I received my iPhone Developer Program activation code this morning, followed the on-line instructions and had no issues at all. My iPhone (Blackberry) and my iTouch (Raspberry) are now provisioned and useable for development and testing.

Double cool.

It has been just over two weeks since I applied to the developer program, so Monday evening I sent an e-mail using the ‘Contact Us’ page on the developer website asking about my status.

Early this morning I received this message from Apple:

Dear Registered iPhone Developer,

We noticed that you have not yet completed your enrollment in the iPhone Developer Program. Please log in using your Registered iPhone Developer Apple ID to continue with the enrollment process. If you have any questions, or need assistance in completing your enrollment, please contact us.

Best regards,

iPhone Developer Program

When I logged in, I was presented with the iPhone SDK click-through agreement which I am sure I clicked through before, but once I agreed (again), I was able to purchase the developer program through the on-line store.

I assume the message was a reply to my status e-mail, but I guess it could have been a very timely coincidence. Either way, I am just waiting for my purchase to arrive via e-mail so I can begin testing on my iPhone and iTouch.

Cool.

If you are interested in meeting with other iPhone developers in central Ohio, there is a google discussion group and the potential to start meeting together in the coming months.

See Christopher Judd’s original announcement, or join the Google discussion group.

What Seth says about ideas,

The quality of ideas is not a factor in whether or not you will be in a position to have a chance to sell those ideas.
Seth Godin

is true for other things as well. If you have the ability to do something well (or not), that is orthogonal to whether you are in a position to do so.

If you want to get better at your craft, it takes work.

If you want to have better opportunities to use your craft, that takes work as well…just a different kind of work.

I attended my first COJUG meeting last night in Dublin, Ohio. My goals for going were to:

• Meet some somewhat local developers (the majority of those I know are out of state),
• Find out if the traveling to Columbus was worth the bother (about 90 minutes one-way),
• Learn more about Groovy and Grails.

It was a decent size group, especially considering this was the second meeting of the day (they also meet during lunch on the same day.). I had a chance to talk with several people while there, and look forward to going back.

I think the travel time will not be an issue for me, although working from my home office much of the time has spoiled me — it had been quite some time since I had to tangle with commute time traffic in a large city. I listened to some Mac Developer Roundtable podcasts on the way up and back, so it kept me in the “working” mode.

The presentation by Joseph Faisal Nusairat was on “Spring Web Flow inside of Grails “. He is a co-author of “Beginning Groovy and Grails“, and seemed to know Groovy and Grails well. Since the presentation was on integrating Spring Web Flow and Grails, it was not a lot of detail on Grails itself — Joe bravely did live editing and demonstrations, and recovered well from those gremlins that afflict any live development session. I learned enough from the session to pique my interest in Groovy and Grails, and will probably spend some time in the next couple of months exploring them. I think Spring Web Flow looks promising, but I would need to read more about it before I would commit to trying it.

All my goals were met, and I found the evening worth while. I plan on attending again.

Doug

My goals

This past year, I have read many discussions about the pros and cons about distributed version control systems (DVCS), and git in particular. It seemed like it might be a better fit for the style of development I have been doing the last few years, but since our current process worked well enough, it wasn’t worth the bother to switch at the time.

But, I was intrigued, and decided to use git in a project sometime soon, and even though my new project is a solo project at the moment, it gives me to get accustomed to git.

I had some pretty fuzzy goals when starting:

1. Use git for version control
2. Integrate git with XCode as much as possible
3. Setup separate physical machine for a remote repository

And at the time, I wasn’t quite ready to begin, so I gathered my thoughts into a simple project on Things. (Things deserves a post of it’s own — very useful, flexible, and straightforward.)

Setting up a new server

Fortunately, since I wanted a remote repository on physically separate machine, I had an old pc sitting around that had not yet been completely scavenged.

A friend of mine recommended Ubuntu, so I decided to try it. I retrieved the latest installation image, Ubuntu 8.10, burned it to cd, and installed. The installation went without a hitch on my 4+ year old machine, thanks Paul!

Setting up a remote git repository

Ubuntu does not install ssh or git by default, so I installed them both from a terminal window using apt-get.

$ sudo apt-get install ssh
$ sudo apt-get install git-core


I have used subversion for years, but am new to git, so I googled for some tips. The article ‘Remote Git Repos on Ubuntu: The Right Way‘ was very useful. I followed what Drew discussed and had no issues at all, and I was now two for two.

XCode and source control

XCode comes with in-built methods to deal with some source control systems, but nothing for git.

Git for the Cocoa Developer: A Typical Workflow describes how Christopher Roach setup his git project directory. Since I had followed Drew’s steps for configuring git, I really only needed to use the configuration information for ‘.gitignore’ and ‘.gitattributes’ described in the section ‘Config the repository for Cocoa development’.

I had an existing xcode project that I wanted to put into git, so I followed these steps:

$ cd myproj
$ git init
$ vi .gitignore

I then reopened my project in xcode to make sure I did not break anything. (It was fine.) I’m sure I will be fiddling with ‘.gitignore’ as I move along, but for now I’m calling it good enough. Obviously, since xcode is unaware that I am doing version control, I will have to manage that via the command line or other tool. Since this is as much a learning project for me as anything, I’m okay with that for now — but I reserve the right to vent here later!

I just downloaded the WordPress application (free) and wanted to try it out.

Other than the normal constraints of iPhone text entry, I like it. Obviously, it will not become my primary blogging method, but I believe it will earn it’s place on my iPhone’s front page.

Over the last couple of months, I have been working on a set of ideas for a new iPhone application and have actively begun development today. As I begin narrowing down my thoughts on features, I will post more about the actual application.

My current goals:

• Focus on doing a few things very well,
• Link to existing resources where it clearly enhances the value of the application,
• Deliver a working application to a small set of people by February 2009,
• Have a marketable application by April 2009,
• See continued growth in customers each month of 2009.

I have spent a considerable amount of time the last two months reading books, articles, blogs, reviews, etc. to get a better understanding of what it takes to build a business around an iPhone application. I have not done enough to be comfortable (who has), but I have done enough to begin.

Today’s accomplishments:

• I successfully upgraded to the latest versions of all the tools,
• I downloaded what appears to be useful sample source code,
• I verified that my development environment works as expected,
• I applied for Apple’s developer program (thought I had done that months ago),
• I restarted my blogging with this post.

Next tasks:

• Figure out how how to best use GIT with xcode projects
• Setup a GIT server on a separate machine,
• Acquire one new skill with iPhone SDK
• Post about my progress.

Waiting on:

• An e-mail from Apple about the developer program

Not long after returning home from JavaOne, I picked up a new project, and combined with my existing commitments and my vacation schedule, I had to do the time juggling dance for a bit.

I just returned from a two week vacation at Yellowstone and Glacier national parks–a very welcome respite. It can take me a few days to quit thinking about my various work projects when my mind is idle, so I like vacations that are more than just one week. It is a wonderful feeling to “forget” about all the things your mind spends so much effort on for awhile and just enjoy some physical activity and some beautiful areas of God’s creation. I take my laptop along on trips like this, but almost exclusively just so I have a convenient place to accumulate digital photos.

Now that I’m back to work, I finished some performance bug fixes on a existing webapp for a client today, so I have a nice sense of completion already. My newest project involves several areas I’ve done work on before (intelligent agents, business rules using JESS) as well as some new areas for me (semantic web, ontologies, OWL, Protege). The system architecture is still being developed, but it all appears very doable (given the right resources and time) and very cool. The biggest downside is there appears to be more travel than I’d like.

After a red-eye return flight from JavaOne, and a couple of days catching up on my personal todo list, it’s time to get back to work.

Working as an independent, the decision matrix for things like conferences is a little different, but my overall impression was that it was worth going to JavaOne. It was my first time, and probably will not be my last. It provided an opportunity to spend time with those for whom and with whom I have worked over the last year that I probably would not have had otherwise.

My first todo generated by the conference is to join JCP, and become involved with JSR-295 which deals with JavaBeans and data binding. I had planned on packaging and releasing a data binding framework under some open source license (developed with help from others) soon, but JSR-295 appears to take a very similar approach to binding.

If there are good business reasons to approach a problem domain differently that existing tools or frameworks, I don’t have a problem with doing so. But, in this case, it appears that what JSR-295 will be developing will cover the most common and useful use cases that my framework handles. Hopefully, some of my code will be useful to the project.