Nicholas Pike

This afternoon I put together a quick Ubiquity script: Spellcheck!  Spellcheck uses Google under-the-hood to do a quick spellcheck of any words you pass in as parameters after invoking spellcheck in Ubiquity.

spellcheck rudiculous speeeling

Pretty sweet!  Hit the link below to suck it into your Ubiquity installation:

http://apps.npike.net/ubiquity/spellcheck.html

iXboxLive 1.1 has been submitted to Apple for review!  Many under-the-hood changes, and a ton of visual changes:

• Many crash bug fixes
  • Won’t immediately crash to the springboard if you have no active internet connection (iPod Touch users). This often resulted in your buddy list being wiped. This has been fixed.
  • Occasionally downloading avatar images from Microsoft would result in a crash. This should be fixed.
• Redesigned Buddy List and Details View
  • The Buddy list now resembles the style of displaying friends that Xbox.com uses! (Thanks Mike Jefferson and Erik Bye for your help here..)
  • The gamer details view has been redesigned by TOTUSHI. You can find him online here: http://www.totushi.com/. He is a visual artist that does excellent freelance work.
• Message Xbox buddy’s with www.xbox.com
• Online buddies are automatically moved to the top of your buddy list
• The application now does some under-the-hood caching of gamer tag avatars, which should result in better loading performance.

iXboxLive is also sporting a new Springboard Icon, designed by Erik Bye:

Time for some screenshots!

Wow!  I’ve gotten a huge response from the Internet about iXboxLive 1.0.  Over all mostly positive, but there are some big issues that I need to fix for the first update.

• I’ve fixed the crash that occurs when theres no active internet connection, which often resulted in your iXboxLive buddy list to be whiped out.
• I’ve hopefully fixed the source of random startup crashes.
• I’ve increased loading performance significantly.  iXboxLive will load its main interface and add buddys to the buddy list as their information is retrieved.  (As opposed to what it does now, and waits for all the information retrieval to be finished before displaying the main interface)

More info to come.

Xbox Live is great - there’s no questioning that, but sometimes you just really want to check your Buddy List without having to turn on the Xbox, or fire up Xbox.com in a browser.

iXboxLive is your Xbox Buddy List(*) on your iPhone or iPod Touch!

• See your select buddy list
• See what they are currently playing
• See their gamer pic
• See their gamer score, gamer reputation, and location
• See their list of recent games, including scores and last played dates
• More features to come!

* This application uses the Microsoft Xbox Community Developer SDK, which is private and only available to a limited number of developers.  Due to limitations of this SDK, you will have to specify which gamertags to view on your local buddy list, and you will not be able to use all of the features you would expect from Xbox.com (like messaging friends)
** It is highly discouraged to add more then a dozen or so gamertags to your local buddy list.  The initial loading time of the application will increase significantly for each gamertag you add - so be cautious!

Now that project #1 is out the door, and pending Apple review… it is time to start planning and working on the more important project:  Porting MobileTwitter to the AppStore.

Laid some foundation work this afternoon, will definitely need to revisit the icons used in MobileTwitter 1.5 (as they look like crap, and I need someone to make me new ones)

Changed around the Gamer Details screen a little bit again:

• Using the Xbox Orange
• Using the Gamer score icon where appropriate
• Bold header for Recent Games list

Finally was able to deploy iXboxLive to my iPhone for testing on an actual device, way too many steps Apple.  There HAS to be a way to make this easier.

It feels really nice to see my hard work in a tangible form, as opposed to being on the simulator on my desktop, but it really shows some areas where I need to improve some items:

• Color profile on my monitor is apparently quite different from the iPhone, so the colors look different when deployed to the device.
• Asynchronous image downloading from the internet is an absolute requirement (implemented already), BUT you also should cache those images.  Multiple simultaneous downloads over 3G seem to be painful for the iPhone.

Generally though, the application performs well on the hardware.  Not surprisingly, since I wrote the original version straight on the iPod Touch (no simulator was available for the iPhone toolchain “back-in-the-day”).

I’ll do some more testing and optimizing for connections over 3G and Edge, and then start the deploy-to-AppStore process, which is any ones guess how long it will take.

Hopefully my first *legit* iPhone app will be in the AppStore soon.

Nearing completion I think… today I changed the DetailsView around a little bit, and now it looks like this:

For reference, you can see what it looked like in the last revision here.