I didn’t know if this would be helpful but SitePoint has been putting together an “HTML 5 Development Center”

http://www.sitepoint.com/tag/html5-dev-center/

The only thing that made me “raise an eyebrow” was that the banner on the page says “Developed in part for you by Internet Explorer 9″ and evidently Microsoft has been assisting in the project.

[Pause...]

But the good news is this statement on this page:

Browser Neutrality
The HTML5 Dev Center is browser neutral, these are growing technologies and the browsers are always evolving and updating.

In general I really like SitePoint’s reference material, so hopefully they will live up to the browser neutrality policy… ;)

Recently, I was trying to understand what happens when an iOS app goes into the background and then re-emerges later in various ways. It actually wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be. This may have already be documented somewhere, but it was a useful educational exercise nonetheless.

The driving reason for exploring the sequence was that I needed to suspend an NSTimer-based process when the app went into the background, and then start it back up when the app returned from suspended animation. Additionally, I needed to refresh a list from a web service when the app emerged, and the issue is that I needed to have it occur just once.

I needed to discover the events that occur and in what order when an app is active in the foreground and the following things happen:

• User presses Home button
• User Locks the device

I was also interested in seeing what happens when the reverse scenarios happen:

• User re-launches app when in background
• User unlocks the device
• Initial launch of the app

Turns out the sequence wasn’t quite what I was expecting — but it was very instructive. The following table illustrates my results. The numbers just indicate sequence of events (what happened first and second).

The good thing about creating this table is that it was very helpful in activating and deactivating the NSTimer-based process and also triggering the list refresh when the application submerged and then emerged.

Let me know if anyone is interested in code for this…

I wasn’t having a problem, but I was just curious about the question of whether or not it was necessary to make all your shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:interfaceOrientation overrides jive when using a UISplitViewController.

Sure enough, as is mentioned here in this Stackoverflow thread:

All of your view controllers INSIDE the split view controller have to override [shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:interfaceOrientation]… To make it rotate to all orientations, return YES in all overrides.

Makes sense to me. Thanks to Krumelur.

Can you guess what I’ve been doing lately?

Here’s another great tutorial from Dan Grigsby of Mobile Orchard, this time on playing audio with the AVAudioPlayer in the iOS SDK…

Tutorial: Easy Audio Playback With AVAudioPlayer

The iPhone SDK’s AVFoundation framework includes AVAudioPlayer, an easy, feature rich, Objective-C based way of playing audio files.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use AVAudioPlayer. When you’ve finished the tutorial you’ll have created a simple app that plays an MP3 audio file in a loop when the app starts.

enjoy!

For some reason I edited the iPhone wireframing files article a while back and added the individual PDF file links. Unfortunately they 404ed since they were the wrong URL.

This situation has been rectified and the individual PDF files can now be downloaded by themselves (though I suspect most people have been just using the zip file…).

After weeks/months of work I have submitted my first app to the iTunes AppStore!

NineOneOne ~ one-touch emergency dialer

So, now we wait for the approval/rejection to occur (hopefully not the latter)…

In truth, the amount of work can actually be measured in hours or perhaps days, with the actual building of the app being the least time consuming part since this is a very basic application.

I had no idea going into this the amount of time that would be spent on the preparation of the application for submission. At this point it is probably the most daunting aspect of the process — the development of the product was the simple[r] part. I expect that it will get easier the more apps I create, and having gone through the process once already, at least now I know what’s involved and what some of the potential gotchas are.

It’s tough to go it alone, but for now that’s what I have to stick with, having a day job and no capital to back up my projects or to hire other staff, much as I would like to be able to focus on this alone. It seems to me like you really need a team of three (+/-) people to make a really decent app in a timely fashion. Ideally, I think  I could get by on a relatively lean three-person team and would consist of:

• Me. (duh)
  • product design and specification
  • UX/interaction design
  • iPhone development/programming
  • Web site programming (if required)
• graphic designer (my graphic design skills are limited, and I’m really slow at what I do…)
  • iPhone interface eye candy
  • Icon design
  • Web site design
• Deployment/distribution (and marketing) engineer
  • Manages distribution for testing, arranging and managing alpha and beta tests.
  • Handles all iTunes AppStore preparations (SKUs, marketing materials)

That last one is kind of squidgy, but it was the stuff that really made me insane on this first go-round, and having someone – even just part time – to collect the resources and manage the iTunes part of the equation would be really helpful. This persone would be someone who has done it a number of times and knows all the little gotchas. There are many.

Thankfully, I chose to create an app that was very small and not real complicated to construct. Otherwise, this app would never have gotten submitted! However, since it was an app that I personally needed (but didn’t realize until after I needed it), I felt pretty strongly about just getting it DONE!

I will announce when the app is approved, if it is approved. In the meantime I will be planning out the next update for NineOneOne, in addition to the next app in line…