Flakasoft

Paper Airplane Guy Breaks the World’s Record!!!

timwnitram — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:30:22 +0000

We are SO extremely proud of John Collins, aka “The Paper Airplane Guy”, on his latest victory of breaking the Guinness World’s Record for longest paper airplane flight at 226 feet, 10 inches. This blasts past the old record of 207 feet 4 inches. John has been working hard at perfecting the plane and finding the right person to throw the plane for years and his hard work and genius paid off big time!

John is truly a rare breed, he is like the Mozart of Paper Airplanes. When you go over to his house, it’s filled with new paper airplane designs. When you ask him how he does it, he simply says that he just had a bunch of designs that start flowing out of him. He is also a rare individual in that he is geniunly nice and of good character that still has the enthusiasm of youth.

Again, congrats John, you deserve it!

To see the flight, check it out on youTube. You can also check out his designs with our iPhone app.

Debugging in XCode 4.3 and why member variables don’t seem to resolve correctly

timwnitram — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:43:13 +0000

So you’re an early adopter, good for you, although many times it can bite ya in the behind. Xcode is a fickle mistress and the latest release of Xcode 4.3 is no exception. If you’re like me and you’ve got it installed and are cranking happily coding and debugging, you might have run into a strange phenomenon that the debugger doesn’t seem to show the variables and their values correctly. This caused me hours of heartache because I was thinking that I had something messed up with my inheritance in my classes and sent me down a wild goose-chase trying to track down why my members weren’t being initialized correctly. The it dawned on me, “hey I just updated to Xcode 4.3, I bet somethings up…” Ding ding ding, give the man a booby prize. The problem is the debugger and compiler settings. I changed my compiler to use the GCC compiler (“LLVM GCC4.2″) and the debugger to GDB and all was right in the world the next time around. After playing with the settings a bit more, turns out I didn’t need to change the compiler at all, just the debugger.

The short version of this post is, if you’re having difficulties debugging in Xcode 4.3, simply set your debugger to the GDB and you’re good to go.

Good luck and be safe out there!

More iOS Developer Resources

timwnitram — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 22:53:09 +0000

When I get off my lazy butt, I’ll add these to the resources page, but for now here are a list of great resources courtesy of http://www.vfr.org/

Blogs/Websites

Icons/Graphics

Code/Libraries

Paper Airplane Guy’s Video Instruction iPhone App Launched!

timwnitram — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:09:28 +0000

We’re super excited! We’ve poured a lot of love, sweat, and tears into this new release. We really wanted to make it look beautiful and I think we pulled it off. This is a major overhaul of our wildly popular Paper Airplane Guy’s Starter Kit. We’ve changed the tutorials to high quality videos and added the ability to download new plane instructions. There are currently 50 planes that the user can now download. That’s almost the entire library of the Paper AIrplane Guy’s award winning planes.

Give it a try, let us know what you think. We’re busting at the gut with pride and we hope you enjoy it!

XCode 4.2 Beta means Beta! Having Trouble Archiving to an ipa?

timwnitram — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:34:55 +0000

Just a quick entry to remind people that XCode 4.2 is a beta product and consequently there are certain behaviors that aren’t supported, including creating an ipa file archive. When you attempt to create the .ipa, you will get a “file or directory not found” error.

Branching Model That Helps Manage Your Code Using Git

admin — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:46:06 +0000

We have an ongoing conversation about the best way to manage our code-base and repository in Git and have found the best solution is by using this branching structure:

http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

‘develop’ should always be in a compiling/working state, containing the most current completed features
‘master’ should contain only releases (e.g. build from here for app store submission)
‘release/some_release_name’ should contain releases in-progress (bugfixes only)
‘feature/some_feature_name’ is where most work should take place
‘hotfix/some_hotfix_name is where we fix critical bugs on code that has been released (in master)
Feature branches are the only branches that can be in an indeterminate state, though I avoid intentionally checking in code that doesn’t build. All other branches should build and run cleanly.

You can help enforce this practice through good discipline and by using Git-Flow. If you’re on a Mac you can use MacPorts or Homebrew. There’s also a pretty decent screencast showing you how.

Some comments from our developers and friends:

Steve Hong:

Yes. Basically, we should be checking in only code that works to ‘develop’. If you need to save your latest progress, you should just create your local git branches as many as you like and when you are ready, merge with your local ‘develop’ branch and then push the changes to the remote ‘develop’ repo.

Jereme Monteau

ShortForm

We’ve been using git-flow at ShortForm for about a year now an we love it. The gitflow extensions are also very nice, save a lot of manual branching and tagging as per the process :

https://github.com/nvie/gitflow

There have also been a few moments where the process has broken down for us, but with git it’s so easy to do things manually as well that it has not held us back in any way.

iCloud vs Google or Apple Against the Prevailing Winds of Web Apps

timwnitram — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:27:40 +0000

So here’s a story of marketing might versus a prevailing trend. Apple is bucking against the trend to move everything to the cloud and I mean everything. Popular cloud implementation moves not just data to the cloud but also functionality. From Google docs for authoring to Pandora for music consumption. You don’t just put stuff in the cloud, you use stuff in the cloud. You take advantage of the platform independence that the cloud provides you. You don’t need to lug around your computer to edit your document in Google docs, you can do it from your Dad’s computer at his house, your wife’s iPhone, or your workstation at the office. Apple takes a hybrid approach by integrating cloud served data to their proprietary platform and apps. The question is, will this work? Can they so infiltrate a consumer’s electronic appliance world so that you will always be an arm’s length away from your cloud data via an Apple product? I kinda doubt it, there are circumstances that even the most dedicated Apple Fanboy will not be able to access their data via their personal Apple product even if they wanted to. Say they work at an office that is PC only, what’s a fanboy to do?

It’s easy to see Apple’s motivation to use iCloud to drive sales of their hardware but the question is is it compelling enough? They are really fighting a powerful trend (and common sense). I am one of those folks that think’s 2007 Steve Jobs was correct in seeing most people will be using web apps with their iPhone over installed apps. There’s no reason why content providers will choose to create app binaries for each platform over a single implementation as a web app once connectivity has become fast and ubiquitous. That won’t happen for a few more years, the cell networks are still to creaky to support the kind of reliable connection people will require for reliable access to their web apps and data. But if Apple can convert many of its active users to iCloud that’s worth around $1.2 billion dollars in revenue! So even if they buck the trend for a year or two, that’s serious money.

What are your thoughts?

Update:

Here’s Slate’s thoughts on iCloud
The trend towards web apps and away from installed apps is already beginning, check out Financial Times “App”
Another article with a similar thesis, concentrates on Apple’s financial motivations
Article claiming iCloud is designed to kill MS Windows (how about a side of hyperbole with your blog posting?) He goes on to say that Jobs is sacrificing the Mac to kill Windows. I disagree with this, as I mentioned in my post, he’s forcing people more into the Mac to create and maintain the content that’s going to live in the cloud. Jobs is trying to strengthen the Mac’s role in content creation in iCloud by tying people to apps that only run on Apple products. And since we know what a joy it is to create content on the iPad, people will be using their Mac for that.
SF Chronicle also chimes in about differences between iCloud, Google, and Microsoft

Wireless Connection Speed Drop-off on Macbook Pro

timwnitram — Wed, 18 May 2011 17:46:03 +0000

This is just a short post based on my anecdotal experience with the wireless connection strength with my Macbook Pro 17″. The connection strength drops off dramatically if you have the display lid closed vs open. This is especially apparent if you are at an extended range from your wireless router. I experienced drop-offs equivalent to ~25Mb/s open vs ~7Mb/s closed. What was interesting was it didn’t matter how I oriented the closed Macbook. I assumed that if I prompt up the Macbook so that the closed lid was approximately the same orientation as it would be opened, that I would get the same download speeds, nope. The orientation didn’t matter, just the fact that it was closed vs open.

So my word of advice is if you connect to an external display and usually keep your Macbook Pro closed, keep it open for better download speeds.

XCode 4 Bug – Duplicating a Target Results in Link Error Due to Missing Paths

timwnitram — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:01:34 +0000

This should be titled, “oh XCode 4 why do you spite me so?”. What have I done to deserve being smote by XCode? I ran into an couple issues with the latest version of XCode 4 when I tried to duplicate an existing target that was linked against a bunch of 3rd party libraries. One of the annoying things I ran into is that the new target was autonamed “[projectname] copy”. You could rename the target, however internally it was still referred to as “[projectname] copy”. You could not change the project id in the target settings and you had to live with this. That’s a minor annoyance, what was worse was all my string paths referring to my library search paths got escaped so that the build would fail during the linking phase. So if you have this mystery problem, then go into you Target Build Settings > Library Search Path, then double-click on the path. Notice all your quotes have been escaped with a backslash. Delete those puppies and you’ll be good-to-go.

Here’s another good explanation:

http://www.executionunit.com/2011/03/25/xcode-4-duplicating-a-target-to-make-an-ipad-build-link-error/

Be careful out there! XCode doesn’t hate us, it just likes our attention and gets jealous when we don’t spend enough time tinkering with it…

iPhone/iOS Video Playback Bug: No Video On Older Devices Running iOS 4.1 and Earlier

timwnitram — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:51:51 +0000

We had users reporting that the video playback wouldn’t work on their iPhones

and iPods. With a testers help we found out, that the video playback in our

Tricktionary iPhone app didn’t work on some iPod Touches and iPhones with 4.1

firmware (and probably older). The issue seemed also to be related to the

hardware as well, for instance 2nd generation iPods would not play the video.

The users were reporting that the video player would load, the controls would

appear, the progress bar would indicate playback, however the screen was blank

or black.

Was not easy to find out why exactly. Tests showed, that sample videos from

Apple worked when plugged in there, also the intro video was working most of the

time. We first changed the video encoding from H264 with MAIN 3.0 to Baseline

3.0 – this seemed to work at first, but we soon discovered that it would still

not work on iPhones or iPod Touches with FW 4.1 on. Scratching our heads, because

it was exactly the settings Apple suggested, we finally found out that the

problem was the encoder. Using Adobe Media Encoder CS4 before created the

not-working clips. Using Canopus Procoder with the same settings then helped the

issue, now the video features in our Windsurfing Tricktionary iPhone App are

working on all devices we could test them on (so far).