A small update to ShoveBox has been released that addresses an issue with iSight capture on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

It can be downloaded here or through ShoveBox’s auto-update.

PhoneFinger is a small app I wrote to solve a frustration I found early on in developing iPhone software: the simulator makes using the interface you designed look way easier than it really is! PhoneFinger simulates a human finger (complete with smudges) to help expose hidden usability problems.

I wrote it a couple months ago but decided to release it now as freeware because it was sitting on the shelf too long. I’ve used it for testing and to liven up demos for clients. It’s also a fun prank. Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Despite recently sustaining some damage (after), I plan to be in attendance at WWDC ‘08. I’ll be staying in San Francisco from Saturday, June 7th to Sunday, June 15th.

Unlike last year, it looks like this one has quite a few “to be announced” sessions, so I’m sure there will be plenty of news in store.

Hope to see you there! I’ll be the one with the ridiculous-looking arm sling.

ShoveBox 1.1.2, a free upgrade, is out. Here’s what’s new:

• Added several new keyboard shortcuts including arrow keys for switching between folders/entries list, spacebar to open.
• Fixed bug where keyboard shortcuts would stop working in some circumstances
• Fixed several small GUI bugs.

You can download it here or through the auto-update feature.

I decided to port Otis to the iPhone using the new SDK. It’s a little fancier than its Mac-based cousin, as I’ve been using CoreAnimation on it. Here’s a quick demo movie:

Download (.mov, 580KB)

Still needs a little work (nicer graphics, performance optimization, etc), but I think I’m off to a good start. I had the game itself playable on the iPhone in under 3 hours. The rest has just been polish and tinkering.

I think I’ll let the user choose an arbitrary picture from their library for the background. What I’d love to do is have the blocks fall whatever direction the iPhone is facing, to add an additional element of strategy, but then it’d be a different game.

Video:

Slides:
iphonedev.pdf (7.5 MB)

I went to MobileCampBoston today and gave my talk on iPhone development. I had decided to toss out the slides I made for it, figuring people would be more up for a discussion than an organized presentation…then decided at the last moment to finish up my presentation.

I felt pretty confident after I gave the talk, but now that I watch the video, I think my performance more closely resembled Matt Foley than Steve Jobs. Oh well — practice makes perfect.

Boston-based videoblogger Steve Garfield (you might know him from his Rocketboom segments and his recent coverage of the Scientology protests), was able to get a video of most of my talk (above). This felt awesome because I’ve been watching his reports since even before I moved to Boston.

Corrections:

• I showed the basic structure of an iPhone app, but it only showed views and controllers. I meant to add a bunch of generic-looking blue cubes to represent model objects and other objects you’re likely to use.
• I slipped a few times and used the term “message” for a simple method-call in a non-Obj-C language. You might have deduced that they’re the same from the way I spoke about it. But there is a difference — for more information on how messages work in Objective-C, take a look at this article.
• One point I meant to bring up as I was talking about interface design was the iPhone’s multi-touch interface. Gestures, if used well, can be a lot more intuitive than the alternative. Instead of putting awkward little “previous” and “next” buttons in an interface, for instance, try using the “swipe left” and “swipe right” gestures.
• I said -alloc “creates” the memory. It allocates it. Who the hell says “create”? Doy.
• I said that I felt like a Martian telling people I write Mac software and showed a slide depicting Krankor. Krankor is from Neptune, not Mars.

Further Reading/Things Mentioned:
37Signals’ Advice on Design
CocoaHeads Boston
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
CocoaDev

I’m going to be at MobileCamp Boston this weekend, and I’ve prepared a talk on developing for the iPhone. It’s called “iPhone Development for Earthlings.”

What’s with the title? The iPhone SDK announcement has attracted a lot of developers (and even designers) who are pretty new to all the technologies involved. Things Mac nerds like me have lived with for a while. To them, it’s kind of an “alien world” — all these seemingly bizarre conventions and ideas that started way back in the NeXTStep days.

It’s a friendly (and hopefully entertaining) introduction that sets things straight. It drills down into some of the trickier aspects of Obj-C and the frameworks that newcomers are likely to stumble over. It also covers some of the design/UI issues involved. You can see a tentative outline here.

Speaking of iPhone developments…watch this space in a couple weeks.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s release, ShoveBox version 1.1.1 (build 161) is out, fixing several printing-related bugs.

You can download it here or through ShoveBox’s auto-update feature.

A quick bug update to Wonder Warp’s addicting freeware game Otis is out.

It fixes an obscure scoring bug, slightly cleans up the graphics, and adds an oft-requested “Fast New Game” feature to quickly start a game with the same settings as the last.

You can download the update through Otis’s auto-update feature, or right here.

The fine gents at Macgasm have interviewed me in their latest podcast about ShoveBox, SimpleChord, and being a Mac developer in Boston.

We’re giving away two copies of ShoveBox to the people with the messiest desktops. Just submit your entry to their flickr pool. The deadline is March 11, 2008. Check out the details here.