0 You've been promoted! Posted on 20. Apr, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

It has been pretty silent the last month. I have been busy with work, holidays, iPhone apps and more stuff.

First off, there has been an interesting development at work. My boss announced him leaving the company and they needed one or more people to fill in his job. Just before I left for a week of fishing in Denmark I heard that they would let 2 colleagues and me take over his responsibilities! W00t! So from today on, I am trying to lead my colleagues to get things done!

Next up, I am working on a game for iPhone OS 3.0, which uses a couple of new features that aren’t available in 2.0 yet. Can’t talk about it too much yet, but everyone who played it, loved it! The game will be ready for release, when iPhone OS 3.0 and the new iPhone are released. A funny fact: I tried emailing a phone store in Belgium, to reserve a new iPhone, when it comes out. But it turns out, you can’t get yourself on the list, before the phone is announced…. .

I am also getting more active on StackOverflow. I must say, it’s getting a bit addictive and the reputation system works very good. If you don’t participate yet, make sure you check it out. I also love the way StackOverflow is now taking over Experts Exchange position in Google, because that site is just annoying.

I hope I will be updating my blog more often now.

PS: ReviewReader was denied by Apple. I tried arguing with them, but they do not respond to my emails

0 Windows 7, new features in the announced RC1 Posted on 27. Feb, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

Windows 7 build 7000 en 7022 are pretty good. 7022 is a lot faster than 7000 for me, especially browsing local disks.

Well, Microsoft posted a list of changes they made when going from the beta to the first RC! You can see that list here.

What I find very interesting, are the the next few points:

2. Windows Logo + <#> keyboard shortcut – This gives you the option to cycle through the open instances of an application located on nr # of your taskbar!
5. Taskbar scaling – This makes the taskbar contain more icons of applications! Woohoo! It also states that applications can’t register itself on the taskbar anymore, which is a good thing!

All in all, I only read good things about RC1…. now all we need is a date of release

14 Running Sitecore 6 on Windows 7's IIS Posted on 27. Feb, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

Just posting this info, for all the people getting an error after installing Sitecore 6 on IIS7 of Windows 7.

The error

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Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
 
Exception Details: System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: The system cannot find the file specified.

Well, the solution is rather easy… make sure you got the following code in your global.asax

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  public void Application_Start() {
	  System.Security.Cryptography.RSACryptoServiceProvider.UseMachineKeyStore = true;
	  System.Security.Cryptography.DSACryptoServiceProvider.UseMachineKeyStore = true;
  }

0 Make Xcode behave more like Visual Studio ;) Posted on 26. Feb, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

I am getting used to Xcode more and more, but the default behavior for double clicking files in the file tree really sucks. In the default mode it opens up an extra window, which is annoying when you are used to Visual Studio.

I googled on this a lot lately and I couldn’t find any answers, so I finally went looking through the settings of Xcode, just to see what I could tweak. Well I found it!

Well first, you need to close all project windows in your Xcode and then go to the Xcode preferences screen.

In the general tab, set the layout option to “Condensed”. After that you can open up a project and your file tree will be a undocked window. Double click one of the files in your tree, that should open up a code windows and on the code windows’ right-top side should appear 2 icons like this:

Make sure the 2nd icon from the right says “Grouped”. If it says ungrouped just click it once to make it say “Grouped”.

After that, when you double click a file, it will just show you the code in the currently open code window! Hurray!

0 Using Cocoa and Google Translate together Posted on 23. Feb, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

For my AppReviews application I have trying to get Cocoa and Google Translate to work together. Note that this is still a work in progress and in this example the length of the text you submit is limited to the GET limit size.

Get the code after the jump…. (more…)

0 Want to close a MacBook Pro but keep external display alive? Posted on 21. Feb, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

I recently bought myself a new LCD monitor, to use with my MacBook Pro. The problem is that it is so big that using my MacBook Pro display next to it isn’t really useful anymore. So would like to just close my MacBook Pro and don’t put the system to sleep, while keeping my external monitor alive.

Well normally this can’t be done really fast, but I will show you a solution. First off, I needed to change the way the MacBook behaved when closing the lid. Normally it saves your memory to disk and then goes to sleep. This slowed down the process of what I wanted A LOT (taking up more than a minute). So what I did was change the hibernation mode, by doing this:

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sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Now, if you want to close the MacBook and want to keep working, do the following:
- Make sure your MacBook is connected to the power outlet.
- Make sure your external display is connected too.
- Close the lid of your MacBook
- Wait till the power LED starts fading in and out, so you know that the MacBook is asleep.
- Awake the MacBook with an external mouse or keyboard.

Tadaaa, voila.

12 NSURLConnection in it's own thread Posted on 20. Feb, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

I am currently working on perfecting my new AppReviews application. It sure coming along nicely but I ran into some trouble.

Because I am pulling a lot of data from the web, I wanted to update a progress bar when data arrives and show the user some progress. Of course you can normally do this by putting your web activity in a separate thread and making sure that thread notifies your main thread when changes occur.

Well, in Cocoa this isn’t that simple. For my web activities I created a new class and when I want to pull data from the web I do that by putting it in it’s own thread.

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NSString* url = @"http://your.url/here";
NSURL* nsurl = [NSURL URLWithString:url];
NSMutableURLRequest* urlReq = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:nsurl];
NSURLConnection *conn = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:urlReq delegate:self];

My class contains all the necessary delegate methods like :

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- (void) connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data;
- (void) connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection;

But once the NSURLConnection is launched in a seperate thread, the delegate methods do not get triggered anymore. This probably because the thread is finished before your class actually executed all it’s code.

After you initialized the NSURLConnection object, you actually need to put the class in an infinite loop to make sure the class is still alive when the delegate methods are hit.

For example:

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NSString* url = @"http://your.url/here";
NSURL* nsurl = [NSURL URLWithString:url];
NSMutableURLRequest* urlReq = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:nsurl];
NSURLConnection *conn = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:urlReq delegate:self];
 
while(!finished) {
	[[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] runMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode beforeDate:[NSDate distantFuture]];
}
 
- (void) connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection
{
	finished = TRUE;
}

‘finished’ is a bool variable, which declare in your .h file.

Hope this helps some people out, because this bugged for a while…..

0 4.000.000 Wallpapers served Posted on 29. Jan, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

Yesterday the 4.000.000th wallpaper was served through my iPhone application WallPaper. I never imagined that it would go this fast, because earlier this month we reached the 2.000.000th WallPaper.

Currently there are over 7.000 wallpapers in the database and currently over a hundred are added every day! Thanks for that!

1 Spray On released! Posted on 28. Jan, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

I just received an email about my new iPhone Application, Spray On, being released soon! It was accepted without problems in the first run! (that’s a first!). Check out a screenshot in the image gallery here.

I also created a page about my iPhone applications here.

0 Updating blog layout Posted on 28. Jan, 2009 by Wim Haanstra.

Since my iPhone application was launched I noticed that there is the need for a good website, just to give (future) customers more information about my applications.

The previous layout, was more of a tech-layout, which I ditched for this new one. I will be customizing this layout in the next couple of days, to make it work with the normal layout. Sorry ’bout that.