iPhone Ad Hoc distribution for application beta testing
Apple’s Ad Hoc distribution process is a godsend for iPhone beta-testing, but a right pain to use in practice. I’ve tried several different approaches for creating and managing Ad Hoc testing; this article describes the one I now use for my National Rail Enquiries for iPhone application.
DesignWatch: iPhone OS 3.0 makes it official; 45-degree-diagonals are the new curvy-cornered-boxes
Whether it’s Shazam’s grey-on-black background on the App Store, arsenal.com’s subtle top bar, or the new Messages, iPod and Phone icons in iPhone OS 3.0, there can be no denying it: 45-degree-diagonal-one-pixel-stripes are this year’s curvy-cornered-box. You heard it here first.
iPhone Development Kits now available at devkits.net
I’ve just launched a new web site, called devkits.net. The site is all about a couple of iPhone development kits I’ve been working on. Each kit is a self-contained, fully documented set of classes to kick-start an iPhone development project. The kits have been fully tested in my own commercial software projects, and each kit comes with a sample application to demonstrate the kit in action.
The new site is launched with two initial kits:
XML Kit: If your iPhone app needs to retrieve content from an external server, you need XML Kit. It’s an industrial-strength HTML / XML retriever, cleaner and formatter for iPhone developers. It can retrieve any HTML or XML source from any location via SOAP, HTTP GET or POST, and can tidy and transform the retrieved source via XSLT into your own custom XML.
Location Kit: This kit’s key feature is super-fast SQL sorting by distance from a known location. For example, Location Kit running on an iPhone takes 0.12 seconds to to find the nearest 20 locations to a given latitude and longitude, sorted by distance, from a database of over 2,800 locations.
More kits will be available soon. If there’s a particular kit you’d like to see, let me know!
