Domain of the Bored

I'm still Mac-only, so I still won't be there, but here's the information for this year:

• The conference is in Seattle, Washington on April 24th and 25th.
• The speakers, including Aaron Hillegass, Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch, Erica Sadun, and Eric Buck, will cover many different topics, including Core Data, Core Location and MapKit, in-app purchasing, UI design, and OpenGL ES.
• Early bird pricing is $200 off until March 12th.
• If you use the coupon code “PHBLOGS”, you'll get another $100 off.

(I do still wonder what the “PH” stands for…)

If this sounds good to you, register for the conference.

See also Brent Simmons's post about it. He wants to play pinball with you.

If you know someone who's recently taken up programming the Mac or the iPhone (or both), please give them one (or both) of these links:

• For new Mac programmers
• For new iPhone programmers

As a frequent answerer of questions on Stack Overflow, I see certain patterns—not just frequently-asked questions, but also frequently-unasked questions: Things that are biting the questioner that they don't know about.

Sometimes they're thinking about things the wrong way (e.g., using property list objects where they should have a model). Sometimes there is a route to a solution (“my app is slow” “run Instruments”), but they don't know about that route. Often, they'll use wrong terms that are right on another platform (like “member variable”), like a speaker using their native language's pronunciation rules when speaking a foreign one.

To help people over these speed bumps, I've composed an introduction for new Cocoa and Cocoa Touch programmers. (Both of the above links redirect to it.)

If any part of it doesn't help them (i.e., is unclear or wrong), I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know, either here or by email.

Some of you know that I use a second-generation iPod nano (the best iPod ever) with an iPod Radio Remote. There are two generations of iPod Remote; here they are side by side:

The original is on the left. It was for the 2G iPod (that's what I had, anyway) and possibly some other models. That remote didn't have a radio tuner in it. The one on the right, the one that has a Dock connector and looks like a 2G iPod shuffle, is the iPod Radio Remote.

The iPod Radio Remote never did work with the iPhone and iPod touch. Every introduction of a new iPhone or iPod touch model (including the originals) made clearer that they'd either make a third generation or kill it. Sometime around the time when they introduced the new Apple Remote, they chose the latter.

At some point, Griffin Technology introduced their Navigate. I spotted one today at Walmart for $20 on clearance and snapped it up. Walmart normally sells it for $50, and MSRP is $60.

Not only does the Navigate work with my 1G iPod touch, it adds a display showing the current track. The iPod Radio Remote never had this! The picture on Griffin's website doesn't do it justice; it actually looks much better, as shown in this video:

(If you want to really see how good it looks, click through to the YouTube page and watch it there.)

Like the Radio Remote, the Navigate has a clip. Unlike the Radio Remote, it's not a moving part; it's just a fixed, flexible (but not too flexible, but not too stiff, either) bit of plastic. Time will tell how easy it is to break.

True to its name, you can even use it to navigate your music: It will let you pick a playlist, artist, or album to listen to, and change the shuffle setting. However, it does not let you go straight to a specific song, which makes that feature useless for me. I understand why that limitation exists, though: It would be much more difficult to scroll to it with the Navigate's buttons than with the iPod's own click wheel or touch screen.

Navigating the FM band isn't exactly easy. When moving along the frequency band itself, next and previous move one frequency-stop at a time. You can set presets, but only four of them. It's not at all obvious how to set and use them; I'll leave it to the manual to explain it. Ameliorating this problem is that it remembers the last station you had tuned, so it's not like you're going to have to deal with the preset menu every time you turn on the radio.

I do have a couple of significant problems with it.

The first is that it doesn't remember your volume setting. (The Navigate has its own volume setting, separate from the iPod's; the iPod's volume setting has no effect on audio through the Navigate. This is another difference from the Radio Remote, which had no volume of its own.) The Navigate doesn't have a battery; it relies on the iPod for power, so it goes dead when you unplug it. Then, when you plug it back in or plug it into a different iPod, it's back to the default volume, which is quite loud for me. This will probably grate on me a bit.

The other problem is that it doesn't fit in my iPod touch's Dock connector with its SeeThru hard case on it. My iPod nano doesn't have a case on it, so I don't have that problem with that iPod. If you don't have a case on your iPhone or iPod touch (or other iPod), or you use a different case that won't conflict with Griffin's Dock connector, then this won't be a problem for you.

I hope a future version of the Navigate will remember the volume setting and have a slightly thinner Dock connector so that it isn't blocked by my iPod touch's case. Even now, though, I consider the Navigate a worthy successor to the iPod Radio Remote, primarily because of the display, secondarily because of the iPod touch (and iPhone) compatibility.

This October 17th and 18th, there's a conference for iPhone developers in Boston, which the organizers asked me to attend.

The conference is called Voices That Matter: iPhone Developers Conference, and the titular voices include Aaron Hillegass (famous for his book), Erica Sadun (famous and infamous for her jailbreak work and advocacy), Bill Dudney (famous for his book), Stephen Kochan (somewhat famous for his book), Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch, Fraser Speirs, and Daniel Jalkut.

As most of you know, I'm not an iPhone developer—I write for the Mac only. So I declined that part of the offer.

The other part was a coupon for you, my readers. I know many of you probably are iPhone developers, so I asked whether they would still like me to give you that coupon code. They agreed, so here it is:

PHBLOG

(Those of you who read Jesper's weblog may recognize it.)

Without the coupon, the registration fee is $495 until September 12th, $695 thereafter. The Word document they sent me says that that the coupon will knock $100 off.

Enjoy the conference!

The most popular mix-and-match-music app, according to the completely objective score of how often I hear its name, is Pandora.

Most of this popularity came with their release of an iPhone app back in July 2008. The iPhone app makes the site portable: previously, you could only listen to Pandora while chained to a browser (or a SSB), but now you can listen to it anywhere that's in cell range.

Pandora now has competition.

It first appeared in AppShopper's free iPhone apps feed on 2008-11-08, but I didn't see it then (I probably scrolled past it). I did see it when they released their 1.1.3 update back on 2008-11-31.

Its name is Finetune. Like Pandora, it's free.

The differences:

• Unlike Pandora, Finetune doesn't require an account.
• Pandora has an option to jump over to the iTunes Store to buy a song; Finetune has no such feature.
• Finetune only creates stations based on artists; Pandora lets you name an artist, song, album, or composer.

I think Finetune does a slightly better job of selecting songs that are similar to the work of the requested artist. (Sometimes this is hard, as in the case of the Beatles, who produced very diverse work.)

One major drawback to Finetune is that, since it only lets you select based on artist (performer), not composer, it really sucks for classical music. (The service has it, but it's little better than shuffle-play.) If you want a customized classical station, Pandora is currently your only option.

(Note: I wrote this before Pandora 2.0 came out, but it's still accurate. If anything, Pandora 2.0 is even better for classical now, since you can now make stations by genre.)

On 2008-12-12, Tim Haines, the developer of BurnBall, contacted me on Twitter to offer me a free promo code. I accepted, and played the game on my first-generation iPod touch.

The game is basically Qix with a Sonic-the-Hedgehog-esque theme. Based on that, I give you this pull-quote:

If you like Qix, you'll like BurnBall.

As it happens, I don't like Qix. The main thing about Qix that frustrates me is that enemies can kill you just by touching your trail while you're cutting off another piece of the level. This makes some sense for the Tron-based theme of some of the other Qix work-alike games, but it has the effect on gameplay that you can't make any but incremental progress, especially after the first few levels, as the number of enemies goes above 2. Your only hope is that your enemies will see some shiny thing and leave you alone long enough to let you complete your wall; otherwise, you can only complete the level a little bit at a time.

One way in which somebody could improve Qix would be to let enemies go right through your wall, and compensate by making them more aggressively pursue you. Then, you'd stand a reasonable chance of completing the wall, if you can just dodge the enemies. Another way would be to have enemies bounce off the wall, which would provide you with a way to restrain them while you draw more wall—but that may make the game too easy.

BurnBall is graphically different enough from Qix that it could pull off either change, although it probably should be an alternate game mode.

So, basically, the only reason I dislike BurnBall is because I dislike Qix games in general.

That said, BurnBall is a very good Qix game, being both well-drawn and responsive to your control. (Since I originally drafted this post, there's been an update that tweaked the tilt response; I haven't tested it.)

BurnBall has an advantage over Qix work-alikes on other platforms, in that you can move in any direction—you're not limited to up, down, left, and right. You move by tilting the iPhone.

Another advantage of BurnBall over other Qix work-alikes is that Haines holds high-score competitions with monetary prizes on the app's Facebook page. He also posts a free promo code every time that page gets another 100 subscribers, so you may not even have to buy the game.

If you'd rather not wait for the next promo code, the app is 99¢ on iTunes.

One of the ongoing debates among users of iPhone OS devices is whether an app's settings belong in the app itself, or the Settings app.

I'm of the opinion that this wouldn't even be a debate if it weren't for Apple's prescription in the iPhone HIG that every iPhone app's settings should be in the Settings app. Mac apps don't come with prefpanes for their preferences (with the exception of faceless background apps like Growl). Windows apps don't, either, that I know of. GNOME and KDE apps don't pollute Ubuntu's Control Panel.

The iPhone is the only OS I know of whose developer recommends that app developers put their application settings in the system-wide Settings app.

As we've seen several times on every platform, it's OK to break one of the local Human Interface Guidelines if and only if the violation makes the interface better.

I think this guideline is one that iPhone developers should violate flagrantly.

But there's a problem. The iPhone doesn't really have an icon for a Settings button. Most developers seem to use the icon that one of the frameworks apparently provides, but this isn't the proper use of that icon. The means info, not application settings.

Another choice is the gear icon for Action buttons:

But, again, we have a conflation of functions. The button in question is not an Action button; it is a Settings button. This icon is not a Settings icon. (I suspect that most people who use the Action icon use it because it doesn't have any particular association with “action”, either, other than Apple's endorsement of it for that.)

The Iconfactory, wisely, chose differently in Twitterrific. I suspect that this was largely coincidence, as the Mac version of Twitterrific came first and already had a Settings icon; for the iPhone version, the developers simply used the same icon. It works well enough:

But it's not perfect. A wrench does not say “settings”. (I offer myself as evidence: When I first saw it in the Mac version, I didn't know it was the Preferences button.) Generally, a wrench means “edit this”, as in the context of a game.

What we need is an icon that says “settings”. Ideally, this icon should either convey the notion of a changeable state value (as the previously-favored light switch [Mac OS X through Tiger] and slider [Mac OS] did), or build on an existing association with the concept of settings.

Let's go with the latter. I nominate the Settings app's icon:

Familiar enough, wouldn't you say?

That's Apple's version. Here's my button-icon (a.k.a. template) version, in the 16-px size:

I tried it out in the iPhone version of Twitterrific on my iPod touch. Before and a mock-up of after:

After I created this icon, I wondered what it would look like in the Mac version of Twitterrific.

Here's the original:

… And right away we have a problem. These buttons are already framed; my white frame will glare here.

Fortunately, that's easy to solve. With ten seconds of work, I created a frameless version. Here's what that looks like:

I think we could all get used to this icon. This wouldn't have worked at all before Apple changed the icon of System Preferences to match the iPhone Settings app, but now it can.

I don't think it's perfect. Perhaps a real icon designer (I'm just a programmer) can refine it. But I think it's a good first draft. I'm curious to hear your opinions; please post constructive feedback in the comments.

If you want to use this icon, go ahead. Here's the original Opacity document , from which you can build all the many variations of the icon. (Click on Inspector, then Factories, then find the version you want in the list and click its Build button.)

Here are some types of apps that I'm tired of seeing over and over again on the iPhone App Store. In some of these categories, I've picked a winner that completely solves the problem; you're welcome to nominate winners for the others.

• Flashlight (solution: myLite)
• Tip calculator (solution: Calculator—seriously, is subtotal × 0.2 so damn hard?)
• Any app with a checkmark icon, regardless of function: Think of a different icon, please. At this point, you might as well just make the word “app” your icon.
• App to help you find your way back to your parked car: The main problem is that all of these use Core Location rather than just tracking movement through the accelerometer. That makes the app useless if you don't have an iPhone 3G and you're out of cell range or don't have a cell antenna (iPod touch).
• One-tap contact dialer (also includes 911/999 dialers)
• Apps that fake receiving a phone call
• Fortune-telling/decision-making apps
• The Puzzle desk accessory
• Sudoku (solution: ACTSudoku and its free light version)

There's nothing wrong with competition, but these are saturated markets. If you're not going to solve the problem in a completely different way (e.g., by not using Core Location to set the location of the parked car), then don't waste your time—write something else.

If you have any suggestions for other categories that should go on the list, feel free to leave a comment.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a list of requirements for an iPhone sudoku app. At the time, no app satisfied all of the requirements, but one did come close.

Pierre Bernard of Houdah Software posted a comment that his sudoku app, ACTSudoku, satisfied all but one of the requirements I listed. The only one remaining was rotational symmetry, which he asked about.

In response to our dialog on that post, he added rotational symmetry in ACTSudoku 1.1, which Apple has now approved. You can download it now for $2.99 USD (or free if you bought one of the earlier versions).

UPDATE 2008-08-01: As of yesterday, there's now a free version of ACTSudoku, which only generates easy puzzles. This is good if you'd like to try it for yourself, but you don't want to spend $3 just yet.

The interface is simple enough:

Notice that there's no row of numbers for input. The obvious thing to try is tap on a cell, and it works:

In other words, the interface is obviously postfix. The key word there is “obviously”: One of my requirements was that it must be obvious how to input numbers.

The input method is not perfectly obvious, however. One thing that stumps a lot of people (going by Bernard's response to some iTunes reviews) is the fact that simply tapping on a number in the pop-up enters a pencil-mark, rather than locking in the number. You must hold down briefly to set a number in the cell. In the comments on the previous post, I suggested swapping these behaviors; I maintain that suggestion. (UPDATE 2008-10-29: ACTSudoku 1.5 added a preference to do this. It does, indeed, make a tremendous difference in the app's usability.)

You may be wondering what all the green dots are. Those are pencil-marks, filled in automatically by the game. This is optional; you can turn it off in the settings, if you want to be completely free to make mistakes.

With the automatic pencil-marks turned on, the game will not let you enter a wrong number. With them turned off, the game will let you enter a wrong number. Either way, you can clear the cell by tapping again on the cell and holding down on the giant number.

Hold down on that giant 4 to clear it from the cell.

Of course, ACTSudoku is not perfect. It has some minor problems:

• The interface confusion that I noted above. A long tap sets the number, whereas a short tap sets a pencil-mark. This arrangement makes no sense with automatic pencil-marks turned on—and they're on by default. It would make much more sense to have the tap lengths the other way around.
• The northern, eastern, southern, and western blocks are have dimmed-looking gray backgrounds, for no apparent reason. This is slightly distracting (but not enough to qualify as “garish”). I would prefer if all the blocks were uniform white.
• I'd like to be able to turn off the timer. Again, I find this distracting.

However, it satisfies all of my requirements, so I declare ACTSudoku the winner of the iPhone sudoku race. Congratulations to Houdah Software!

• A sudoku generator. The game should not cap me at x-hundred or x-thousand puzzles. Give me all the sudoku the iPhone OS' PRNG can create for me.

• Proper sudoku puzzles, not Number Place puzzles. The difference is that a sudoku puzzle is rotationally symmetric: if you turn the puzzle 180°, it still looks the same.

  → 180° →

  Many sudoku generators actually generate Number Place puzzles, which don't have this constraint. (In particular, all the Will Shortz puzzles are like this.)

• Obvious input method. A row of numbers at the bottom doesn't work because I can't tell whether the game is prefix (tap number first, then cell) or postfix (tap cell first, then number). I could get used to either way, but a good interface doesn't make me guess.

  • Ambrosia's Mr. Sudoku uses handwriting recognition.

  • Platinum Sudoku is clearly postfix, because its input method is a ring of numbers around whatever cell you tap on.

• The ability to set pencilmarks, to keep track of what numbers are viable for a cell (helping to avoid wrong numbers, especially at higher difficulty levels).

• Simple, usable interface. This means two things:

  • No excessive artwork like Big Bang Sudoku has. I only have 16 GB of flash memory—don't waste it!

  • No garish colors. If your sudoku game is in CGA, then I don't want to look at it, which means I don't want to play it, which means I don't want to buy it.