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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Wed 11 Aug 2010

iPad & and how it's not like developing on the Mac

Category : Technology/iPadDev.txt

We've been working on porting an insurance system that we wrote some time back using 4th Dimension, out of a Dell laptop that's on its last legs, and onto the iPad. The Dell is dying and I don't think I'll ever buy a PC again - I've said goodbye to all that. But the app we have there is possibly worth a lot. And I believe that's a worthwhile application to bring over to the iPad, and to test the iPad's credential as a business machine while we're doing that.

What's not to like on the iPad? Lots, if you're a developer used to the goodness of Cocoa on the Mac. Lots of things are still missing on the iPad - Cocoa bindings, multi-column table views, date and number formatters, access to the Unix layer, etc. People who say the Mac is dead, OS X is dead, etc - they don't know what they're talking about. But, understand, I'm not complaining. I think I can understand how hard it is for Apple to shoe-horn all of OS X onto a platform that is as small physically as an iPhone or an iPad. So, as these little machines get more powerful, more of OS X will appear on iOS and eventually we'll get a merged OS.

What's there to like, then? Hai Hwee just showed me a screen where we present to the customer a list of additional coverages he can tag on to his insurance policy, like desserts onto a main meal. Where once we would have popped up a dialog box to capture the size of his order, Hai Hwee now just flips over a small section of the screen. - so it feels like you're doing a back of the envelop calculation. The important thing is that it's very un-intrusive, the screen doesn't move around as jarringly as when having a dialog box pop up. To get back to the dining metaphor, it's like you don't lose sight of the main meal while you're thinking about the desserts and that's how we've always wanted our app to work.

So that sort of sums up what iPad development is like - the game's changed and we got to think differently. We can do some things on the iPad we couldn't do on the Mac. And hold it in ways we couldn't hold the Mac before. And that's what keeps us interested in spite of constraints from the limited toolbox - there's the opportunity to build better things than we ever could.

Posted at 2:41AM UTC | permalink

Sun 25 Jul 2010

Books & Co.

Category : Commentary/BooksAndCo.txt

I'm reading Bookstore - The Life & Times of Jeanette Watson and Books & Co. For a book lover, this is a book to savour, so I'm not rushing through it.

"It's odd to think that one can have ten thousand different books in a space, written by all of those different people, and nevertheless, by the choice of the books, the books represent something about the personality of the owner."

"I'm the oldest girl of five. My younger sisters are, in descending order, Olive, Lucinda, Susan, and Helen, and I have an older brother, Tom Watson III."

So there must have been a Thomas Watson the First and a Second - of course, of IBM. And I remember reading "Father, Son and Co." Good book.

"If the bookstore were going to continue, it would have to be totally changed, computerized, Internetted," Watson remarks - Jeanette Watson that is.

Posted at 5:17AM UTC | permalink

Fri 02 Jul 2010

Luca for iPhone - Now at the App Store

Category : Technology/LucaForiPhoneNowAtAppStore.txt

If you're using MySQL or PostgreSQL as the database for Luca, you can now keep up with your Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet figures, by the minute, while on the move.

The first version of Luca for iPhone is now available at the App Store.

Posted at 11:27PM UTC | permalink

Thu 01 Jul 2010

Liya for iPhone 1.0.2

Category : Technology/LiyaForiPhone1dot0dot2.txt

Liya for iPhone 1.0.2 with support for multi-tasking and iAds on iPhone's iOS 4 is ready for download at the App Store.

Hopefully, our other iPhone app - Luca for iPhone - will also be ready for download by the end of the week.

Posted at 3:24AM UTC | permalink

Mon 28 Jun 2010

What's on our iPad Simulator

Category : Technology/Keystone.txt

This is a project we're resurrecting on the iPad simulator :

It's a General Insurance System (for motor, cargo, fire, etc). It was developed, pre-Mac OS X, using 4th Dimension on OS 9 and cross-compiled for Windows, back in the days when we weren't allowed to use Macs in corporations, but of course we persevered.

The company we built it for had to shut down in the wake of September 11 - its US parent was already struggling, I think, with long-tail claims and 9/11 pushed it over the edge - and so the system was orphaned. But I've always felt it was a great system and even now, almost 10 years later, I don't think any other system in use in Singapore has come close to matching it - in power, flexibility, completeness, accuracy and simplicity in use. So it's an idea I hadn't given up on. This is my unfinished business - to see it in use again and pitting it against the competition.

So, all the things we've been building - MySQL & PostgreSQL installers, database access frameworks, Luca, and now Liya - were really meant to set us up for another crack at doing this kind of work again, but with modern-day, Internet-centric, untethered mobile devices.

The iPad isn't here in Singapore for another couple of weeks. But we managed to borrow one yesterday to test our database frameworks against. Theoretically, they should work, if they work with the iPhone. But I wouldn't believe until I see it for myself. They worked, and ran pretty fast, too.

Now, my favourite segment in the Steve Jobs' D8 interview was when he talked about how the things he love about selling to the consumer space were exactly the things he hated about the enterprise market :

But I love doing enterprise-level work - for the complexity, for the scale, and OK for the "messiness", and there are so many moving parts that the solution can get to be quite intricate. And so, there's a challenge there to your craft that you have to push it to the limit. But, unlike Apple, I haven't yet found a way to make an end-run past the "orifices".

Posted at 12:38PM UTC | permalink

Sun 27 Jun 2010

WebMon Snow 4.0.7

Category : Technology/WebMonSnow4dot0dot7.txt

I've updated WebMon for Snow Leopard to include the latest, most updated IP address-to-country database.

WebMon Snow 4.0.7, available now.

With this release, I've given up support for Windows - XP, Vista or otherwise. Nobody seems to be able to get the WebDAV client working on Windows, whereas it's all just one-click simplicity on the Mac. The only mention of "windows" that you'll find in the whole WebMon Snow documentation is this line - "WebMon is a Cocoa document-based application, so you can open as many windows of log records as you like." That is all.

Posted at 3:24AM UTC | permalink

Fri 25 Jun 2010

Luca for iPhone

Category : Technology/LucaForiPhone.txt

I've submitted this to the App Store - Luca for iPhone. It'll be a free download, and it should work with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases set up for any version of Luca out there (because we've only implemented the ability to access the Trial Balance, Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss reports, plus the ability to zoom into the sub-accounts).

But as we build more and more on it, it'll probably remain compatible only with the latest version of Luca for Snow Leopard (because it'll be very difficult to keep all the versions in sync, so we'll focus our work on just the latest OS X/iOS platforms).

Liya for iPhone 1.0.2 is in the approval queue (in review). This supports iAds and multi-tasking, which the next version of Luca for iPhone will also support. Actually the whole idea of doing all this is to learn from doing it, so we can build better and more powerful tools in future. There are things I still don't like about these apps, but I know more about what needs to be done than I do even a month ago. So, nothing beats the old "hands-on" imperative.

Posted at 3:16PM UTC | permalink

Wed 23 Jun 2010

Liya for iPhone does Multi-Tasking

Category : Technology/LiyaMultiTasking.txt

I've been reading the iOS 4 programming documentation most of the day - only to find that it takes just one line of code to implement multi-tasking.

It's amazing. And I think it helps improve the app's usefulness, too, to be able to, e.g. read a message, look up a database, copy and paste data from the database to the email message, and when you get back to the database to make another search, start off where you left off, rather than have to login to the database all over again.

So, Liya for iPhone now does multi-tasking. I'm now figuring out where the best places are to insert iAd banners into the app. When that's done, I'll submit this version, 1.0.2, to the App Store.

Hai Hwee is almost done with a basic version of Luca for iPhone. You'll be able to monitor the Trial Balance, Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss data, if you're using MySQL or PostgreSQL as the Luca database. No data entry yet. That will come next. But it'll be a free download.

Posted at 3:22PM UTC | permalink

Liya for iPhone 1.0.1

Category : Technology/LiyaForiPhone1dot0dot1.txt

Liya for iPhone 1.0.1 with multi-lingual text entry and search support is now available for free download at the App Store.

I'm now working on adding support for multi-tasking on iPhone's iOS 4. Plus, I've already got iADs working (less than 30 minutes of work).

Hai Hwee should be ready with a Luca for iPhone by the end of the week.

Posted at 3:26AM UTC | permalink

Thu 17 Jun 2010

Liya's Multi-Lingual Support

Category : Technology/LiyaMultiLingualSupport.txt

I remembered, a couple of days ago, that a design objective for the database frameworks we've been building has been to support data entry and search in any language - Chinese, Japanese, Thai, whatever, so that, e.g., for the case of an insurance system used in Thailand, motor policies can be recorded with their underwriting terms written in Thai, and the system will all just work.

But I realised that I hadn't tested this notion in quite a while. So we put Liya to the test and found that it already supported input in multiple languages for PostgreSQL, but not for MySQL. Debugging this, we found that we only had to fix a couple of lines of code, and Liya (connected to MySQL) can do entry and searches in Chinese, say, as shown below :

And, since these fixes were at the database frameworks level, Maven automatically gets multi-lingual support, and Luca too.

Shows the importance of good design. Instead of adjusting two lines of code to get something so enormously useful, we would have had to comb through any number of programs, at any number of levels, simply for a lack of foresight and discipline in coding.

So, Liya 1.0.1 with multi-lingual support has been submitted to the App Store. It'll probably be available for download in a week (well, I just submit it & forget it, the App Store way).

And there'll be new versions out soon for Luca and Maven for Snow Leopard.

I'm going to rename Maven to Liya for Snow Leopard. So, we have the odd couple - Luca and his girlfriend Liya. I seem to have two completely different group of users - Luca and Liya users on one side, and users of the Enablers on the other. And they don't usually cross over. I find that interesting. Had expected different.

Posted at 9:24AM UTC | permalink

Mac OS X 10.6.4 Snow Leopard Software Update

Category : Technology/10dot6dot4.txt

I've updated my live server to 10.6.4 and all the services (mail, web server, DNS server, ftp, ssh, fetchmail, SSL, WebDAV, etc...) continue to work.

So I think it's safe to upgrade, in case you've come on over here to find out.

P.S.: It's not always like this. Sometimes things break, and they break horribly, and we've got to scramble to fix things in Apple's wake. So I'm never complacent about OS X Software Updates. All's well, for now, until the next time it breaks. In the mean time, we get some peace to work on some new stuff.

Posted at 8:27AM UTC | permalink

Wed 16 Jun 2010

MySQL & PostgreSQL Installers

Category : Technology/MySQLPostgresInstallersAnnouce.txt

So, I managed to bug Hai Hwee into doing a MySQL installer to add to the one she did for PostgreSQL. And she's just updated both to their latest (generally available) versions.

Once installed, new versions of these installers will upgrade the previous version automatically, including bringing over existing data.

They'll also install Preference Panes that'll work reliably. They're 32/64 bit Intel fat binaries, Snow Leopard only.

The MySQL installer installs version 5.1.47 of MySQL, whereas it is version 8.4.4 for the PostgreSQL installer.

Posted at 8:51AM UTC | permalink