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
Monthly Archives: October 2010
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.
Continue reading
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.
How to find the moon
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?”