Nicholas Pike

I really enjoy getting emails like the following, from users who don’t understand all the work it takes to give them something free to bash.

Well Connor.  Its people like you, that explains why I don’t bother wasting my time fixing bugs anymore.  Ungrateful and non-constructive emails like this ruin it for everyone else.

For those curious, my response to him was:

Hey Connor, just to let you know; constructive feedback helps me fix its problems.  Your email wasn’t very useful. Thanks

There are many great iPhone web applications for using Twitter on the go – but the selection of native iPhone applications is surprisingly lacking.   The iPhone rocks for easing access to your data on the go – A streamlined, clean, and functional Twitter application just feels like a natural fit.

MobileTwitter is written using the iPhone SDK – so it runs smoothly on your iPhone and iPod Touch.

Features:

• View the timeline of the yourself, and the friends you follow
• View the public time line – keep tabs on the internet world!
• Send updates to Twitter on-the-go  (Over wifi or EDGE) with the iPhone’s awesome touch screen

Many more features are planned and will be implemented – suggestions are welcome.

Where can I get MobileTwitter?  You’ll have to wait for it to appear on Installer.app  (can take some time for a trusted repository to add a new application) .  More screenshots available here.

Took some time this evening to spruce up the iPhone/iPod application a little bit, screenshots below!

(http://code.google.com/p/npike-touch-xboxlive/)

No download available yet, details to come.

Only showing off my latest iPod springboard/desktop today – all other machines in my possession look generally the same.

So I’ve gotten in the habit of cooking with my iPod while making dinners for Jenn and myself. My current approach is sadly not very graceful:

1. SFTP to iPod
2. Copy recipe into a new text file in my home directory
3. On the ipod, open the Terminal.app
4. and use “more” to open the text file in the Terminal

So not graceful at all – but still very awesome. Jenn always seems to make a point to call me a Dork while I cook in this manner. So I have created my first public consumption iPhone/iPod Touch application: DorkBook

It’s rather basic at the moment, and the general procedure for putting a recipe on my iPod remains the same, I just no longer have to view it in more or vi.

Launching the program will show you all the recipes stored in ~/Media/Recipes, and touching a recipe will display the recipe complete with ingredients and instructions. (With a nice sliding transition between screens that I worked all night on)

I’ll put a download link up later, and hopefully will get the application added to the infamous Installer.app that just about every jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch is certain to have.

So it’s no secret that I have been slaving away on a few new projects for the last couple weeks – one of them is actually to a point where I have something to show!  First a little background information:

The MobileMail application on the iPhone is able to receive attachments via email, and if they are images then it will let you view them inline in the email message.  But thats it.

iExtractor is an application that will let you extract attachments from your iPhone and save them to any location of your desire.

A few interesting uses:

• Save emailed images to a Photo album (probably limited to the CameraRoll album)
• Save pdfs to local storage to view in a PDF Reader
• Save other binary files into the iphone file system (useful for modification of iPhone software)

Application Status

Currently all the application does is identify the encoded attachments stored by MobileMail.app and list them.  The next step will involve check the Mail database to retrieve their original file names, decoding them to their original form, and saving them to your desired location.

I’ve implemented most of the above separately, but need to integrate it into the UI now.

In a few days I should have an actual application for testing on other iphone/ipods.

More info on the Google Reader Blog – but in short, its awesome!

Erica Sadun provides a slew of command line applications for the OS X mobile operating system – my favorite being her series of screenshot applications.

I just have one problem: Theres no easy way to take a screenshot of an arbitrary screen directly from the device. (Unless you install the “Dock” launcher, which does not work for me)

I wrote the following two scripts to accomplish my task. From the terminal application you execute s.sh with a name for the screenshot:

You then have 10 seconds to exit the terminal, and navigate to the screen you want to take a picture of. After the screenshot has been taken and saved, a dialog will popup to tell you.

screenshot.sh

s.sh

Both these scripts require EricasUtilities to be installed, and /var/root/bin to be on your path (otherwise the binaries in EricasUtilities wont work).

Save both scripts to /var/root/bin, chmod +x on both of them, and optionally rename s.sh to s for easier launching from the terminal.

All screenshots will be stored in ~/Media/screenshots (which will be created if it doesn’t already exist) – once you have the screenshot, you can use the fileToEmail utility included in EricasUtilities, or SendFile available via Installer.app

For awhile now, I have been using the VLC Remote HTTP interface to control the VLC instance running on my laptop hooked up to a TV through my iPod Touch.  Now this is really cool, BUT the default (and apparently ONLY) interface for this is absolutely ugly.

During lunch today I took some time to draw up a mock UI for the interface for the iPhone/iPod Touch:

This will only support a subset of the features that the current VLC interface allows (as these are all I really need):

• Play/Pause
• Skip forward
• Skip backward
• Volume
• Full screen toggle

Native or Web App?  At first I am just going to whip up some new HTML files that will override the ones that come with VLC – but once I get my iPhone toolchain up and running on my new Leopard install I will shoot for a completely native app.