iphone

There have been a lot of people asking angry questions to Apple today because the Apple β that they gave out to iPhone developers was timed to expire today and a lot of devs now have bricked their main mobile phone until an update appears. Lots of people appear angry, but they’re missing the main issue for Apple:

Dear Apple, why are you letting people this stupid into your β programs

People frequently forget what beta for software means in these days where everything is β until people find a way to make money off of it. It means untested, believed working properly but may blow up at any time, not ready for production. So, I’m halfway between bemused and annoyed at the outrage that some folks seem to be fielding on various fora.

Also, calling a phone ‘bricked’ when you can easily recover it by downloading new software hours later is hitting the epistemological puff pastry with a hammer.

note that the latest revision of this blog’s theme seems to have introduced a weird bug with the code layout plugin (wp-syntax) on some browsers. i’m looking into it.

I think the single most useful thing I’ve figured out recently in programming for MacOSX and the iPhone is this little snippet right here.

- (void) updateListForEntityNamed:(NSString*) entityName andSearchString:(NSString*) queryString
{
[...]
 
	MyDocument* current = [[NSDocumentController sharedDocumentController] currentDocument];
	if(current && current != self)
	{
		NSLog(@"CurrentDocument:%@ != self:%@", current, self);
		[current updateListForEntityNamed: entityName andSearchString: queryString];
		return;
	}
[...]
}

What this does is intercept incoming messages that are supposed to go to the current window, and redirect them to that instance. I’ve run into issues in Leopard (MacOSX 10.5) where this is an issue. To some extent, this is probably a misconfiguration in interface builder somewhere, but it also an issue when using CoreData, because the ManagedObjectContexts are particular to instances of NSManagedDocument, and there are issues that arise if you end up using the wrong context.

I am slowly becoming a great fan of CoreData, it’s a great persistence/object-graph-management layer. More on this later.