• Added iPad 2 stencil to UI and Wireframes
• Removed full screen width UIPickers for iPad stencil in preference to popover controllers.
• Changed the backing color of the stencil canvases to a light gray because OmniGraffle Pro 5.2.3 seems to ignore stencil background colors and lightened or darkened existing shapes to ensure visibility.

When Apple reveals more about what will certainly be iOS 5.0 at WWDC this summer, I will begin planning an update for iOS 5.0 changes and would love to work on a similar set of stencils for Mac applications.

Some interesting aspects include:

• No backing or support images required to draw the tab bar interface. The bar, tab item selections and arrow indicator are implemented as CALayers.
• Tab bar and tab items support two styles, a standard appearance a la UITabBar or with an arrow indicator a la Tweetie / Twitter).
• UIImage category takes black images masks and renders with gray and blue selection gradients like UITabBar/UITabBarItem
• Uses UIView block animations to respect the hidesBottomBarWhenPushed property on contained UIViewControllers.
• Uses ObjC associatedObject API to associate tab items and the tab controller with contained view controllers.

Screen capture of the “tweetie” style tab bar…

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs

Best statement I’ve seen so far on the matter.

The first time I realized Apple might be thinking of a tablet came to me last spring quite by accident. My brother, also a Mac developer, was discussing potentials uses for frameworks and new APIs in iPhone OS 3.0. He brought up the topic of the table rumor point at some point in our dialogue.

I was skeptical of the broad impact of such a device and of hearing new media douche bags  prattle on about it. This is my 8th year as a full time Mac developer and you grow thick skin regarding many of the long fantasized devices the MacMacs dream up.

I took issue with a point he made. I reached behind me to grab something flat to illustrate. I happened to grasp a DVD case. I sat and played with for a few minutes, tap typed on it. Then I calculated what the screen size might be vs iPhone OS devices and had a reversal.

Holding an object of that width and height, I realized it felt right. The size and weight is perfect for a thumb typing interface. Try holding your large moleskine, 7.5 by 9.75, 12 inches diagonal in your hand and thumb typing. Doesn’t work. Too big. Think 10 inches… diagonal. Think those little PADs from The Next Generation. As for the screen resolution, perhaps I am just hoping for the death of pixels but hope we see the payout of that long work through Leopard and Snow Leopard for resolution independence. That… would be exciting.

Obviously an operating system based on a mach microkernel with with C, Obj-C and Core Foundation and Cocoa-based frameworks is involved.  Absolutely it will be part of the iTMS ecosystem from day. Certainly, it will be beautiful. The questions I have are, “What problem does it solve?” and “What will Apple permit to create markets beyond throwaway applications at slot machine prices. I’ve helped make than enough of them  and working on one or two myself.

WebServiceKit is an Objective-C library for building web service clients that uses the NSURLConnection and NSOperation. This code was yanked out a project and cleanup up a bit so I has lost some context. I need to document it and build an example application with the JSON and XML libraries forks of the JSON framework and DDXML I have called JSONKit and XMLKit.

BuildKit will require a lot of more documentation but it is the project tree structure that I use with Xcode projects and Subversion to create an easy to use environment to quickly create new shared libraries (static for iPhone, frameworks for Mac OS X) and application projects that can all share libraries and resources.

I’ll get to writing documentation and how to use these things over the coming weekend.

I answered the question the relevant questions off the top of my head, Joe Hewitt marked the offending code for debug only builds. Jonathan Saggau followed up with a nice category to UIWindow to do the recursive search for the first responder.

I get the feeling that some of these folks don’t even know WHY they are using the Three20 library… which is concerning.

• Glacial pace of application reviews.
• Walls of separation between user and developer.
• Application rejections that often seem capricious or arbitrary reasons.
• 
  Paid apps subsidizing Free apps. I am looking in your general direction 99¢ and Lite crapapps…
  

On carpeaqua today, Justin added grist to the mill with Where Do I Sign Up?. He ends his article with:

The AppStore is partially a success because of the infrastructure Apple built, but it wouldn’t be anything without the software developers. I wonder when Apple will realize that?

As both developer and user, I want to carry his last thought forward with this?

What happens when users are unable or unwilling to find and successfully evaluate any application?

Exemplars of code and interaction design, which require huge investments of time, effort and capital are faced with the possibility of failure once admitted into the overcrowded AppStore.

#FIXME

An idea came to me today that would fix some of the issues above. Use of a Follow model, applied correctly, could give users and developers trust like relationships, improve application discoverability and serve as the basis to begin filtering the steady streams of crapapps.

Improvements in user / developer dialogue and findability of applications would make a hell of a lot of developers really happy. Here are a couple of the key concepts flittering around in my not to bright noggin:

• Following – Follower / following between user and app developers and companies of interest.
• Filtering – Follow relationships as filter a users view of the AppStore. Crap Apps go away, good apps appear. The “Genius” feature would be an interesting way to implement this feature.
• Using – Make, edit and sync Following and filtering on devices and iTunes desktop. A freely downloadable app for devices to provide a continuing dialogue on updates, releases, support and responding to bogus or troll ratings.
• Service API – Allow programmatic access on a per developer basis to these features of the AppStore infrastructure that developers can incorporate into the websites and web applications.
• Communities “Feeds” – Feed oriented access to AppStore application metadata, categories and ratings that allow alternate views into the sea of similarity that is the AppStore.

If successful, Apple might be able to take an intermediary role and focus on maintaining the infrastructure and capabilities of the AppStore, iTunes Connect and iPhone OS.

“I’ve never doubted the viability of running a serious business of writing iPhone apps before. For the first time, now, I am.”

I have been getting these feelings since January of this year, in particular as the discovery of new applications became close to impossible and it seemed clear that Apple did not see it as an issue worth resolution. In seven years of exclusive focus on the development of software for Mac OS X and now iPhone OS, it appeared to me that Apple was quite simply overwhelmed. I felt confident they would catch up with issues, resolve them to the satisfaction of the majority of developers and move forward.

After WWDC this year, I was ready to throw in the towel on the AppStore as a viable market for a small software business and refocus my project work on Snow Leopard and Mac OS X. The problem that looms over my head now is continued  justification of the AppStore as a market to the executives (and ultimately the investors) that I work for.

Remebering Apollo 11 on The Big Picture from The Boston Globe
NASA Releases Preview Partially Restored Apollo 11 Video
Weaving the way to the Moon on BBC News

This last one from BBC on the Guidance Computer used on the Apollo spacecraft is great. The debate between the engineers and the pilots is classic and to a certain extent both where proven right, the pilots in particular with Apollo 13. Being both a software engineer and a licensed pilot (Private Pilot, Instrument Rated, Single and Multi Engine), I see both sides of the argument and tend to come down on the side of the pilots and astronauts.

Half ass placeholder pages until the graphic designer does her magic but I think you get the point.

1. Get the latest episode.
2. Listen intently.
3. Subscribe to podcast in iTunes.
4. Listen intently to all episodes.
5. Be enlightened and entertained simultaneously.

You will thank me in the next life and possibly this one.

In large part it comes from exposure to the material year after blinking year as well as six years spent developing on Apple platforms.

Will write up a full review of the non-NDA material once I get a nap. I’m tired not from WWDC so much as having to get up at 5 am for the flight home.