I may have mentioned it before, but I created a Migraine Diary application for the iPhone as my master's captone/thesis project. The school year finished out for me and I submitted the application to Apple on the 29th. Two days - TWO DAYS - later they approved it and it's listed in iTunes! Head on over to Net Workz LLC to find the app. I still have a lot of work left to do before I'm really happy with it. Help screens, more graphing, and encryption are two things I really need to get out there. Until then, enjoy!

I didn't start developing in Xcode "for real" until this year but I've played around with Xcode for a number of years. Over that time, I've screwed around with settings and changed defaults. It got to the point where following screen shot examples weren't matching up, #pramga marks in my code weren't showing up correctly in the code editor method drop down list and on and on. Perusing through Xcode Workspace Guide, I found this handy little suggestion from Apple: To reset Xcode to its factory settings for the logged-in user, run these commands in Terminal: ...

Google just announced today (or yesterday?) that you can now have Google Voice's voicemail replace your cell phone's voicemail. http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-voice-with-your-existing-number.html What this means is you can now have all of your voicemails handled by one service provider. This feature only works with cell phones (most US carriers supported) but not landlines, VoIP or SIP phones yet. I switched my iPhone voicemail over to Google Voice today for a trial period. I'll see if I like it and report back. My first attempt wasn't perfect - it took nearly four additional rings after I ignored a test call for Google Voice to pick up. A total of eight rings is way too much for most callers to wait to leave a message. ...

Xcode 3.2.1 was released today and is available for download with iPhone SDK 3.1.2. This release is mainly a bug fix release and I've confirmed it does fix the Unit Testing issue I reported earlier.

I haven't written unit tests before in Xcode. I started to read Apple's article on unit testing with iPhone development because I wanted to follow sound development principles with an agile approach. Not long into the guide, I got stuck. Literally. Using Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard caused Xcode to lock/hang during the build of the logical unit test. Same results after iPhone SDK 3.1 came out. I couldn't find anything online either except a few people experiencing the same issue. In the system console (not Xcode console) I was seeing: ...

I'm currently using Scrum in my school capstone project. The advisor, however, designed the deliverables around the Unified Process and still expects some things like a Software Project Management Plan (SPMP). While it's a little late in the game, I've decided to fill one out and hope that maybe it'll help weed out some requirements I didn't document well in my backlogs. First task - find a template. An SPMP is usually based off of IEEE's standard 1058-1998, which costs more than a hundred dollars to get a copy of. I'm not paying $100+ to get a 200KB document. I've seen example around the Internet of a SPMP but nothing that was formatted well in Word or handled copying and pasting into Word. I spent some time doing more digging and found this wonderful site - ...

Xcode has a build directory inside of your project, which you shouldn't be including in your source code management repository. Simply said, those files change so much and are "discardable". There is no way to easily exclude this directory from your repository. The accepted way to fix this (after some digging) is to simply move the build directory for Xcode to a temporary folder. To move the build directory, click on the Xcode menu in your menu bar, and click on Preferences. Change the folder under "Building" to a temporary folder. I created a tmp directory in my user folder. ...

I admit, back in the day I stole a lot of music with peer to peer sharing programs like Napster and WinMX. I stopped after I realized that most times the MP3s I was getting were subpar and the metadata associated with them was crap. I spent more time fixing artist names, track numbers, etc than I did listening to the actual music. Enter buying a Mac and having iTunes and I've tried to go legal for all my music. ...

I finally got my Google Voice fka GrandCentral invite last week. I have to admit, I got really giddy like a kid getting candy when I saw the invite come through e-mail. So, I signed up, put my phone numbers in and have had two weeks to try it out. The verdict so far? It still needs some work but I love it simply because its free and super convenient. ...

Everyone is giving their two cents about the iPhone 3GS. I'm excited to see that Apple is releasing a faster phone that still feels like the first generation iPhone. Developers are used to a specific screen size for instance. Drastically changing the environment will create the discord other cell phone manufacturers feel when it comes to 3rd party applications. I do suspect, however, that next year will bring drastic change to the iPhone. Apple is still getting to where they really wanted the 1st generation iPhone to be. They realized that its easy to make their own hardware and software, but its hard when dealing with so many third parties. Cell phone carriers like AT&T stand in the way of real progress. Why doesn't Apple follow suit with Virgin and create their own private label cell phone company? I suspect that would give them a lot more flexibility in pricing and give them the ability to put whatever carrier they want behind the name. ...