muthu arumugam blog

I decided to find a better way to get some money out of my 1.5 yrs efforts behind Apple’s iPhone. I tried simple apps and asked for a buck! People didn’t like it and few went too far. Then i made most of them in a lite version. Then I see a sudden change in Downloads. I realized one thing that, it’s all behind the value users expect out of $1.

I started thinking at AdMob to get implemented in my iPhone applications. I read a lot about it in the Web. It’s still early. There are few things which will discourage you to use it. One of the blogs which is very valuable on that topic is http://www.doipod.com/ipod/2008/08/admob-still-not.html. But I wanted to give a shot anyway.

I added the advertisement and posted it for Apple’s approval. Eventually, it will take another few more weeks to get it published and see the response. I will keep it posted here. But I am thinking that if this works (as it says), I may get some revenue coming back with the effort. Worst case i will get $1 a day which is another $300 overall !!!

Look at AdMob at http://www.admob.com/.

What to consider before you buy iPhone 3G?

Battery is not exchangeable - So if you are using phone a lot and on travel, this will not work. You will be frustrated after few hours of usage.

MS Exchange support - We have to wait and see how many corporates are allowing its users to get push services on their new iPhone. My company doesn’t…

MobileMe - This is a killer. It was really unreliable. I had issues before and i cancelled for couple of years and got recently. There are some advantages if you are a beginner. But if you use computers often, i wouldn’t recommend buying it.

AppStore - There are some joke applications which take some time out of you. There are few good applications and i am not sure the direction where they are heading towards. There were more social web applications and tip calculators than anything else. And some of the paid applications are not that great. So far, there is no WOW on any free applications.

GPS - Drains your battery and no existing application to help you start getting thrilled. There are some “WHERE am i” applications and the accuracy is questionable as of now. I guess Apple will fix those issues soon. One of those applications show me that i am in Seattle even though i am in Boston (slight mistake !!!).

PUSH services - It’s not pushing upto the minute like blackberry. Instead it does it every 15 minutes. Well, do we still call this PUSH service ? I guess Apply must be working on this. Let’s wait and see.

There are lots of other glitches. I have the old iPhone and i exchanged it 4 times already and i am on the 5th phone. So, please get the warranty to keep it smooth (actually, one of those phones stopped working on the next of my 1st year warranty).

 

There are several other missing feature on the hardware, phone and software side. I guess they may come back with iPhone OS 3.0 for Christmas which can fix quite a set of bugs and features.

Finally, I got the application working with interactions. I credit http://zone12.co.uk/iCode/tut1.html for this information.

Step 1: Create a new Cocoa Touch Application.

Step 2: Pick the directory and name for your application.

Step 3: As per the current template, it doesn’t generate Interface Builder file for you. Create a new one after opening the Interface builder in parallel as shown below: (Choose Cocoa Touch - View)

Continue reading »

Finally Apple released an initial version of iPhone SDK Beta 2 which has Interface Builder. It’s really cool to create applications. I wanted to put together the first step of creating HelloWorld quickly on it.

• Open XCode
• Create a new Project as “Cocoa Touch Application”

• Provide the project name as “HelloWorld” on your selected folder and Click Save

Continue reading »

Google released its SDK for iPhone native application development. Please follow http://code.google.com/p/gdata-objectivec-client/ to see the Objective-C library and sample code to use it in your application. It supports the following:

• Google Base
• Blogger
• Calendar
• Code Search
• Contacts
• Documents List
• Notebook
• Picasa Web Albums
• Spreadsheets
• YouTube

I wanted to write a simple Console application in Cocoa. I followed the same old XCode approach of creating a project from the IDE. I started the project with Fundation Tool. Then the rest is to enter the following code into <the name you have given.m> which is the only class in that project. Its simple and good for making services and console applications. This also helps you to understand simple Number & Array manipulations with Objective-C style.

int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {

    NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

NSMutableArray *ar = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

NSNumber *n;

int i;

for (i=0; i<10; i++)

{

n  = [[NSNumber alloc] initWithInt:(i)];

[ar addObject:n];

}

for(i=0; i<10; i++)

{

NSNumber *newN = [ar objectAtIndex:i];

NSLog(@”Stored: %@”, newN);

}

NSLog(@”Number init %d\n”, i);

    // insert code here…

    NSLog(@”Hello, World from Muthu!”);

[ar release];

    [pool drain];

    return 0;

}

Download complete project: ArrayTest.zip