One of the main questions I get from people buying iPads is “how do I edit Word documents on the iPad?”. Right now there is no great solution for this. You can buy 3rd party apps that will let you open documents from your dropbox folder and edit them – but as anyone who have tried this can attest – there is a very high probability that any document edited in a 3rd party app will look very different when you open it on your PC in Word later. At best the fonts and alignments may be off at worst you may have just lost all the tracked changes that someone made.

I am sure that this is a huge factor for people wanting to use the iPad for work. People have told me that they are using citrix or remote desktop clients to access PCs so they can edit docs on the iPad, which just seems to defeat the whole purpose of having an iPad.

By Apple giving $100 to students they are giving a big discount on the iWorks suite (or maybe the students will just use it on music and games and ask their parents for $ for the iWorks suite). I hope that this will increase the number of people that adopt the Apple document platform and get people away from Word. With iCloud coming soon we will be able to open our Pages/Numbers/Keynote documents on the iPad / PC / Web (??). Personally, if the iPad could do documents well I would not need to bring a laptop when traveling anymore.

Getting criticism, be it from users through app reviews or emails or from bloggers, is a great way to push everyone to make better applications. I can clearly identify with the fact that developers have an emotional connection to the applications that they make. None of my applications make a huge amount of money and my main motivation is to provide people with great tools to use on their phone – so getting emails or reviews saying “this app sucks” is a feeling not much different than helping a complete stranger just to have them spit at you.

In my opinion, the app review system setup by Apple is one of the greatest innovations of the iOS platform and has been instrumental in the success of the App Store – before this the only way to give feedback was to email the developer and then they could do whatever they wanted – you had already paid for the app so they had no incentive to actually fix the issue. With public reviews and a rating system the incentive to fix issues brought up is much greater and this is something that will push apps to become better. Several times this has brought great new features to my apps and alerted me to features that were not as intuitive as I had originally thought.

Like many other Apple enthusiasts I was very excited for the launch of The Daily. Like many others I was disappointed at the initial product. I think that a lot of people expected the app to be Apple Great (like Maps, Garage Band etc) because of the hype and media buildup for the app and the apparent endorsement of the app by Apple. However, the app has several short falls which were pointed out and suggestions for improvements with implementation were posted. I do not understand why the developer of the app would be surprised that the app got a harsh reception when the developer admits himself that there were issues with the app that if they had longer time could have been sorted out.

I hope that the iOS developer community is grown up enough that we can accept criticism of our work and that we can learn from this and all strive towards making excellent if not perfect apps.

For your .h file:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>;
#import <iAd/iAd.h>;
@interface iAdViewController : UIViewController <ADBannerViewDelegate> {
	ADBannerView *adView;
 	BOOL bannerIsVisible;
}
@property (nonatomic,assign) BOOL bannerIsVisible;
@end

In the .m file you need the following:

- (void) viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated {
	// check if iAd is available
	Class classAdBannerView = NSClassFromString(@"ADBannerView");
	if (classAdBannerView) {
		// create iAd
		ADBannerView *bannerView = [[classAdBannerView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero];

		if (&ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait != nil) {
			// NEWER
			DLog(@"NEWER");
			bannerView.requiredContentSizeIdentifiers = [NSSet setWithObject:ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait];
			bannerView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait;
		} else {
			// OLDER
			DLog(@"OLDER");
			bannerView.requiredContentSizeIdentifiers = [NSSet setWithObject:ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier320x50];
			bannerView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier320x50;
		}

		bannerView.delegate=self;

		self.adView = bannerView;
		[self.view addSubview:adView];
		self.bannerIsVisible=NO;
		[bannerView release];

	}
	[super viewWillAppear: animated];
}

I am creating the bannerView programatically in order to have the app also work on pre iOS 4.1 devices. The check for ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait is to see if the user is using iOS 4.1 or newer iOS. In iOS 4.1 the identifiers were based on size – but in newer iOS the iPad got iAds and the size no longer made sense – thus the landscape/portrait designations.

Finally – if your app supports multiple interface orientations – you need to let the banner know that the device rotated so it can show the right size ad.

- (void)willRotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)toInterfaceOrientation duration:(NSTimeInterval)duration {

    if (&ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait != nil) {
        // NEWER
		DLog(@"NEWER");
        if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(toInterfaceOrientation))
            adView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierLandscape;
        else
            adView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait;
    } else {
        // OLDER
		DLog(@"OLDER");
        if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(toInterfaceOrientation))
            adView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier480x32;
        else
            adView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier320x50;
    }
}

The removal of this app is a huge let down since the the LogYourRun iPhone application relies on the application ID of the Facebook app in order to let people post their activity information on Facebook.  In addition to taking down the app they also took down the app’s Facebook page – so I have now lost all mode of communication with the application users and my inbox is currently getting flooded by emails from users letting me know that the app is no-longer working.

I am used to developing apps on a closed system – the iPhone – so I am used to following directions on how the user experience should be and what I can and cannot do.  For Facebook applications the terms of service is described in their Platform Policies (http://developers.facebook.com/policy).  The terms in this policy are very nebulous and include things such as “Create a great user experience” and “Be trustworthy” but does not actually define what “spammy” is – though from my albeit infrequent use of Facebook, I would think that Farmville would fit that description better than the LogYourRun application.  In addition I do not see a single term in the document that the LogYourRun app violates.  The app clearly pops up a stream.publish dialog (created using the Facebook JS library on the web or their SDK on the iPhone!) which the user can clearly decide to click post or skip.

I tried appealing the removal of the app and I must say that I appreciate that they got back to me within a couple of hours – though the reply could have easily come from the same algorithm that deleted the app (see below).  It crushed all hopes of ever reviving the app and restoring communication to the over 30K users of the app.

So now I am left with having to update the iPhone app so it does not link to the broken Facebook app.  It was surprisingly easy to setup a new application – which is probably why they need to have algorithms for taking them down also.  This will allow me to go back to being an enabler of my evil spamming users so they can once again brag about their exercise activities.

In the mean time developers have to rely on shipping their apps with large bundles of mp3 or aiff files in order to get their applications to talk to the users. Or they can implement some of the online TTS engines or TTS engines made for the iPhone. The results are terrible in all cases that I have observed – if an app needs to only speak predefined words the developer will load all of these as sound files that will be downloaded with the app. This leads to bloated app bundles and wastes bandwidth and phone storage media. The iPhone TTS engines also take considerable amounts of space and if anyone has been able to understand what the app Social Radio is saying to them they deserve a medal. Then there are apps that use online TTS engines and essentially downloads the sound file on demand. This is probably more efficient and has a better result – but you need an internet connection and you will always be at the mercy of the TTS engine provider.

So Apple – please open up the great TTS engine of the iPhone to developers so we can make apps that will be able to talk to the users.

iMovie is very easy to use and after taking a couple of guesses on what the different buttons mean you can quickly get a hang of video editing using the phone – or you can use the excellent help from within the app. The phone version of iMovie has two simple transitions as well as a straight cut to the next video segment with no transition option. iMovie also comes with a couple of preset styles, which allow you to add text to your video clips (double tap the clip), but I did not use those for this project.

After editing the video it took about 3 minutes to export the final video and another 10 minutes to upload in HD to YouTube (over WiFi).

	MFMailComposeViewController *mail = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
	mail.mailComposeDelegate = self;

	if ([MFMailComposeViewController canSendMail]) {

		//Setting up the Subject, recipients, and message body.
		[mail setToRecipients:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"YOUREMAIL.com",nil]];
		[mail setSubject: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ iPhone Application Feedback", kTWApplicationName]];
		[mail setMessageBody:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"\n\n\nIn order for us to better help you, please provide the following information:\nCountry: \n\nDebug info:\n%@ v %@\niOS version %@\nModel: %@",
							  kTWApplicationName,
							  [[[NSBundle mainBundle] infoDictionary] objectForKey:@"CFBundleVersion"],
							  [[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion],
							  [[UIDevice currentDevice] model]

							  ] isHTML:NO];

		//Present the mail view controller
		[self presentModalViewController:mail animated:YES];
	}

	//release the mail
	[mail release];

The  TWApplicationName is a constant that is set to the string value of the application name – this allows you to also see which application your user is asking about in case you have more than one app.

To run this program on all files in a folder run the following command from the terminal after copying the sox program to the folder:

for i in *.aif; do ./sox $i ${i%.*}.aiff gain -n 8; done;

In the instance above the original files are .aif and they were converted to have the file extension .aiff.  I tried to overwrite the original file – but that did not work well.

The following code gets you the timezone offset in hours:

NSDateFormatter* dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"Z"]; // error in documentation - the zone in hours should be 'z' not 'Z'
timezoneoffset = (int) [[dateFormatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]] intValue]/100;
DLog(@"format %@", [dateFormatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]]);
[dateFormatter release];

(Note the division by 100 is because the timezone is reported in military time so for 30 min offset the final timezone would be read as x.30 which is not really correct – but for getting a ballpark figure it would suffice).

Since the code is not behaving according to documentation it is not a good idea to use this to get the timezone because the code will break if the code ever starts behaving according to documentation.

Instead it turns out that there is a very nice NSTimeZone object which will give you the timezone offset from GMT in seconds:

int timezoneoffset = ([[NSTimeZone systemTimeZone] secondsFromGMT] / 3600);

Then all you have to do to get the hour difference is divide by 3600 (seconds per hour). If you cared about the half hour offsets you would make this a float – but this is plenty for getting a ballpark figure.