Monthly Archives: October 2010

iOS Ad-Hoc Beta publishing directly from Xcode

A couple of weeks ago I posted about automating Ad-Hoc publishing using some simple shell scripting and a modified version of the BetaBuilder utility by Hunter Hillegas. Based on a comment on his blog I’ve taken this a step further: I’ve fully integrated the publishing mechanism into Xcode. Here’s how… Continue reading

Poor-guys CDN (ish)


For fun, I setup a couple of Squid proxies in reverse-proxy fashion to see how it performed. Overall, I am happy with the result but a key thought behind the idea is to provide front-end resilience to the resources they publish. To that end, I made what can be best described as a poor-guys CDN. It’s not truly a CDN in the sense of global presence nor the ability to choose a front-end server closer to the end-user (not least because some of that functionality is patent-encumbered), but it does provide some degree of resilience.
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Automated Ad-Hoc Beta iPhone App Publishing

A while back, I came across Jeffrey Sambells post about iOS Wireless App Distribution, thought “that’s cool, I could automate most of that” and then promptly forgot about it. A little after this, Hunter Hillegas introduced iOS Beta Builder which I also thought “cool, I could extend that to do some of the automation I thought about” and then forgot about it again. Continue reading

The anatomy of a page curl

As I was developing the ABC of the Sea App, which is an interactive picture-book based on a proof-of-concept Tara (my wife) made many years ago and did not publish, one of the early and obvious items on the checklist of cool things it should do is have a nice page curl transition when moving between pages. Initially I expected this to be easy – Apples Apps do this, iBooks on the iPad especially, so it’s built in, right?

Wrong. Well, mostly wrong. I quickly discovered that the only documented curling transition for a UIView goes up/down, not left/right. It’s the one that Maps uses. Some Googling then revealed that an undocumented transition did perform left/right curling. However, being undocumented means it’s not viable for an App Store submission. It may later acquire an official constant and become kosher, but not yet.

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How to find the moon

Moon during Lunar Eclipse

The Moon

Intriguing title for a first web log post? I thought so! It’s the working title for something that, like so much that I am doing now, exists only in my head at the moment. It will be a childrens story based on a series of dialogue with my daughter on the way to school that began with:

Her: “Where are we going?”

Me: “The moon!”

Her: “Really? How do we get there?”

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