iPhone Keychain RESTful services

Well I’m glad to say my iPhone app is finally moving in the right direction, I’m finding stackoverflow to be a goldmine of pointers and code snippets and well explained!  Also during my rummaging I discovered that WordPress actually make their iPhone app source code available for you to download and play with, I think this is very helpful for newbies that are interested in finding how everyone else programs a full app (one accepted and shipping on the store!).

Keychains, this seems to be the way to go on the iPhone for storing users usernames and passwords securely, thankfully there is a class already to use without too much work from me, so I’ve implemented this in my code and so far so good!

http://log.scifihifi.com/post/55837387/simple-iphone-keychain-code

This site also helped point me in the right direction http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1536386

So now I have my loginViewController with a login form ready for my user to enter their details and also have the means for the values they enter to be stored securely and accessed by the app later on, so the next bit is validating their input with the website via some service. The iPhone SDK seems to have some nice easy methods for calling webservices and making use of them in the app. So I need to start making some webservices from my web app. So now I’m turning my attention away from the iphone app (kinda) and looking at making RESTful services.

First stop is http://blog.garethj.com/2009/02/building-a-restful-web-application-with-php/ – not sure this is any good but its going to be my starting point.

Also looking forward to the Apple announcement, saw a linked pic of the iSlate today…. very nice! Also Google phone could be an interesting idea, but I’m still sticking to the iPhone!

iPhone app rootController (Facebook style) and network detection features

As planned I started my iPhone app again, being lightly inspired by LinkedIn’s new interface I decided to rewrite my app and move away from a tabbed interface. Now my app runs using a navigation controller and icons are used to browse to different view.

So how far have i got? Well I’ve been working on it for three days on and off and I’ve set up a root controller that houses the icon interface, blank views ready for my various app views and a network detection that detect if the phone has any networking issues, if it does a network unavailable view is displayed as opposed to an alert view (might change this).

Some resources that I found useful so far are:

http://adylitica.com/2009/12/15/test-if-your-iphone-app-is-connected-to-internet/

http://www.raddonline.com/blogs/geek-journal/iphone-sdk-testing-network-reachability/

http://fuelyourcoding.com/iphone-view-switching-tutorial/

Next I need to tackle user login, sqlite3 and connection to my website using RESTful services. I’ll post as I go!

Tags: development, iPhone, iphone app

Joomla woes

Been a while since I posted on my blog but I’m finally getting back into twitter after an absence.

Over the last few months I’ve been busy designing the new Pride London website, we opted for a Joomla install as a CMS and all was well in the development stages but now i need to migrate the site to its new server I’m having problems after problems.

I used JoomlaPack, a module that helps back up and migrate Joomla installations, I knew something was probably going to go wrong as i had to hack some of the scripts to work on my server, but i chose to ignore these and continue with the installation.

Once I finally got the back up to work I download the rather bloaty 104MB back up folder and uploaded it to the new server. Then it took me a few attempts to get the kickstart.php script to work due to various permissions and locations of the back up files.

Finally it kicked off, but it installed all the folders and files as a root user with no write or execute permissions, so the problems get worse. All the files we there and i could see the site once i browsed to its location but none of the plugins worked, including the menu!

Now i had a bunch of files that don’t work an i can’t get rid of without the hosts intervention. So now i’m waiting the weekend for the host to get to work Monday and hopefully sort out my problem. I can over install due to the rights of the existing files .

Though this was going to be easy but sadly not. So my next attempt is going to be a manual transfer so I hope this goes easier!

Tags: joomla, pride

Firefox Toolbar

Finished my first Firefox toolbar at the weekend, it isn’t mind blowing yet, allows users to log in to the site via a button on the toolbar, jump to key areas in the site via drop down menus in the toolbar and has a search bar for people to search the site directly. Small steps and all that.

I hope to revisit this after I’ve finished my never ending iPhone app. I aim to integrate message alerts, maybe a side bar for news feeds and so ajax linking to get current info. All on the list of things to do.

References that I found helpful were:

http://www.borngeek.com/firefox/automatic-firefox-extension-updates/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/McCoy

http://www.shell-tools.net/index.php?op=hash_sha256

Also stumbled on references on how to provide a default search service using open search, so people can set your site to their default browser searches, might be something i look into:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/creating_opensearch_plugins_for_firefox

I hate IE6 the group

About 2 years ago I started a random group on facebook called ‘I hate IE6′ because of my frustration with IE6 at the time. I was surprised to see today that the membership of the group has been growing and I didn’t even notice! Current 654 members strong! The more the better, think of it as a stress relief exercise!

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=2463342409

or search I hate IE6 on facebook.

Interestingly a post on twitter lead me to this website, the main aim being to eradicate IE by fooling users on IE6 to update their browsers via a update bar in the browser…. probably unethical and I won’t be using it but thought I’d post the link anyway for those interested. http://ie6update.com/

Tags: facebook, IE6, Web Development