Things are going to change around here soon; this blog will soon be accessible only through blog.alanquatermain.net, and you’ll (still) only find intermittent essays here. Essentially I made up my mind that I didn’t have anything to write which was long enough to merit the whole WordPress thing, so I’ve wound up moving over to other platforms for the majority of my online presence. More on that in a moment, but first a couple of announcements:

Open Source Code

Those who don’t follow me on Twitter won’t know about my latest source code publications. I’ve updated the source code page to include three new projects I put up on github, including the complete source for both ATV Loader and the BackRow Developers’ Kit.

New Partnerships

I was recently given the immense privilege of being invited to join a new mobile development startup, Pinch/Zoom, founded by Brian Fling and Garrett Murray. It’s exciting and humbling to be able to work with such a great team as they’ve assembled, and it’s great that my Morfunk colleague David Kaneda is there too. The whole thing is thanks to his random phone call to ask if I’d be interested in working on an iPhone app for Basecamp nearly a year ago now.

Whither Now?

As I mentioned above, most of my online presence happens through other means. While this blog will live on elsewhere, you’re more likely to get timely information from these new sources:

• Twitter: Follow alanQuatermain.
• Tumblr: My tumblog is where I post most longer-than-140-character things, and anything I think should persist. Most of my blogging will occur there, I think.

Sometime over the next few weeks I’ll be redirecting alanquatermain.net to the Tumblog. I don’t have any firm plans, but since cPanel here doesn’t allow for directly editing DNS address records (just some high-level things like redirects) I’ll have to ask my hosting provider nicely to do it for me

I think that PayPal’s currency conversion arithmetic is a little bit out…

Well folks, Outpost has finally been released! Version 1.0 finally hit the App Store yesterday evening-New Year’s Eve. It took a little while for me to figure out how to get a URL to the application in the iTunes store set up, but I finally managed to tweet that just after New Year.

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After all the crap I’ve had trying to get Outpost through the app store (today I’m told it crashes on launch— a situation no-one outside of Apple has yet encountered, even following their rather scant instructions) I’ve come up with an idea for a new microblogging service:

Ventr

It’ll support short posts (called ‘diatribes’ for branding purposes) of up to 2-3 times the length of the basic Twitter post length. This length is suggested to keep things short, but not so short that you can’t say what you need to.

The service will appeal to people (like me) who have no close-by folks of a similar persuasion whose ears could realistically be bent about the problem. As we all know, it’s no good to bottle it up, and bouncing complaints off a like-minded person can often lead to a solution (if not to the problem, then at least to the anger/frustration it has inspired). In these cases, it is better to be able to vent towards a generally like-minded populace in the hope that someone somewhere can either help solve/calm/quiet the whole situation. I’m sure psychiatrists would agree with me on this one.

The ‘killer feature’ for this app would be the hardest to put together, but I think it would be a winner. There would be some sort of time-sharing agreement going on with advertisers who own large LCD advertising (or public announcement) boards. They advertise on the site and in return they will occasionally put someone’s rant up on one of their hardware boards, for 30-60 seconds. At no particular time, etc.

This might sound crazy, but think about it— you’re stuck in traffic, absolutely fuming at the truck driver in front of you. You look up, and where the congestion report usually is you see a message from someone who’s just missed his daughter’s birth due to similar conditions. Suddenly you don’t really feel too bad for yourself any more; that has been replaced with compassion for the poor schmuck whose story just flashed up briefly on the board above you.

Doesn’t that sound great?

And just for starters, I volunteer that we get a big billboard just outside the App Store Review Board’s windows, which will display any diatribes containing ‘App Store’. That ought to get the message across, I think

So, a new AppleTV OS dropped today. Interestingly, the new features actually had code supporting them in ATV 2.2 — like the remote learning stuff, video playlists, etc. API support was there in the previous version. Weird, huh?

So anyway, this morning I got my big big AppleTV project running on ATV 2.2. I breathed a huge sigh of relief & took a break to read the news. ATV 2.3 released. So I update my test box to 2.3, try my software out. No go.

Bugger.

That leaves one now-very-full day in LA to get it working on 2.3. Great timing there Apple. Do you have, like, spy-cameras in our office here? Huh? Do you?

sigh

Well, at least I’ve got my tequila.

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WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE’RE OUT OF TEQUILA ??!!?!?!?

I’ve not had a chance to actually put together a test app for this yet, but having read John Gruber’s piece on the use of a private API within Google’s much-reported new iPhone application, I felt an urge to put my oar in here. My experiences with iPhone programming and Apple’s private APIs ought to count for something, after all.

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There are things happening now: this is a truism.

I am somewhat intoxicated. This is also a truism, as my Twitter feed can attest.

However, these two facts serve together to loosen my usually very shy tongue, inducing me to wax lyrical where I would ordinarily smile & nod, trying not to inconvenience anyone unlucky enough to be burdened with my company. Whether this is a good thing or not I will leave as a thought exercise to you, Dear Reader, for I am too drunk to manage such cerebral tasks st this precise juncture.

The chief reason for this missive is this: I have been working hard on an iPhone application these past few months, and it is finally about to be released. The application in question is Outpost, a Basecamp client from a company called Morfunk. It had been a long time in the making, longer than your overconfident author had originally envisioned, but it is at last entering its final testing and clean-up phase, and will be submitted to the App Store within a week.

The application itself represents a great deal of hard work from both my business partner David Kaneda and myself, over a number of months. We have striven at every turn to create an application which would be both intuitive and powerful, whilst giving us a solid platform upon which to build for the future. We intend to stay in this business for a long time, and to provide our customers with the best tools we can make. Our roadmap does not stop at Basecamp support.

For those waiting for the release of Outpost, I thank you for your patience, and I hope that you will agree that the product justifies the time you have waited. You will not have to wait much longer.

So, I’m now working on bringing a large AppleTV-based system up to scratch with the latest software/hardware updates from Apple, and I’m going through BackRow class changes, at which point I find this member variable in the BRMediaPlayerManager class:

BRWindow *_shroudyMcShroud;

This is why I like working with Apple software

Much kudos to the lovely folks at bravenewcode for their WPtouch iPhone/iPod touch WordPress theme plugin, which is the new hawtness:

Mmm, look purdy!

I got an iPhone 3G on Friday, and I’m really quite happy with it now. It wasn’t an easy process, however; the closest store to my house claimed to have 10 units in total, and so, reasoning that there weren’t any bigger stores closer by, and that there were people waiting overnight at the main Toronto store, I decided to head for the main store. They should have plenty on hand, I thought, or at least if they don’t have enough I’ll know at 8am-ish, so I’ll have plenty of time to find a smaller store with no lineup by 10am when the other stores opened.

So, I queued up with a bunch of other folks on Friday outside the Rogers store at Yonge & Dundas, with all the press & suchlike. I arrived at 6:15am, and left — with an 8GB iPhone 3G, thankfully — at about 4:45pm. For most of the afternoon, I was less than 20 yards from the door of the Rogers store, watching one person go in about every 30-45 minutes or so.

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