Accidental Technologist

I think the title is pretty clear.  The annual renewal to the Apple iPhone Developer Program is due and I have decided not to renew.  Why do you ask?  Well for a few reasons:

1. Apple gets enough of my money and I don’t think I want to give them another $99 for the privilege.  If I create an application for the store and it gets approved I am adding value to the iPhone as a platform and I don’t think I should have to pay for it.  What does the $99 actually go towards?  It’s not like there is any overhead for me being a member and downloading the iPhone SDK.  Seems like another way to make a buck for Apple.  No thanks.
2. It’s not open.  I can’t just create an application and give it to my friends.  I am forced through the Apple Store just to have something available for my friends to use.
3. The biggest reason is the noose of control Apple has over the process.  I can take the time and effort to create an application, submit it to the store and under the whim of Apple, it can be rejected, just ask Google.  It is a bad business decision, especially for small companies with limited resources, to take the time to create a piece of software and have Apple reject it.  You have no leg to stand on, you just wasted all that time.

I think Apple needs to change the process they go through to accept or reject applications.  MacRumors reported that Apple was being investigated by the FCC over the rejection of the Google Voice app.  I hope it does some good, maybe there should be no rejection at all and the apps should just get added.  I am behind Google here and hope their rejection brings some changes to Apple and the iPhone Developer Program.  Apple may have made a mistake here picking on an 800-pound Gorilla.  If you or I complain we get the door slammed in our faces from Apple.

Looking at other platforms including Google Android, Palm Pre and Windows Mobile, all of these platforms are open and anyone can create applications an put them on their phones with no begging to do so.  Time to change Apple for the better or I hope other developers move away from them as well.

Update: Interesting case of a developer getting banned from the app store – Apple bans App Store’s 3rd-most prolific developer.

UPDATE: I have been adding new sessions below as they have been posted from Stanford.

My recent journey to learn some iPhone development, like what seems to be half the population of the planet, I came across a great resource for learning.  Many universities are putting their courses on-line and making them free these days and Stanford University is no different, offering a totally free course on iPhone development aptly titled iPhone Application Programming.  The syllabus is available for the 10-week course on the Stanford site as well.

As the time I am writing this there are 13 lectures available to download from the iTunes store:

1. Introduction to Mac OS X and Cocoa Touch : Evan Doll provides an overview for the Stanford Computer Science department course, iPhone Application Programming.
2. Using Objective-C, Foundation Framework : Alan Cannistraro provides an overview of object oriented programming, the objective-C programming language, and common foundation classes.
3. Custom Classes, Memory Management, and ObjC Properties : Evan Doll discusses custom classes, object lifecycles, autorelease, and properties.
4. Interface Builder, Controls, Target-Action : Alan Cannistraro discusses the interface builder, controls, and target-action.
5. Views and Drawing, Animations : Alan Cannistraro covers views, drawing, and animation.
6. View Controller Basics : Evan Doll outlines designing iPhone applications, goes on to discuss the model-view-controller paradigm, and explores view controllers.
7. Navigation Controllers : Evan Doll covers navigation and tab bar controllers.
8. Table Views : Guest lecturer Jason Beaver from the Apple User Interface Kit (UIKit) team covers scroll views and table views.
9. Dealing with Data: User Defaults, SQLite, Web Services : Evan Doll discusses data in your iPhone application.
10. Performance and Threading : Alan Cannistraro covers application performance.
11. Text Input, Presenting Content Modally : Evan Doll covers text input and presenting content modally.
12. Address Book: Putting People in Your App : Alex Aybes discusses interfacing with contacts in the address book.
13. Debugging Tips, Searching, Notifications, KVC/KVO : Alan Cannistraro covers searching and notifications.
14. Touch Events and Multi-Touch : Steve Demeter shares his experience in creating the popular game applications, Trism. Josh Shaffer follows with a overview of touch-events and multi-touch.
15. iPhone Device APIs: Location, Accelerometer & Camera, Battery Life & Power : Justin Santamaria, from the iPhone Software Engineering team, provides an overview of the iPhone device APIs.
16. Audio APIs, Video Playback, Displaying Web Content : The lecture today covered audio, video and web APIs available on the iPhone. We also touched on settings bundles and some additional view transitions.
17. Creating New Expressive Social Mediums on the iPhone : Ge Wang, co-founder of Smule and developer of Ocarina and Leaf Trombone, spoke at length today on metaphors for the iPhone and creating expressive social mediums for the phone.
18. Unit Testing, Localization & More : Evan covered unit testing, how to have some fun (and either impress your friends or crash your app) with Objective-C, localization and some common questions that we’ve been asked

I have gone through several of these and they are really very good.  We are fortunate to have a resource like this without cost. 

A few bonus talks were also included from some folks who already have iPhone applications developed:

• Loren Brichter on Tweetie : Loren Brichter shares his experience in developing Tweetie, the most successful paid social networking application.
• How to Build an iPhone App that Doesn’t Suck! (In 10 Easy Steps) : Steve Marmon discusses the iPhone User Interface guidelines and proposes ten steps for the application development process.
• From Upstart to Startup to Grownup: Lessons Learned in the First Year of an iPhone Company : Jessica Kahn, the Director of Engineering at Tapulous, describes her experience at an iPhone application development company.
• Optimizing OpenGL for iPhone : Tim Omernick from the popular gaming company, ngmoco, provides a broad overview of OpenGL on the iPhone.

All of the materials from the course are available from the class site at Stanford.  This seems like a great resource to anyone starting out in iPhone development and either cannot get the time away.

The recent announcement by the Pragmatic Programmers that they would have their books available in other formats besides PDF piqued my interest because I have a lot of their books in PDF today.  I was particularly encouraged by the iPhone support and wanted to give it a shot.

One of my latest projects it to learn Objective-C and become proficient as an iPhone developer, both for freelance work and some product ideas of my own.  So one book I wanted to try was the iPhone SDK Development book by Bill Dudney, Chris Adamson and Marcel Molina.  This is a great book with so much practical advice for the aspiring iPhone developer.  A word about the book, it does seem to lean toward folks who have had background in C++, C# or Java, which is perfect for me.

Setting Up

Pragmatic is providing three types of downloadable formats now; PDF, epub (iPhone) and mobi (Kindle).  Getting setup to read documents on the iPhone is pretty simple.

1. The first thing to do is to install Stanza, the free ebook reader,  on the iPhone from the Apple App Store.
2. Browse to the Pragmatic Programmers site from the iPhone and login to your account.
3. Download the ebook you want from the site.
4. Run Stanza on the iPhone and it will pick up the newly downloaded book. 
5. Done.

Viewing the Results

Stanza loads up and lets you use gestures to move through the book, selecting the Table of Contents lets you choose which chapter to view.  Going from page-to-page is easy too with just a flick across the iPhone screen.  I was really amazed how good the quality of the text is:

You can see the nice crisp letters on the white background are easy on the eyes.  Images also show very well:

One area I was concerned about was view code. As you can see, code looks good too:

Granted, the need to scroll may be annoying to some but it is acceptable to me.  The main goal for me it to actually read the text and not really focus on the code.  I don?t know how this would be with pages of complex Objective-C here but time will tell.

I am curious what type of battery life I will get with reading for long periods of time or how the reading experience will be over long periods either.  I guess I need a chance to use it for a while.

One nice thing about Stanza is they have over 100,000 books and periodicals available.  Sure, it is not a Kindle but the iPhone is already paid.

It always seems that when I have an idea, a to-do or something I would like to write down, I am in the car driving.  Maybe this is my creative time where I am not writing software, working on an article or something else that needs my full attention.  Sure, I should be paying attention when I am driving, I am, but my mind seems to come up with thoughts I need to make a note of and I can?t.  Until now actually, with the introduction of iRecorder for the iPhone by SimpleTouch Software.

This little utility has a nice, simple user interface with allows me to just press Record button, say what I have to say and then press Stop. 

I was introduced to this utility from Bob Walsh over at the 47hats blog.  He started using this tool as well with similar.

I have just started working with iRecorder but so far it is awesome.  I really like the ability to sync with my laptop over WIFI, which allows me to get my recordings saved and edited as I want.