image by setting the image for src, the movie for href, the media MIME type for type, and myself as the target:

<embed src="poster.jpg" href="movie.m4v" type="video/x-m4v" target="myself" scale="1" ...>

Make similar changes if you are using the <object> HTML element or JavaScript to embed movies in your webpage.

On the desktop, this image is displayed until the user clicks, at which time the movie is substituted.

For more information on including QuickTime Movies in webpages, see the tutorial Including QuickTime In A Web Page.

Configuring Your Server

HTTP servers hosting media files for iPhone OS must support byte-range requests, which iPhone OS uses to perform random access in media playback. (Byte-range support is also known as content-range or partial-range support.) Most, but not all, HTTP 1.1 servers already support byte-range requests.

If you are not sure whether your media server supports byte-range requests, you can open the Terminal application in Mac OS X and use the curl command-line tool to download a short segment from a file on the server:

curl --range 0-99 http://example.com/test.mov -o /dev/null

If the tool reports that it downloaded 100 bytes, the media server correctly handled the byte-range request. If it downloads the entire file, you may need to update the media server. For more information on curl, see Mac OS X Man Pages.

Ensure that your HTTP server sends the correct MIME types for the movie filename extensions shown in Table 8-1.

Be aware that iPhone OS supports movies larger than 2 GB. However, some older web servers are not able to serve files this large. Apache 2 supports downloading files larger than 2 GB.

MISC Directory

After moving to iPhone OS 3.0, from past few days i have been experiencing a strange bug. The camera photos, images saved from the web, or iPhone screenshots are not showing up in the Camera Roll. The iPhone’s Camera Roll keeps a correct cumulative count, and I have no problem transferring the images files to my MacBook  using iPhoto or Picasa.

According to iLounge, the bug appears to pertain only to photos with the name IMG_10000 or higher. As a result, iPhone OS 3.0’s built-in Photos application refuses to acknowledge the presence of these images or show them in the Camera Roll. The pictures are indeed still on the device but only that its not shown in the iPhone Camera Roll.

To fix this issue, download ‘PhoneView’ software from

http://ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

Launch the PhoneView application while your iPhone is connected, goto DISK->DCIM directory. There you will see a folder called ‘.MISC’. Delete that directory and then restart your iPhone. This should fix the issue. Let me know if it worked for you.

iPhone 3GS Battery Meter

iPhone 3GS now supports showing the battery charge level as a percentage rather than just the icon indicator.  Percentage indicator is really helpful. Most of the times I plug the charger to my macbook when it starts showing the battery level at less than 3%. And with iPhone I usually end up plugging the charger only when it shuts down completely running out of battery.  The 10% battery remaining warning is too early.

Unfortunately Apple has put this new option only in new iPhone 3GS. Its not available for iPhone 3G or the 1st gen iPhone. Apple is so cruel.

I wonder what big pain would it cause to Apple to include that feature in all iPhone models. Apple acts crazy.

XCode: Could Not Support Development

Today  when I started my work on an iPhone project, my XCode failed to mount my iPhone. The XCode organizer was showing an orange dot next to it instead of the usual green one. Organizer complained “Could Not Support Development”. I tried restarting my XCode, launched iTunes but in vain. iTunes was able to mount my iPhone but XCode simply failed and I was not able to test my app’s on my phone. Finally I restarted my iPhone and tried again. Bingooo..! it started working again. My iPhone was running the latest iPhone OS 3.0 GM developers build. See left for the screenshot of the error message that I got.

Error Starting Executable

Quite a few times in our iPhone application development cycle we would encounter XCode error “Error Starting Executable – No provisioned iPhone OS device is connected.” even when we know the device is connected to the machine.   This error occurs when the connected device is not configured in the XCode->Organizer. Organizer would fail to mount the device as the version of XCode installed on the developer machine may not support the version of iPhone OS installed on the device.

If you select the device in the Organizer, then XCode would list you the supported iPhone OS versions as well as the OS Version of the device. (An organe dot aganist the device in Organizer indicates it has not been mounted properly.)

iPod_Unmounted_In_Organizer

the first feedback would be I am missing all the formatting options that I take for granted on desktop version of wordpress.

- (BOOL)textField: (UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange: (NSRange)range replacementString: (NSString *)string

to set the maximum character length.

This can be done by doing the following:

#define MAX_LENGTH 10

- (BOOL)textField: (UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange: (NSRange)range replacementString: (NSString *)string
{
    if (textField.text.length >= MAX_LENGTH && range.length == 0)
    {
        return NO; 
    }
    else
    {
        return YES;
    }
}

UIView *myView = [[UIView alloc] init];
myView.layer.zPosition = X;

Messed Up Icons With iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5

With the latest release of iPhone OS 3.0 seed 5, the icons of the applications are being messed up. This mostly occurs when we install updates to the applications from App store. Few applications will not have any icons altogether, few apps have icons of their neighbouring apps like shown in the figure. iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 is lot more buggier than beta 4 or beta 3. Also I have observed beta 5 drains the battery very fast. My iPhone lost more than half of its power over night even without performing any tasks while lying idle. Seems Apple has purposefully made beta 5 buggy so that users are forced to move to the final version expected in the WWDC.

On the screenshot we can observe that, PingPongLite application doesnt have icon at all and NewsPro and Bloomberg have same icons.

However on a positive note, if we restart the iPhone, all icons are restored to their original application icons.

Update:

The messed up icons issue has been fixed with the latest iPhone OS 3.0 GM build. Also with the GM build my iPhone runs relatively for a longer duration on a full battery charge than what I used to get with beta 5. (But still I feel 3.0 is consuming too much of battery than 2.2.1)

UIWebview Action Alert

If there is an <a href></a> tag in the html that is being loaded in an UIWebView, then touching that link for few seconds would trigger an alert showing ‘Action’ or the alternate text provided for the link.

If we need to disable it, then we need to set

document.documentElement.style.webkitTouchCallout=”none”;

This can be called in the onload event of the html <body> tag which is being loaded in UIWebview. Put this piece of Javascript before the <body> tag

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<title>Hide Action Alert In UIWebView</title>

<script type="text/javascript">
function OnLoad()
{
   document.documentElement.style.webkitTouchCallout = "none";
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="OnLoad()"/>
</body>
</html>

iPhone OS Active SDK Targets Missing

The iPhone SDK 3.0 is great in offering tons of new features to developers to play with. It irresistable not to install it n use it. But we should be ready to make few sacrifices in using it. Firstly as the release notes says, iPhone OS 3.0 beta installed on iPhone can’t be revereted back to a earlier version of OS. While this was a big issue for people who skipped reading the release notes n were excited to install iPhone OS 3.0 Seed 1. However the later versions of iPhone OS 3.0 Seed 3 and 4 seem to be pretty stable and near production quality expect for few problems like low battery backup. The other major issue I am facing with iPhone SDK 3.0 is not being able to set the Active Target to a earlier version of iPhone OS other than 3.0. XCode silently removes all the other available options from the ‘Active SDK’ list and gives only iPhone OS 3.0. This can be annoying, but we cant blame Apple for this as they have warned this in their release notes. The image on the left shows the behaviour I am talking about.

Remove User Specific Files From XCode Project File

But as the saying ‘Where there is a will, there is way’, we can overcome this by following these steps:-

1. Clean All Targets
2. Close the project
3. Right click on your XCode project file and select ‘Show Package Contents’
4. You will be presented with usually 3 files with two of the files carrying the system user name as shown in the figure. Delete those two files. (Don’t worry, Its safe to remove them.) And open your project again and you should be able to see the old SDK options back in your ‘Active SDK’ list

Active SDK Regained