The Evolution of Lunchbox

Introduction

This is an account of how I devised and designed Lunchbox, my first completed iPhone application that will hopefully be in the App Store in a few weeks. It’s much longer than I originally thought it would be but rather than try to trim it down I thought it might be an interesting read for other developers and maybe its users so that they can see what goes into creating a ‘simple’ application. In addition, I am planning on following this article up with a set of smaller articles detailing some of the development issues I had and how I solved them.

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QuickTime Chapters

Introduction

Following on from my article about renaming QuickTime tracks I thought I'd add another QuickTime article, this time about chapters. This is a topic I first looked into because although my Elgato EyeTV creates some chapter points when it exports files I wanted more control over them. The article will cover the basics of adding, renaming and deleting chapters along with a couple of other bonus bits of information.

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Rename QuickTime Tracks

As a result of doing quite a bit of work with QuickTime and QTKit someone asked me if I had some sample code which would allow them to rename an audio track in a QuickTime file . I'd never actually done this but I decided to have a look into it and it turns out that it is pretty easy.

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Embedding Fonts in an Application

I'm working on an application that needs to display the current timecode of a movie file. I wanted to create a display that looked something like an old-school VCR clock and found a font whose license allowed me to distribute it freely. The next problem was being able include the font in my application's bundle rather than having to have it installed in one of the traditional font folders. Fortunately this turned out to be easier than I expected.

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Application Accessibility

Martin Pilkington of M Cubed Software, has published a blog post about application accessibility and how some major Mac applications fall short in providing robust implementations. In the article Martin declared that his application will all be fully accessible by the end of 2009 and defined the parameters as:

• The UI available to VoiceOver users should be as user friendly as the visual UI
• All UI elements should have titles and/or descriptions
• All custom controls should provide full keyboard access
• There should be a clear and logical order to navigating UI fields with the keyboard
• Every part of my application should be reachable without the mouse

He also threw down the challenge to other developers to do like-wise and I'm delighted to say that I'll be taking him up on it so all Otter Software products will be made fully accessible during 2009.

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Automating Build Numbers

Introduction

In my previous post about Version Numbers I briefly mentioned the idea of including build numbers in your version numbering scheme. To make this easier some people automatically populate this build number with the version number of the code from their source code repository.

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Version Numbers

The Core Intuition Podcast

In episode four of Core Intuition, Daniel Jalkut's and Manton Reece's excellent podcast, the conversation evolved from Apple's Design Awards to application version numbering. Daniel and Manton raised some very good points and this has prompted me to use their thoughts as the basis of writing an article about it. If you want to listen to this particular episode then you can download it via http://coreint.org/audio/CoreInt_4.mp3. The section about version numbers starts at 15:20 but I would strongly recommend that you start at the beginning, listen all the way through and then subscribe to the podcast and listen to all of the other back-episodes. Many thanks to Daniel and Manton for allowing me to plagiarise their work.

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Handling Older Versions of OS X Gracefully

One of the advantages of being a newcomer to Cocoa is that I can make my life easier (albeit at the expense of a few potential users) and concentrate on Leopard-only code and ignore all of those previous version of OS X that have gone before. A result of this, however, is needing to tell a user who has downloaded your application that they need a more recent version of OS X or even simply that they need to update from, say, version 10.5.2 to 10.5.4.

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Resources For A New Developer

Introduction

As a new Cocoa developer I've spent a fair amount of time ferreting around for useful books, web sites, podcasts and blogs, forums and discussion lists and looking into source code repositories. This article will highlight some of the best that I have found to date and will be the first post in my 'Resources' category. There are a several more books that I have and many more sites and blogs that I visit but these are some of the key ones so they get mentioned first.

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