web development and photography
development
Flomo iphone app
Jul 12th
A few weeks ago I decided to start playing around with iPhone app development. It would, I thought, be a relatively straightforward thing. Even small children could do it.
But what to choose as a test project? Perhaps something stupid that made some kind of farty noise each time you shook your iPhone? Nah… build something useful Matthew. Something I and others like me would want to use.
Uploading images to Flickr seemed like a cool idea. There are some really nice apps out there that do this already. Hmmm…
Another thing was simple image manipulation. You know, make your crappy iPhone photos look like you took them with a Lomo ie turn them into something bad yet cool. Already done. Hmmm….
I know – combine the two! Brilliant idea! Let’s call it Flomo (flickr + lomo). Lame name – yes. Arsed to think up a better name – no. I even designed a funky logo (above).
Turning the idea into reality has proven to be somewhat more tricky than I’d thought. Trying to run before learning how to walk is a cliché that springs to mind. But it’s been a useful lesson in iPhone development.
Specifically it’s taught me:
1. How to access flickr’s API. Authentication with their API is like sticking hot pins in your arm at the best of times, never mind in an unfamiliar language (Objective-C).
2. Objective-C doesn’t have a simple way of doing MD5 hashes. It’s a pretty much build your own kind of thing. Ugh.
3. How to process images. Thanks to some online help and general banging-head-on-wall type thinking, I’ve finally realized that image processing isn’t all that hard. Neither is it easy. Finding stuff on forums like (I paraphrase) “listen you newbie scum, this kind of thing is so trivially easy I’m not even going to explain how to do it” didn’t help. But I got there. I’ll publish relevant bits of my code in the next post.
4. Multithreading is really useful. Do you want a nice spinny wheel thing while the image is uploading, so your user doesn’t think the app has broken? Well you *have* to use multithreading. Obvious if you know that it’s obvious. Like so much in iPhone world.
5. XML parsing? Not easy and not fun. Just parsing a simple web service response is bad enough. Making any sense at all of complex XML seems like far too much hard work. PHP SimpleXML – I love you!
There are all kinds of other bits and pieces which I’ve had “fun” with. I’ve probably implemented them really badly. But I don’t care. I have an iPhone app which works. Just a little more work and it’ll be ready to submit to Apple and wait months before it ever appears on the store for free.
Oh, and those news reports about small children coding for the iPhone? Two words: parental guidance.
Drupal in perspective
May 13th
Drupal prides itself on its community aspect. And so it should as a truly open source system. One of the good things to come out of this is the principle that dissenting voices should be given a platform. Hopefully what they say gets taken on board too. A talk titled ‘Why I hate Drupal’ at the recent DrupalCon in DC is a great example of this principle.
‘Why I hate Drupal’ was given by James Walker, one of the Lullabot team, and general Drupal insider and guru. It’s important to point out that this isn’t just some bile-filled sour-grapes rant. It’s a considered, insightful and eloquent discussion of some of the problems and issues with Drupal as it grows in popularity, and enters a new, more mature phase of its life.
Here’s a link to a video taken of the talk. It’s an hour long, so you may have to book out some time to watch it. It’s worth it though.
Drupal for education
Apr 27th
Just noticed a Drupal for Education event going on at Sun’s offices in London, on 14th May:
http://www.drupal.org.uk/event/drupal-education-may-2009/14-may-2009
The event is organised by Codepositive, Sun, and Acquia, and seems to be part of a series of ‘Drupal for…’ events. The last one I went to was Drupal for Enterprise, and was pretty useful – especially for those who didn’t know anything about Drupal and wanted to get a good overview.
Interestingly, they mention on the event page that the Open University is now using Drupal for its new Platform site:
http://www.open.ac.uk/platform/
This bills itself as a ‘virtual campus’ social networking and news site for staff, students, and alumni. They even have blogs, although they’ve seemingly gone for Drupal-based blogs rather than the WordPress MU we’ve chosen for blogs.kent.
Review of Panic’s Coda – One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X
Feb 8th
I’ve recently been trialling Coda, Panic’s web development environment for Mac OSX. It currently costs $99 (about £65 at current rates) per licence, and offers a fully-featured 15-day trial before you burn your money. The version I’m looking at here is 1.6.2.
Coda sells itself as offering a complete environment for all-round web developers: somewhere to do your coding, a css tool for the design-oriented, and built-in subversion, FTP and SSH tools to transfer your masterpieces from your localhost to your live environment. In other words… an IDE (although it’s perhaps telling that it never uses that acronym in its sales pitch).
Coding
Coda offers a passable pure coding environment. It has all the basic text editing things: fancy colours, a certain amount of text completion and insertion (e.g. comment blocks). I don’t want to bore you with a list all the small details I found wanting in its text editor. Some of the bigger issues I had were lack of diff tool, and the inability to search across an entire project (or ‘site’ in Coda-speak). On the plus-side the editor did have a nice visual list of functions in your code. Macromate’s TextMate is often compared to Coda (a not entirely fair comparison, but anyway…), and to be honest in terms of code editing offers lots of things Coda doesn’t, and all the things Coda does. So, take your pick…
Styling
The css editor is pretty much what you get from tools like MacRabbit’s CSSEdit. You get to edit your css with a user-interface rather than hand-coding the stuff. That’s pretty much it. I’m left wondering just how useful Coda’s CSS tool is. If you’re proficient in CSS then do you really need a GUI to help you? If you’re not proficient in CSS then you’ll still be confused because Coda assumes you have some knowledge of how HTML and CSS work together. It’s a kind of irritating half-way house which I suppose might make life easier for half-way-house developers. I’m not sure.
FTP/SSH
One of the really nice things about Coda is that you can fiddle around with a local copy of your website and FTP it up to your live hosting account, all in a simple, integrated way. When you alter a file a little icon appears next to it in Coda’s file browser. Just click it, and off it goes. It really is very simple and easy to understand. So it has the same feature if you’re working in a more serious environment, where SSH is the only way to transfer? Erm… nope.
No quick-and-easy scp-equivalent? Let’s just stop here and digest what Coda’s all about. Those of you wondering what scp is will probably be ok with Coda. Those of you who know will probably realize that Coda’s aimed primarily at semi-pro developers who need to access hosting accounts with FTP. If you work in a professional environment where servers are locked down to such an extent that SSH is probably your only means of access, well one of Coda’s main selling points is lost.
To be fair there is an SSH terminal. My feelings are that this has been bundled to make Coda look more professional and justify a higher price-tag. Why is it any easier to click a button in Coda taking you to the terminal, than it is to switch to a terminal in a different window? Cmd-Tab? At best you might consider it a very, very minor advantage. At worst it confuses Coda and makes you wonder whether it’s trying to pitch itself at semi-pro or at professional developers. Is it for the Rails and Symfony developers out there? Who knows.
Preview window
Coda’s preview window lets you see your webpage as it would appear in a browser. Well, actually it shows you how you web page does appear in a browser, because the preview window is basically just a browser window. Again, I’m left asking the question: Cmd-Tab? Personally I found it more useful to analyze my CSS changes in Firefox + Firebug. Note too that the idea that you can review a single page of your website as a complete entity is a very out-dated and curiously amateurish one. The idea that ‘blah.php’ as a file actually renders a page of HTML is verging on the laughable: there will typically be dozens of files involved in rendering a single web page. Any serious (PHP) web developer would surely be using either home-grown code developed in a framework such as Symfony, or would be modifying available web apps such as Drupal or WordPress. The only way to view a ‘page’ in any vaguely sophisticated web app is to view it in a browser with a web server running. All this makes Coda’s preview window largely defunct. Once again, just Cmd-Tab to Firefox or something. Is it really that hard to do?
Subversion
A big selling point of Coda has been its inclusion of some kind of version control mechanism for your code. In this case subversion. The user interface is nice, although a little basic. Any checked-out code will display little icons next to the file name in the file browser. If you’ve made a change, you’ll see a little ‘M’ icon appear next to the file, which you can click to commit to the repository. It’s all very neat and rather lovely.
This does seem to be one area of Coda that works well. You will have to rely on terminal svn commands for some things, but most day-to-day stuff can be done very neatly and easily. Incidentally, TextMate includes very similar functionality. It doesn’t have the useful icons to let you know when something is out of sync with the repository, so for me Coda’s svn scores a point over TextMate here.
Conclusion
Coda looks lovely, and feels like something designed for semi-pro web developers. I can’t imagine hard-core designers and CSSers finding it particuarly useful, and hard-code programmers and coders won’t find its text-editing functionality up to scratch compared to much cheaper/free tools like TextMate, JEdit, or Eclipse. The preview window and SSH terminal features feel like a bolt-on, and honestly you’d have to be pretty lazy to find Cmd-Tabbing to another application much harder than pressing a button on Coda’s UI. The lack of integrated scp functionality will be annoying for many developers.
Coda costs $99, and could be a really useful value-for-money tool for semi-professional web developers who appreciate the convenience of having almost-TextMate, almost-CSSEdit, almost-web-browser, and SSH terminal thrown into one eye-candy package. Dreamweaver it ain’t. For starters Coda it has none of the HTML-building capability of Dreamweaver.
For about half the cost of Coda you can buy TextMate, CSSEdit, and use Firefox and an SSH terminal. Ok, you have to switch between them which is a slight inconvenience. But you do get more functionality for less cost. At the end of the day it’s all about what you’re comfortable with as a developer.
