Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

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I’m a Biggest Winner… winner!

I joined BDHQ's Biggest Winner (BW) program last July. So far I've lost 55 pounds and feel better than I have in over a decade! Bri Westhaver, an ambassador of the BW program interviewed me after the first session ended.

Before (July) and after (September)

BC Health Service Locator app wins Innovation award

Each year, the BC Ministry of Health holds an internal "Celebrating our Successes" event to recognize their accomplishments.

I've just learned the BC Health Service Locator app whose development I led won the Innovation award! The winner of this award is chosen by the Ministry Executive.

I'm proud to have been a part of that project, and also of all of the people at not only the Ministry of Health, but also the Ministry of Labour, Citizens' Services and Open Government that helped make the project such a success.

BC Health Service Locator for iPhone

In spring 2011 I worked for the Ministry of Labour, Citizens' Services, and Open Government to mentor a new iOS developer. Mentoring is something I love to do so I was excited for the opportunity!

The Ministry was working on an iPhone app to help people find health services in BC. The prototype was developed by a Ministry employee, who I mentored. We got down to business right away. We developed the app using the prototype as a guide while I mentored their developer on Xcode, Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, UI design, source code management (GitHub FTW!) and dealing with the complexity of the Apple Developer program. We pair programmed for the first half of the project, and then each worked on features individually but side-by-side. We were pretty much finished by mid-August, with a few bug-fixes and other finishing touches added in September.

The developer I mentored was great... smart, capable, and loved the process. We quickly became friends and I really enjoyed working with him and everyone else involved. It was incredible to see him come up to speed so quickly. We used my open source HLDeferred library, and he had no problem adapting to thinking asynchronously.

While that was happening, the Government was working to get their Apple iOS Developer account registered. That was a challenge since the ultimate leader of the province is Queen Elizabeth II, and she wasn't available to sign paperwork on their behalf. On the App Store, the seller of the app is listed as Her Majesty the Queen in right of the Province of British Columbia! That still makes me giggle.

Legal clearance to submit the app arrived in December and the app went live on January 1st.

The Government officially launched the app in February. Their press release mentions volunteers being used to develop the app. It's true, the developer I mentored wrote the initial version of the app in his own time, and donated a lot more time during the course of the project. The graphic designer (who did an awesome job) and a business analyst also volunteered a lot of personal time and they should be commended for that.

I was disappointed when the Government wouldn't list me in the credits section of the app, wanting to focus attention on the efforts of the Ministry employees who volunteered their time, but I'm mostly over that now. As a self-employed developer, referrals are so important!

I'm happy and proud that the app is out there, being used, and that my Government is so proud of the app and their employees for doing a great job.

Edson becomes an Apple fan

Edson C. Hendricks is the subject of the enhanced ebook iPad app I developed for Agio Studios last fall. I was thrilled to meet Edson at the app launch party, and was honoured to spend so much quality time with him listening to his stories.

Dan and Bruce Batchelor, Edson Hendricks, Jim Roepcke, and Leanne Jones

My understanding is (was) Edson's never owned an Apple product. I know he has very strong opinions on platforms and believes in simplicity because complexity kills quality. So imagine my delight when I saw this email in my Inbox.

Subject: iPadded

Hi All --

Today I did it! I now have a brand new iPad, the biggest one with the 4G LTE (which automatically switches to Wi-Fi if it's available, and back to 4G LTE if not, which is even better than I expected). The rumors about the new iPad being "sold out" are true evidently at only some Apple stores. I also got a (soft) Bluetooth keyboard and case for it.
And, right there at the local Apple Store, they walked me through the setup, but used the opportunity to get me familiar with using the iPad. Wow, what an operation that place is, it's practically beyond belief. It was real crowded there, but the staff were so darned efficient I barely noticed. I believe I can now download from the App Store, and the 4G LTE connection is all set up with Verizon, and the email should work as well. They assured me that if I had any problem I could come back and they'd figure it out. I heard on the radio this morning that Apple is now the most valuable company in the world, and it's easy to see why. I had fun telling the people at the Apple Store that I worked for IBM when it was that, the biggest computer company and the richest company in the world, and they lost it all by effectively betting against the Internet.

And I have the COOL app on my new iPad now, downloaded right there at the Apple Store so I could show it to the folks there. The guy who helped me with it all went into the back to get his manager, who came out to meet me. They were really amazed at both the story, and the look of the app. The manager confirmed that she's never before seen anything quite that good, and she was going to download it herself at the bargain price of $2.99! Good, then they can show it off there at the Apple Store. And they agreed about the story, that it was odd that they also had never heard any clear story about where the Internet actually came from. I assured them that it was all because up to now I had decided just not to talk about it, for good reason, haha! They were just amazed, what fun.

Best regards,
->Ed.H 3/19/12 15:46 PDT

E-mail republished with permission.

Xavier is 10

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of being laid off from Netstruxr, forcing me to leave the US within 10 days.

That makes today Xavier's 10th birthday!

Happy Birthday Xavier!

Income Disparity Illustrated

Xcode 4.0.2 crash on startup

I just had a problem with Xcode 4.0.2 crashing on startup after installation, and thought I'd share the solution. I had just upgraded (in-place) from Xcode 4.0.1. I installed Xcode 4.0.1 in /Developer-4.0, not the default /Developer.

I looked at system logs in Console, they suggested Xcode crashed becaue dyld couldn't find (and thus load) CoreSymbolication.framework.

I figured the ran the uninstall script in Terminal.

sudo /Developer-4.0/Library/uninstall-devtools

After that completed successfully, I trashed the /Developer-4.0 folder (there were some useless leftovers), and re-installed Xcode 4.0.2. It worked!

What is PhoneGap?

I just explained PhoneGap to a client wanting an iPhone app. I thought the explanation was good enough to share. If you're trying to wrap your head around it, I hope this helps...

PhoneGap lets developers use web technologies to develop an iPhone app. Apple has a web browser object developers can use to display HTML content. Usually developers use it to display HTML from a remote web server. What PhoneGap does is let developers create their user interface using HTML in the web browser object instead of the built-in user interface objects (buttons, lists, text fields, etc).

Normally, this would be very limiting, since web browsers can't access most of the services a smartphone provides - what PhoneGap does is "bridge the gap" (hence the name) between the smartphone and the web browser by exposing smartphone services using JavaScript.

For developers that don't have experience with a smartphone's native development tools, using PhoneGap lets them leverage their knowledge of HTML and JavaScript to make an app. PhoneGap also makes it easier to support multiple smartphone platforms because much of the HTML and JavaScript can be reused between platforms which have this web browser object. (iPhone, Android, the newest Blackberry phones, and Palm webOS phones).

To clarify further, the HTML and JavaScript you put into a the web browser object in a PhoneGap app isn't served by a web server over the Internet - it is embedded into the app. That doesn't mean your app is forever limited to what is put into it when it ships - just as they would otherwise, the developer integrates the PhoneGap screens with your remote data sources (typically via JSON web services) - in this case the PhoneGap screens are like templates. If changes to the template are needed, the developer updates them and submits an updated app to the App Store. This is no different than for apps that don't use PhoneGap - any changes to apps must be re-submitted to the App Store before they can appear on people's phones.

Nitro-powered whining

This post is an edited version of a series of tweets in response to all the comments whining about the lack of Nitro in UIWebView and home screen apps, like the ones on this HN story...

As Apple grows, its growing community gives them the benefit of the doubt less and less. I understand why, but at least take the high road. Please stop bitching about Nitro not being available in all of iOS 4.3. These things take time.

Can you imagine the consequences if Apple enabled Nitro in UIWebView and it broke thousands of App Store apps? If you aren't inside Apple you have NO idea what their QA process for this is. Honestly, I think Nitro should be opt-in not opt-out for UIWebView unless Apple can guarantee there are no backward incompatibility bugs.

So MobileSafari is first for Nitro. Apple's eating their own dog food. Hopefully home screen apps and UIWebView come next. I wouldn't be surprised if iOS 4.3.1 or 4.3.2 saw enabled Nitro for home screen web apps. iOS 5.0 is more likely for Nitro'd UIWebView. Apple had to get iOS 4.3 out the door for the iPad 2 launch - there are likely hundreds of radars the engineers wished they could have closed for 4.3 just ran out of time for.

Warming up your car is unnecessary

Yahoo! Autos Canada: Winter driving tips - warming up the car

Good to know, because I've always been too impatient to warm up my car and worried that was bad for it - not so.

Jim Roepcke specializes in development and mentoring for iPhone and Mac OS X / Cocoa, WebObjects, and Python.

Contact Jim for more information.