Oct 102013
 

After several days stuck in various problems, it seems I’m making progress now.

First good news came from financial side … I found this site which is good for on-demand Mac “rental”, and obviously it saved me at least $200 (if I was to go with a refurbished Mac Mini). Now I just leave $30 in my account, and occasionally log on to build my Apps. It was said that you have to log in at least every 60 days, or your money will be gone, this makes sense to me and does not bother me at all. Continue reading »

Nov 072012
 

Just upgraded Xcode to 4.5.2 through App Store, which has iOS6 support, I don’t know what else this new version includes though …

And after the upgrade, I got some time playing with previous AWS project which list my stuffs on AWS, include S3 and EC2. Obviously, every time I access my old codes I could find something wrong, and there is no exception this time – at the time I was doing AWS project, I had only 2 instances staying in one region, and now I have multiple (5?) instances staying in two regions so previous logic does not work very well.

Not many details to talk about here, I simply list all regions for AWS, and query instances targeting each endpoint, that’s it.

Now my AWS app is working well again.

Feb 142012
 

The AWS App on iOS is pretty much done, at least I have made readonly part of S3 and EC2 works, and I don’t think write operations (create, update, delete, etc) are feasible to mobile phones.

I’m moving to Windows Phone now, trying to build up similar App in term of functionality – I’m not sure if I can build things with similar UI since different app store may have totally different tastes/rules on UI standard, better follow what they asked for.

I wish Windows Phone development will be easier thinking of I’ve done .Net/Visual Studio development before, let’s see – I give myself 2 weeks, and will spend no more than an hour per day.

Actually I tried both Android and Windows Phone the other day, trying to get basic idea of development. Obviously I don’t like Android, either because of I’m not a Java fan, or because of ugly interface of Eclipse – it may only be that ugly on OSX though, but I don’t have space (read: memory) to launch such a fat IDE in my Windows VM so leave it to the last.

Feb 012012
 

Here comes 3rd wave …

1. compare strings
It seems NSString did not overload the compare operator (==), or maybe Object-C does not have this kind of idea, so don’t use == to compare strings, instead, you need to use compare: or caseInsensitiveCompare: and their dialects.

2. catching cell selection event in a table view
I was trying to subclass UITableViewCell to make it works, but actually don’t have to be this complicated – all that I need to do is deal with “- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath” in the table view, and this saves me a lot of effort as I don’t have to go through all the difficulties to get storyboard, etc with codes within a Cell class.

3. singleton, property or method?
I created a singleton class, then found in Object-C, it’s better to static method (if you can) instead of property. It takes quite a lot keystrokes to use a property, while using method is not that hard.

4. passing data to a view controller in a storyboard based application
– define a property of the child view controller for holding data
– in parent view controller’s prepareForSegue, set the property of the child controller
– that’s it …

Feb 012012
 

This may not be useful to others, but it bothered me quite some time, so I’d like to write it down in case some others stuck at the same place as I did.

getMetadataForKey calls from aws-ios-sdk, actually it:

  1. returns user defined meta data, nothing to do with s3’s meta data
  2. the key used here will be prepended a “x-aws-meta-“, that is, in aws console, we will see a meta data entry keyed with “x-aws-meta-hahaha”, but in ios app you need to use “hahaha” to get the value

some other interesting stuffs … don’t use S3GetObjectRequest/Response call to get object’s header information, as it will indeed download the object. Instead, you should use S3GetObjectMetadataRequest/Response.

To get “Expiry Date” and  “Lifecycle Rule” information as they are shown on aws console, you need to use response”s valueForHTTPHeaderField method with key “x-amz-expiration”, the parse it … I guess there should be something more easier but havenn’t figured out how. Both “expiry-date” and “rule-id” are there so you can use them, note that they can be empty so better prepare for that.

Jan 302012
 

Here comes the second part of ios development tips which follows first part, I’m starting over the number now so to ease my life.

1. How to navigate to a view in another view
– original post is here:
* dealing with views in a storyboard based application
* some other helpful discussions are here: manually switch view controllers in storyboard, and another similar topic
– idea
* actually the basic idea is pretty simple and straightforward – you create a new view (the one you want to display), and push it to the top of the navigationcontroller (which actually is a stack), that’s it …
* tricky part #1: this cannot be done in a viewDidLoad event as view was not fully loaded at that time so you can nothing, the place I found that is workable is viewDidAppear event
* tricky part #2: ViewController’s initWithNibName does not work … I haven’t figure out the exact reason yet but you have to use instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier comes from storyboard
* tricky part #3: nibname … gave me QUITE A LOT headache, it should be “UIViewController-“, you can get the object ID from Interface Builder, in the identity inspector tab

Jan 272012
 

Here are two (and actually, ALL) of my app’s screen shots … for iOS only.

I’m kind of slow now, need to speed up so not to eat my words.

Jan 102012
 

I know this could be a crazy thing, but why not? Especially I have a Mac in hand so that I can do both at the same time.

Since I know almost nothing about either, and I’m not good at client side development at all, so I started with a not-that-complicated open source software, WordPress for iOS/Android. It’s good to see WordPress is almost the same on both platform, this will help me a lot in future work.

The bad thing is, WordPress does not have too many features, such as animation, and so on (sorry all that I know about “fancy” is animation …), so I can only learn basic coding stuffs, but I think it is good enough for now. Anyway it is a API based “flat” App, which has a pretty wide market – think about Amazon AWS manager (I need this), E*Trade App (I’m using this), and GMail client, etc.

Dec 272011
 

Let’s see what we have now from the Christmas – a Bambook, a Kindle, a Kindle Fire, a Samsung phone (running Windows Phone), pretty much all popular mobile devices are in my house now (yes, iPhone and iPad came from last year).

I can say all mobile OS’s are good enough, though iOS is having better operational features, Aneroid is rich of free Apps, and Windows Phone is just … cute? Sorry I don’t know what can exactly describe it, but its look and feel is nice.

I think I need to spend some time follow Windows Phone while playing with iOS and Android, will be busy.

(This post was sent from Kindle Fire with WordPress App for Android.)