samuelschroeder.com
Ruby in the front, Rails in the back.

The last six months have been busy. Summer was crazy. Why? Besides working my regular consulting gigs I co-founded a new company with my good friend Justin Grammens. We named it Recursive Awesome, LLC.

Recursive Awesome is focused on developing mobile applications for the four main smart phone platforms; iPhone, Android, Blakcberry, and Palm. We do custom development for clients as well as build our own products.

Our first product, called Mobile VidHub, allows video producers to have a custom, branded app on each platform to distribute their content. More details here.

As for client applications you should check out TrickiWiki Trivia. Recursive has released iPhone, Android, and web based versions of the game. The Palm Pre and Balckberry versions are in development. All of the TrickiWiki games are native applications with the questions powered by a Ruby on Rails web service.

While Justin and I are using RA to focus on mobile development we will continue to build web applications using Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Please check out our business and let us know if you are in need of our services.

Just in case anyone else runs into this time suck

There is a bug in the iPhone 3.0 SDK for the UITableViewController template. Specifically, in the didSelectRowAtIndexPath method when trying to push another view controller onto the stack.

Sweet Apple code…

The correct code is…

See the difference? Apple did complete the signature with the “animated” parameter. I just spent an hour trying to find out why my UINavigationController may not respond to -pushViewController. I guess, that’s my fault for trusting the generated code.

I started this project to test out some ideas for an iPhone app which utilizes a 3rd party API. Naturally, I chose GitHub because I’m an extreme fanboy. It’s not polished. There are no tests. It really doesn’t do anything useful and I really don’t where I want to take it. However, there is a good deal of infrastructure here that I feel is worth sharing, especially, since there are so few OSS iPhone apps out there in their entirety.

Get the code here => GitPhone on GitHub
Screen Shots => GitPhone Wiki

Just storing this code away for future reference. It creates a new thread and adds a timer to it’s run loop.

This code creates a new thread and calls the secondThread method on self.

You’ll need to setup a new autorelease pool and start a run loop for your new thread. Ths code below does the following.

• creates a new pool
• creates a new timer to call the secondThreadMethod method every 5 seconds
• adds the timer to the new thread’s run loop
• starts the new thread’s run loop

All I wanted was some simple code to POST an image to a web service from my iPhone project. No big deal, right? Apparently, not.

Based on my google search results many people we were wanting the same thing and just not finding it. There are a couple iphone development sites giving examples and some really old open-source projects but nothing really felt right to me. So being a good developer I hacked something together which works for me and posted it on GitHub.

Issuing standard GETs and POSTs with Cocoa is pretty easy, but I couldn’t find anything easy to make multi-part forms for POSTing. This is where mini-mallows comes in. Just make some Cocoa, add some mini-mallows (form fields & a file), and POST.

Easy.

Current status

This project was written to satisfy my need to POST a single image and related form fields from an iPhone app to a web service. It only allows for the addition of one file per request. I am very open to comments, patches, and ridicule.

Installation

Get the code from GitHub => a href=”http://github.com/sschroed/mini-mallows”>http://github.com/sschroed/mini-mallows

Copy the files MultipartForm.h and MultipartForm.m anywhere you like into your Xcode project.

Usage

First, add your standard #import.

Create a NSURL object as you’ll need to send that to Mini-Mallows.

Now create a MultipartForm object and a few form fields and a file. I really wanted to call the class MiniMallows but MultipartForm is easier on the eyes.

When you are done adding fields and the file you can get a fully formed NSMutableURLRequest object from Mini-Mallows.

All set so POST the form.

Well, I just submitted my first application to Apple. Wish me luck on getting it accepted.

BabyBeats - Life’s Soothing Rhythm.
Making bedtime easy for babies and their parents

BabyBeats plays a steady, comforting heartbeat. Babies will recognize the familiar sound and be comforted as it is similar to the sound they heard while safe and warm in utero, mommy’s heartbeat.

Just push the “Start Rhythm” button and adjust the volume for a continuous calming heartbeat. BabyBeats is specially made to work even when the phone ringer is set to mute so remember to shut off the ringer so incoming calls, emails, and text messages won’t disturb your baby.