abednarz.net

There is so much crap in Apple’s AppStore. My pet peeve is all of the “Days until…” apps. These are all the same, you set a day and it tells you how many days there are left until your nominated date. Of course there’s a seperate paid app for every occasion, days until wedding, days until school, days until vacation etc etc.

However there is also some of the best software I’ve ever seen for a mobile internet device. Here are my top five, best value, most essential applications that I use regularly.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire Feed List

The best RSS Feed reader for the iPhone - this will sync with a free NewsGator account. Using the identically named NetNewsWire for OSX - this combination is the ultimate in automatically synchronised news reading. Read some items on your computer, go on a train, and keep reading - without worrying about coming across articles you’ve already read. And best of all, its all free.

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After many years of hosting abednarz.net in the US with an uber-cheap hosting provider, I have moved to an Australian host. While a tiny bit more expensive, the uber-cheap came with a few niggly issues that, over 5 years have been too annoying. Faster maintenance being hosted locally, plus support hours that match my hours should make it all worthwhile. Bits and pieces may be missing for the next few days while I ensure everything is copied over.

A long time ago I wrote a Tetris game. See my old article to read about it all. Lets say that ultimately my game is still available and I have had no further action taken against me.

This week I got an email from Todd, who wrote to let me know of Apple rejecting his falling blocks game due to legal threats from the Tetris Company. This is what he had to say:

I wrote my own interpretation of tetris (called Kafablo - instructions and gameplay movie at http://www.na-ba-no.com/kafablo/help.html) for the iPhone because I didn’t see any available tetramino games that I liked. In the time it took me to write it I’ve seen how all the unofficial tetris games get yanked, but since I’d put a fair amount of work into it and my game control scheme is (I think) unique, I went ahead and released mine a couple weeks ago. Sure enough, the lawyers came knocking - now even if I chose to dispute the legality of their claim of copyright infringement, that would take a long time, and Apple (rightfully so) won’t keep anything on the App Store that puts them in a position of jeopardy. So I have to take it down. Another win for the lawyers, another loss for creativity, freedom of expression, and competition! If you want a better tetris, too bad!

As far as my letter is concerned, there are no details as to what they think they’ve copyrighted or why my game is an infringement - the only thing in there (besides the threat of legal action and various legal mumbo-jumbo) is (grammatical error included):?

“The “Kafablo”game on apple.com violates the copyright in the Tetris? game because it is a copy of our client’s game and was created and are being reproduced and sold on your web site without our client’s prior permission or authorization.“

In case anybody is counting, here is the list of falling tetramino games that I know of (there are probably more) that have been removed from the App Store:
- teto teto
- tris
- touchris
- kafablo

I can’t comment on the other games, but I know mine at least differs from any official tetris: different controls, different sounds, different graphics, completely different name. I’m not sure what they claim to be copyrighting, but that’s a subject for further research.

And today I came across this switched article about another tetris-style game being blocked.

Its an outrage - the Tetris Company do NOT have a patent on the rules behind falling and rotating?tetramino games. Copyright has not been infringed.

Now I generally consider the Tetris Company to be nothing but a bully which can be ignored in such matters. The problem here is that Apple are rejecting the apps (as is their right) for publishing in the App Store because they don’t want to be liable in any legal action. Which is fair enough.. the Tetris Company are the problem here.

This brings it all back again and makes me want to release Bedter for jailbroken iPhones via Cydia just on principle.

Following closely from my first OSX application (MServClientOSX), I have finished up version one of porting it over to the iPhone. The guts of the code compiled over without any issue, so all I had to do was implement the different UI.

This doesn’t contain the browsing or queuing support that MServClientOSX does - but it allows viewing the currently playing song, skipping to the next song and adjusting the volume.

MServ Client for iPhone is a client for the MServ music jukebox server for common area music playing. You can download it from the AppStore by clicking here.

Config

MServ status

MservClientOSX is a Mac OSX client for the mserv music server.

Version 0.80 supports the following functionality:

• Viewing the current status of what’s playing
• Play, Stop, Next and volume control
• Browse and serach the list of tracks available
• Add tracks to queue
• Browse and search the queue
• Configurable menubar status icon
• Configurable Growl notifications
• Self-Updating (via the Sparkle framework)

Download MServClientOSX 0.80 and copy to your applications folder.

MServClientOSX's main controller

MServClientOSX's track browser

MServClient OSX's menubar status item

On Monday, I succumbed to the iPhone. I certainly haven’t been disappointed - it makes my old windows mobile (running wm6.1) feel like a 386 with windows 3.1.

So this post is being written on it with the wordpress app - really just because I can.

It really is the device I’ve been wanting for the last few years and it has completely lived up to the hype for me.

More Apple KoolAid down my hatch.

Since we develop Windows applications at work, its now starting to become more common for clients to be running Vista. We found our first compatibility issue last week - performing ICMP pings that worked on XP nolonger worked - the API actually failed.

One of the quickest ways to find problems, is for the development enviroment to be moved from XP to Vista. So relunctantly, I am seting up a Vista Business virtual machine for this purpose.

I was quite suprised, however to discover that my Bed’s Printer Switcher application works perfectly in it. I was impressed to discover that OSX did this all for me - I don’t know if Vista does (it bloody well SHOULD), but if it doesn’t at least that will work without fiddling.

I’m so very impressed with WordPress, especially the inter-connectivity plugins for LiveJournal and now I found this one for Facebook. I like everything being connected, its the smart way of the future.

Before becoming a Mac-convert, my backup procedure was almost non-existent. Every six to twelve months I would burn a CD or DVD with my most important stuff on it. I’ve been rather lucky that I’ve never had a hard-drive failure - its happened to most people I know at least once.

After turning to the Apple-Dark-Side they made it too easy. To not do a backup really required effort. Stick a USB drive in, turn on Time Machine… and you have a regular automatic backup procedure.

Of course I didn’t want to backup to USB drive. I have my and K’s stuff to backup, and an Ubuntu file server with a nice 400GB drive to hold the files (lets not discuss off-site backups, move along…). Now while Time Machine supports backing up to a network drive, they limit it to Apple’s own products, or a drive hosted by Mac OSX 10.5. Capitalistic goals aside, there is a very good reason for this. Apple added some extensions to AFP to safely handle network dropouts during the backup process. These extensions are required to safely protect your backups from becoming corrupted.

Now if you are pretty confident that your network isn’t going to drop out during a backup, you can configure Time Machine to allow an unsupported network drive, and backup to your SMB shared network drive. Easy. So thats what I did.

This has worked flawlessly with K’s iMac. My MacBookPro however, was more complicated. Because its a laptop, I often run on wireless when I’m downstairs in-front of the tv. When I go upstairs, I’ll plug in the Ethernet for optimal speed and turn off wireless. Of course I never paid attention to see if Time Machine was currently working when I did this. It was often running and every so often I would corrupt my backup sparseBundle and had to start all over again.

So I finally gave up on Time Machine for my laptop. I still wanted the automated backup however - but I don’t care about incremental backups, I’ve never (famous last words maybe…) wanted to go back to a previous version of a file. I just care that the current version is backed up in-case my drive dies.

This is where I love that the best computer UI is built on-top of the best OS core… unix. A simple installation of rsync on my Ubuntu file server, a simple shell script on my laptop (rsync is installed by default with Leopard) and I’m mirroring the folders I want. Then a simple configuration of my system to wake up at 3am and run my script and I’m automated. Too easy.

I have started playing around with OSX development, and I have to say that Objective-C and the Cocoa framework is quite inviting. After spending so many years in a windows world, doing Delphi (object pascal), MFC C++ and .NET stuff, objective-c required me to turn my head sideways. The cocoa framework really encourages good code design. My first project (I always need a project to learn a new platform) is an OSX client for mserv, which is the shared music jukebox we run in the development area at work.

In other news I have moved abednarz.net from using joomla to using wordpress, as joomla was feature overkill. I have also decided to semi-retire my live journal, since I don’t use it that much anymore, my paid status is about to run out and most posts I do these days are of a technical musings nature. I’ve set up a wordpress cross poster and will still be checking my lj friend’s page.