CallContext

I’ve been using a combination of The Gimp and Inkscape to handle my artwork needs of recent. As I’m running them in OS X, they need to use the X11 environment. One of the annoyances I have been having with the Gimp is every window has needed an extra click just to focus it.

It turns out the fix is not difficult. I initially thought it might involve turning on the “focus follows mouse” option, but instead it was this:

So if you’re using an X11 application and find yourself dealing with weird focus issues, try turning on “Click-through Inactive Windows”. It did the trick for me.

There was an interesting argument I was a witness to a few days ago. The basic premise was, a developer was complaining about the lack of thought that went into a particular area of a particular piece of software.

He was right. The most basic amount of thought had been put into it, and the thought that had been put into it was wrong. It was causing him some distress (shall we say…) and the conversation was getting quite heated. Continue reading →

Wow. I mean, I realise the whole point of putting something in the app store is to get it into other people’s hands, but wow. After finally getting the contracts sorted out (still a GST issue, but that’s a simple thing), LiveTrax Pro went live.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think (and really, I still don’t think) that there’s any kind of huge market for LiveTrax Pro. The “back-of-a-napkin” math went something like this. X million iPads sold (let’s say 10 – I know it’s more, but humour me…). Number of performers who own iPads would be X percent of that (let’s say 5% – 500k…). X percent of those would consider using their iPad live (let’s say 5% again – 25k…). Standard conversion rates for app sales are somewhere around 1%, so that leaves 250 people who may buy my app. But that’s not why I wrote it. Continue reading →

It appears I have been granted access to that exclusive club, the App Store. Today I received the fantastic news that LiveTrax Pro has been approved for sale!

Unfortunately, right now you won’t be able view it as I am still waiting on an ABN number before my contract is complete. If you think waiting for app approval from Apple can take a long time, trying getting something out of the Australian government…

Anyway,  good news for now. Time to fix up the websites while I’m waiting for my mark of the beast…

In the interests of providing some impetus for myself, I thought I’d detail a few ideas of the posts I want to write. Some of them I’ve been wanting to write for a while, others are new ideas that have come about from my recent journey to the “other side” (read: Apple).

Writing like this is quite new for me, and I know that I’ll be more focused if I put myself under a little bit of pressure by detailing what I’m thinking about. As I write them, I’ll try and update the list to link to the specific articles. Continue reading →

After a little bit of mucking about, I’ve finally submitted my first application to the Apple App Store. (Hence the lack of posting for a few days…) I have to say, the process seems a little convoluted, but that’s most likely because of the need to grab a certificate to sign the code.

Now, in fairness to Apple, I did recently upgrade to XCode 4.0, which means that the instructions detailed in the iTunes Connect site weren’t aimed at me. It took me a little bit of mucking about to find some of the things that need to be found, and I’m pretty sure I’ve still not got the actual distribution build settings quite right. XCode 4.0 has some pretty cool features around build configuration that aren’t clear to me yet.

Anyway, now the long wait begins. They say their typical turn-around is about two weeks. All things considered, I’m expecting a fairly quick response and a rejection seeing as it’s my first submission. Let’s see how that pans out.

Sometimes, no matter how well intended, things just go right. I had planned, and indeed started writing, a post describing in great detail the steps I was going through in order to debug the memory leak I had in LiveTrax Pro.

Anyway, as my luck would have it, the leaks have mysteriously disappeared. I hate this. It’s relieving, as the circumstances surrounding the leaks were confusing and non-sensical, but they were leaks and they needed fixing. As the old adage goes: if you don’t know why it’s working, then it isn’t working.

Anyway, seeing as I’m still learning about leak tracking using Instruments and XCode, I’m going to come up with a contrived project to demonstrate the process. Stay tuned.

I’ve just finished installing it. Unfortunately, when you sign up for the Apple developer program, you also submit to an NDA. So I can’t actually say anything about it. By “say”, I’m assuming English words, seeing as it’s my native tongue. Let me just type: mmmmmm mmmmmm. Oh, and I’m doing a little happy dance.

Well, LiveTrax Pro was used in anger for the first time last night with the Australian Kylie Show, and it performed flawlessly. Stress levels were down on previous shows, and everyone found it easier to know what was going on.

On the plus side, a real-world shake down of the app turned up something I didn’t think about originally. LiveTrax Pro loads the contents of your iPod library when it starts. However, when switching away to the iPod to reorder the set lists and then switching back, it doesn’t reload the sets. Bit of an oversight there! I suppose that’s what testing is all about.

That’s the last development task to finish. I’ve just got to put some time into the memory leak with the song queue, and then the graphic design of the icon and the website and we’re ready to launch. Exciting times.

I’m having an interesting problem with one particular aspect of the memory management of songs and song queues in LiveTrax Pro. So, in the interests of rubber ducking, I’ve decided to explain memory management on iOS as I understand it, and then how it relates to my problem.

The scheme Objective-C uses to keep track of memory allocated to objects is based around reference counting. This is the same scheme used by COM on Windows. The difference is in how it’s exposed to the user. Continue reading →