Solipsism Gradient

pablowestenh wrote:

its extremely quiet in here

post some interesting topics guys

Somehow this makes me ask: are you sure you’re in the right place?

…anyway: there’s no “guys” plural here, only myself; and only I can post topics; others can just reply/comment. I do plan to report on my work progress Real Soon Now, though.

I seem to have boarded the latest bandwagon du jour. They seem to come at progressively shorter intervals these days – the last one was just two days ago. In other news, serious work today has again been successfully averted…

(This was a good question asked of me at formspring.)

So far, I haven’t done anything for the iPhone, for three reasons.

First, I don’t own a cellphone, and I find it quite difficult to write an app that I won’t use myself. I do have an iPod Touch, and I carry it with me on trips, but it seems I use it strictly as an alarm clock and as a normal iPod – the only apps I have installed are PCalc Lite and the Flycast internet radio. I look at other apps now and then, without finding any that give me that “wow I need that” thrill. (For the record, I’ve also owned the first Newton, the first Palm Pilot, and the Sony Magic Cap – all with their development SDKs – and I couldn’t think of a single useful app for them either; I suppose it’s a mental deficiency.) Also, recall that where I live there’s very little public WiFi, and 3G charges are ruinous… any app I’d use would need to work offline 99% of the time, which narrows things down considerably.

Second, the current AppStore model is extremely different from what I’m comfortable with – ideally, I want to distribute and support it myself, and be able to post updates immediately, without waiting for approval from anybody else.

Third, my main interest is in writing utilities – applications that extend or change the way “the system” or other applications do things. There’s no space whatsoever for that on the iPhone, and it doesn’t look like there’ll be space for it on the iPad for now.

That said, I do plan to attend WWDC 2010 and it’s possible that until June I think of some mainstream application that I’d like use myself. The larger screen could make all the difference. Send in suggestions!

So, to start things going again… I was looking at my RSS feeds for the first time in almost 5 months, and read Dan Wood of Karelia fame explaining about Converting Rich Text to TEXT/styl resources for an SLA on a Disk Image.

My own workflow for building a release disk image uses a small tool I’ve written for that. You can download it here. Here’s the help text it prints out if you run it without arguments:

   Add one license at a time to a (unflattened) disk image.
   Usage: AddLicense /path/to/TheUnflattened.dmg Language /path/to/TheLicense.rtf
   Languages supported: da nl ko ja fr it fi pt sv en es de nb
   You can also use long equivalents like English, French etc.
   The first language added will be the default language (usually English).

Here's an actual usage example from a build script:

   hdiutil unflatten "$SOURCE_ROOT/My.dmg"
   "$BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR/AddLicense" "$SOURCE_ROOT/My.dmg" English "$SOURCE_ROOT/EnglishLicense.rtf"
   "$BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR/AddLicense" "$SOURCE_ROOT/My.dmg" French "$SOURCE_ROOT/FrenchLicense.rtf"
   hdiutil flatten "$SOURCE_ROOT/My.dmg"

and I use the “flatten” and “unflatten” arguments to hdiutil to massage the disk image.

The trick (as Dan points out in his post update) is that you can use ‘RTF ‘ resources instead of TEXT/styl. I received this interesting tidbit through oral tradition; I’m not a 100% certain, but I think it was through some code that Marko Karppinen showed me a few years ago. Pass it on.

If there’s interest, I may clean up and publish the source sometime, though it uses all sort of gronky old APIs (Resource Manager etc.).

Update: the link above now downloads the complete Xcode project. I also included it on my source code page.

I just published the Xcode project for the AddLicense tool I mentioned previously. Enjoy.

Ask me anything. I may even answer. My meta-disclaimer applies in full.

OK, herewith my first impressions of the thing. (As if nobody else weren’t posting theirs, too… I suppose this will be mainly of historical interest to Future Me.)

The name: iPad, not Magic Whatever. It could have been worse, at least it’s short and easy to remember; on the downside, I gather there are some unfortunate connotations to the name in English, and it’s a little too close to “iPod” typographically and phonetically. One possible consequence is that the iPod touch may be phased out soon, or renamed to “iPad mini”… <insert more connotation jokes here>.

Form factor: looks reasonable to me. Pity it doesn’t fold in half, but you can’t have everything. In vertical (ebook) position, it’s as tall as a trade paperback, but wider and thinner. Not optimal, maybe, for books and watching HD video, but the 4:3 aspect size makes for a less expensive display and easy connection to a presentation projector. Speaking of which, porting Keynote was a good idea; we’ll see a lot of iPads at conferences in the future. I suppose an IR receiver/remote control pair for presenters who prefer to pace back and forth will be out soon from the usual third parties.

Display: 1024×768 at 132 dpi. Quite vanilla-basic, but it means Apple wanted to hold the price down instead of going with seriously new technology here. It also means there’s plenty of things to build into a second-generation device later in the year.

It’s not a cellphone, just as I thought. Avoids the hassles of dealing with subventions and plans, selling through cellphone companies, and all that. I suppose it signals a future for VoIP over 3G for all but the most basic cellphones. The microSIM form factor is quite new, and it will no doubt make for slow adoption in many countries; ideally Apple would have made the device accept both old and new SIM types.

What’s missing from the hardware? Camera(s): a front-facing camera would be great for chatting/video conferences, and no doubt will appear in a future version. A back-facing camera, as in the iPhone? Probably not; the iPad is too large to use as a regular camera, and remember, this is not a convergence device; it’s directed at a market gap. Also missing: GPS. Again, something to build into a second-generation iPad. The “assisted GPS” feature is less precise and, as far as I know, only works well in some cities (most of which are in the USA).

The Apple A4 chip: information is scarce on that, beyond the 1GHz clock speed. I suppose Apple published that because it’s a round number, and contrasts nicely with the 600MHz previously published for the latest iPhone. Beyond that, we can safely assume that it runs the ARM instruction set – I haven’t seen the SDK yet, but I hear gcc 4.2 is the default compiler; that it was designed by the former PA Semi people; and that its built-in GPU has been heavily optimized for the iPhone OS X. Future systems may not be bound to ARM, once Apple deems Clang/LLVM production-ready.

Software: I can follow the reasoning of using a modified iPhone OS X – all the pieces are in place, zillions of users already know the GUI, the developer SDK and the AppStore are out there. On the other hand, the iPad inherits all their problems, too. Granted that those problems are mostly on the developer’s side. For me, it means that the type of utility I like to write can’t be done; there’s no multitasking, the APIs are too closed, applications can’t communicate easily, and Apple allows no replacement or supplementation of the basic interface.

Will I buy one? Well, eventually. Just a few months ago I almost bought a 64GB iPod Touch – the 8GB one I have now is too cramped for my music library. I use it only for playing music, and in 2 years of carrying it around I haven’t thought of a single app I would like to write for myself; maybe that will change with the larger screen. An iPad would be great to have as a general book/web reading device, especially on shorter trips. Unless Apple ports Xcode to it, I wouldn’t take it on a longer trip instead of a laptop, and even so the screen is too small. The MacBook Air’s screen is already cramped for development, and in terms of volume, better to carry the Air instead of an iPad with the keyboard/dock. The Air also allows me to run Eudora to check my email; I’ve tried Mail.app in the past and just couldn’t get used to it.

For general use, I’ve no doubt the iPad will sell well, and the vertical markets developers seem to be impressed. Let’s see what the future (and the next WWDC) will bring.

Posted by 0xced:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

If there’s interest, I may clean up and publish the source sometime, though it uses all sort of gronky old APIs (Resource Manager etc.).

Oh yes, there is interest!