iPhone AdHoc Provisioning Tip

Has anyone experienced problems with AdHoc provisioning on iPhone SDK 4?
I had a problem that took me while to overcome. Each time I dragged my app into iTunes I got a message saying:

"A provisioning profile named embedded.mobileprovision already exists on this computer. Do you want to replace it?"

I had a perfectly working setup to create AdHoc distributions of iPhone apps. What has changed?
The only difference was that I created a new Target within the same project. Luckily, I had one target that still worked as AdHoc built. I could boil it down to a missing property in info.plist of the new target.
Adding LSRequiresIPhoneOS and setting it to true did the trick.

If you have a similar problem please check out also this blog entry.

Our thoughts on the iPad for business published in The Age

The iPad is not just a development device to us here at jTribe. We use it in all aspects of our business as well. Recently we were interviewed for an article on how the iPad is being used for business. This has recently be published in The Age Small Business Section here - iPad for small business: hot or not?

"... Daniel Bradby, director of jTribe, which creates applications for iPads and iPhones, relies on it as an essential business tool. “We make presentations to clients on an iPad; it's great for showing our multimedia capabilities and screen shots of applications we've developed. It's a relaxed and informal way of presenting. It's a really collaborative device and clients can also use the screen.”

Bradby says the collaborative nature of the iPad also means it's useful when his team develops presentations. “It's great because two people can touch the screen at the same time. It really is a shared control device, and it doesn't have the formality of the mouse and keyboard.”

Bradby and his team use the iPad to undertake research when developing client presentations and also during client meetings. “You can Google something then and there and move on, rather than having to wait until after the meeting to find out a piece of information.”

The key application Bradby uses is Apple's iWorks suite, which includes the Pages word processing program, the Numbers spreadsheet tool and Keynote presentation software. He also consumes content such as newspapers on the iPad.

Although he's an advocate for the iPad Bradby recognises it has potential for improvement. “You can view your calendar but you can't create a meeting invitation from the iPad,” he says."

Just to clarify the last piece about calendars on the iPad. Yes you can create invites on the iPad, but you cannot currently open calendar invites from emails, or add invitees for events created on shared calendars. However I know Apple is listening and will have it fixed shortly ... please?

jTribe looking at China markets

jTribe will be part of Games Mission to Shanghai. http://en.chinajoy.net/

We are looking forward to create great contacts in the Chinese Gaming community.

We will demonstrate some of our new games at the expo and Patrick Dockhorn will be available to meetings at the expo.

As our Touch Board games is quite a success in China we hope of following up with some more games soon.

Different behaviour in iOS4 for NSError and NSURLConnection

After running some of our apps now on iOS4 we were surprised that there were much more crashes. This little code section is what caused the crashes:

NSURLRequest *request=[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:requestStr]

cachePolicy:NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy

timeoutInterval:10.0];

NSURLResponse *response;

NSError *error;

NSData *responseData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&error];

if(error) {

NSLog(@"error: %@", [error localizedDescription]);

}

After hours of debugging we could narrow it down to the line of code that initialises the NSError. Setting it to nil did remove the crash. So make sure your code looks like this:

NSError *error = nil;

We are currently investigating more issues we have with code that ran perfectly fine in 3.x and now starts crashing with iOS4. The above line fixed approximately 80% of our problems.

Good luck making your apps ready for iOS4.

Interviewed by Computer World about iPhone 4.0 and Augmented Reality

iPhone 4.0 is coming in June and we can see already that the possibilities for augmented reality on the platform are going to be taken to the next level. Computer World magazine recently interviewed us about iPhone 4.0 and we provided careful (within the NDA) insight into what we can expect come June.

Bradby said Apple’s updated application programming interface (API) could allow location-based applications like Wikitude to create a physical environment in addition to overlaying information.

“What you can't currently do is marker-based augmented reality, where you hold up a picture frame and [it] recognises that picture frame and places an object on it.

“Unless you move that picture frame around, the object will stick to the picture frame, and what we're looking [for] is whether the API that Apple has opened up actually supports that type of augmented reality or at least a richer experience [of it].”

While the most obvious improvement in iPhone 4.0 will be allowing apps to be run in the background, we feel the improvements to the augmented reality experience are over looked and would spur innovation.

You can see the whole article here - iPhone OS 4.0 improvements to augment developer opportunities

iPhone Development Training at OpenHub

The three day Melbourne intensive workshop at the OpenHub, May 21 -23, from 10am-6pm covers the fundamentals and advanced feature of iPhone development, enough material that you should be able to develop your own iPhone application and upload it to the AppStore. The workshop is limited in size and features hands on exercises under the supervision of the instructor and teaching assistants.

Instructors:
Paris Butterfield-Addison & Jonathon Manning, Secret Lab co-founder

Paris Butterfield-Addison is a founding partner and producer at Secret Lab, an innovative Hobart-based Mac, Windows, and iPhone game and application development studio. Paris holds First Class Honours degrees in Computer Science. Throughout the past 5 years, Paris has held multiple Apple-funded scholarships through the Apple University Consortium. A frequent speaker and trainer, Paris speaks at the foremost Apple evelopment conference in Australia, /dev/world, on a yearly basis and has presented training on topics ranging from REALbasic, to iPhoneDevelopment to 3D Game Development for audiences ranging from high-school to senior citizens to corporate executives.

More recently, Paris, together with business partner Jon Manning, has been engaged to write the book "iPhone Game Development for Dummies" together with Neal Goldstein (the successful author of "iPhone Application Development for Dummies"), to be published by Wiley in January 2010. Paris is an expert developer turned educator and producer, and is particularly fond of the Cocoa and iPhone platforms. He is also currently mid-way through obtaining a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on the use of iPhones.

Jon Manning has been freelancing since high school, and in 2005 came to Objective-C development. Jon's company, Secret Lab, was one of the first developers on the App Store, with their release of Culture, a puzzle-strategy game that was released on the first day of the store's launch.In addition to development work, Jon is a PhD student at the University of Tasmania, where he researches location-aware mobile social software. Jon has run several Apple development courses, and has presented at the Apple University Consortium's developer conference for two years running. Jon specializes in mobile application development and in the design of intuitive, enjoyable user experiences.

To reserve a seat go to: http://aus2.eventbrite.com/

jTribe on Melbourne Mobile Monday panel in May

Daniel Bradby and Armin Kroll from jTribe are pleased to be on this month's Mobile Monday panel. They are discussing all things iPhone and iPad.

They have heaps of interesting stories to share about what it takes to development high quality apps and some of the traps, pitfalls and rewards of developing iPhone/iPad apps.

Their presentation will have some case studies and some things you may not know about the jTribe team.