While I take a short hiatus from iPhone programming, I’m finding that I’m now aware of some parts of the mobile community that I wasn’t before with my head down and chugging along in Xcode. Namely, this nearly-blind worship of Android from the FOSS community, in spite of most any valid criticisms. In fact, it appears to rival the blind fanaticism of the Apple community in some ways, and in some ways is a direct result of the Apple community and company.

Apple fans are known for their reality-distancing opinions and astounding ability to completely detach themselves from truth and fact as necessary, much like fundamentalist Christians when presented with old passages about mixed textiles and stoning women. So it should come as no surprise that there are a ton of iPhone and iPad fans out there that are head-over-heels in love with the damned things and can’t comprehend why any of the AppStore’s numerous misguided policies are anything but “right for the platform” or some other rosy-goggled bullshit line. However, with every fanatic on a given side there will be an equal and opposite fanatic against it. This was true with the old Mac vs. Windows battles and it’s true today with iPhone. The problem is that before Android came to market, there wasn’t another side to back (Windows Mobile? Please. WebOS? Ha!).

So, enter Android, made by the third giant. What amazes me about this is the brilliant move that Google made in making the operating system open source from the start. This not only made it amazingly easy for phone developers to get in and build devices with it, but it also endeared the FOSS crowd to Google instantly (again). Easy adoption, rabid supporters, high availability — a clear winning combination. Indeed, adoption is really taking off and it’s becoming the default OS for new smart phones that would rather not pay licensing fees or have to deal with writing their own shitty OS to compete with the iPhone.

So … what’s “other” mean and why did it not go away when I removed all music, videos, podcasts, mail, contacts, calendars, and most of my apps?

Restore in progress…

So I’ve been posting my updates to Twitter during the conference for a couple of reasons: first, if I tag them “#wwdc” then everyone at the conf will see them and that’s kind of neat and second, FB is pulling them for status, so it’s a quick double-update.

Well, I posted this one yesterday: http://twitter.com/ahknight/status/2092801084

Little did I know, the first part of that was more true than I thought. The Stump guys themselves were searching Twitter for references to themselves and the host, at the start of the show, starts off: “So I saw on Twitter that some guy said he had ‘the best question’ for us tonight. Is he here? Is that guy here?” After that initial, “Oh. Crap.” I stood up to take my lumps only for the host to have apparently moved on to something else. As I went to myself “eh, oh well” one of the other folks on stage points “he’s over there!” and I’m subsequently called out entirely.

“Come up here. Come here.”

So I put some things down and start the long walk up to the stage. As I go there, some big video cameras start to float around me (obviously with operators behind them, but as far as I can see they’re cameras with legs). Yay, make me more nervous. Thanks!

I get up to the stage and the host points to the stage and says to come up there. Oh boy. So I do. He then says some things that I’m sure other people remember but around this time I realize I probably have a social disorder of some kind as everyone sounds like the teacher in Peanuts cartoons. I do make out that he’s said that he’s going to abide by the statement I made: the experts will have two seconds to answer my question. Go.

So I paused and organized my question, much to the disappointment of the audience, though the host backed me up a little with ‘what you don’t know is that just standing on the stage makes you lose 25 IQ points’. Then I released:

“What two pins on the LC III were disabled on the LC II?

Oh God, I hate this thing. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

Here’s the current method for adding an application to the iPhone:

1. Download an app from iTunes.
2. Connect iPhone.
3. Wait for backup. Wait for sync.
4. Disconnect iPhone.
5. Use application for a while.
6. Connect iPhone.
7. Wait for backup.
8. Wait for backup.
9. Wait for backup.
10. Wait for backup.
11. Wait for backup.
12. Wait for backup.

1. Wait for backup.

It doesn’t seem to be one application, either. At some point I’m going to add an application that completely destroys the backup process. In order to determine which one it is, I have to uncheck applications in iTunes like they’re extensions. This wouldn’t be so bad if not for one problem…

iTunes deletes the application’s data when I do this.

So, even for apps that aren’t hosed, I have to hose them in order to find the app that’s hosed and remove it.

We write Mac applications at work. We have several ideas for great iPhone apps (not the cheesy $5 ones, but real applications) that we’re working on. We can test on the simulator, yes, and that works most of the time, but it’s not perfect¹ and we do need to test on the device now and again so we decided to get a pair of iPhone 3Gs to start off with and see how the development process was.

First, we approached the local Apple Store’s business contact. He said that they don’t handle business orders for the iPhone at all and gave us a name at AT&T that handles small business orders and said that he’d get us set up. That person would be Christopher Spain. Remember that name, he’s going to be coming up a lot here soon.

So I went back to coding and let my business partner handle all the fun of getting this setup. He called Chris and left a voicemail message that first day. The next day we got some information back about how to get setup.

MySQL client libraries and headers are not included with Mac OS X Server 10.5. If you are developing a MySQL client application for Mac OS X 10.5, you’ll need to download the MySQL client libraries and headers.

You can’t build MySQLdb for Django apps on Mac OS X Server without the MySQL libraries and headers, so follow those directions to get the files and then you can use the MySQL that shipped with the OS rather than trying to fight with another MySQL installation.