codesofaJust another WordPress weblog

For those who don’t use an RSS reader ;)

If  you read this post in your favorite news reader, then please open the page for once ;)

You may have noticed: The codesofa-design changed quite a lot. Thanks to a very unfair deal with Stefan, I was able to get this very awesome new design. (Unfair for him btw.)
So, why is this new design? It’s all about code. That’s why the layout changed from fixed to dynamic width. That means, that users/developers with 24″ screens will be able to read code much better.. And those with smaller screens will be able to read it in a slightly better way. That’s why there is also a code prettifyer..
For doing all of that and more, I switched to Wordpress - for now. I intended to switch to  Habari, but it didn’t quite give me the support I wanted for now.. So I chose Wordpress, because with Wordpress, you can export to anywhere :) But for now, I’m pretty happy with it, since there are a lot of features I really like. (Besides that Stefan was able to do the templates on his own, without me hacking the XSLs around ;))

You may have noticed, that your RSS reader double-posted the last 10 posts.. This is because of some fancy IDs I was too lazy to change. But all the permalinks, comments and RSS links are still the same. If you find a permalink which doesn’t work anymore, then please tell me.
There might also be some quirks here and there with older blog-posts - just drop me a line :)
I hope you like the new design, because I love it :) Thanks again, Stefan.

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Filed under: Information on November 9, 2008 at 3:21 pm by marc.

GottaGo takes a day off, or two..

As I promised yesterday on twitter and facebook, today is a fun day for GottaGo..
So why is that? GottaGo is retiring. But its younger brother, Transport is taking over the spot..

So this is the official announcement that GottaGo is renamed to Transport.

There is a new logo, a new name, but the App itself hasn’t changed much. We fixed a few issues and improved some minor things like the hitboxes for the Locate-Button and for the Date-Refresh-Button, as they are now a lot bigger.

But, this is again not the fun part :)
Ever since the NDA was in place, I tried to figure out how to get around it. I posted a tutorial about NSXMLParser, which was meant to help iPhone Developers because usually, you’d use DOMDoc and not SAX.

Through personal requests, I was also able to provide some bits and pieces of code because this was some kind of a request of a customer - where you’re allowed to talk about code :)
Now that the SDK has fallen, we have more or less a little greenhouse where we can play around in almost free nature.

A brief history of GottaGo/Transport: It started off as a free-time project and continued as such ever after. I started it to have an example of a real application to help other developers with their own problems. Usually, in books, they always write about your Car object, which has an ivar with wheels and such. Yeah, thanks, not really real-world :) So it’s always nice to look at real code which is used out there. 
To look at code, there really is no better way as to look at Free Open Source Software.

This is why I declare that GottaGo/Transport shall from now on be Open Source and distributed under a more or less GPL v.2 license. So everyone can create their own Transport App or learn from it or improve it. (The latter would be really nice!)

What does this mean? Not so much for the users, as they are only getting better software :) (Yes, I truly believe in FOSS)

For developers this means: Just drop me a line and help developing the best Transport Application for the iPhone there is. This also means that Android developers and iPhone developers in other countries can adapt Transport for their need and release an equally helpful App for their device and country.

For those who don’t really understand what I’m doing here: I give everyone the right to improve, copy and adapt my code.

The code is available on:
https://svn.liip.ch/repos/public/iphone/Transport

(more…)

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Filed under: GottaGo, Information, Transport, iPhone on October 31, 2008 at 2:00 pm by marc.
Tags: foss, GottaGo, open, opensource, oss, rename, source, Transport

done.

 So much for tonight. Thanks Stefan :)

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Filed under: GottaGo, Information, Transport, iPhone on October 8, 2008 at 1:37 am by marc.
Tags: appstore, GottaGo, iPhone, objective-c, Transport

Let’s celebrate the death of the iPhone NDA

If you haven’t got the wonderful news so far: the iPhone NDA has finally been lifted :)

This is of course a big step forward into an open world with open software for the iPhone - at least I hope so. But I’d like to take this chance and blog about something, that bothered me quite a while.. The locator on the iPhone.

The point is, the locator is not so easy to use as one might think. There is only one way to access it - and you always get every locations, be it WiFi, GSM or GPS. That means that the Locator calls the callback functions multiple times. It tries to find the most accuracte position, and it tries not to return any less accurate positions.

There is this nice example included with the SDK. Did you use it? Poor you. It seemply doesn’t work :)

** here should be more text, but the CMS killed it without notice - so you’ll have to wait a bit **

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Filed under: Information on October 1, 2008 at 7:52 pm by marc.
Tags: GottaGo, iPhone, locator, nda, open source

Alea iacta est.. almost.

Well.. Imagine.. You name your child “Bryan” and your wife/husband is from let’s say Iran.. To make your child getting the iranian passport, you’d have to name him/her “Ali” or something (this is actually true.).
Then  you know how I feel now :)

Imagine as well: You are Opel.. They made some not so good cars back then - they had a few bugs. Then they brought out some better cars (I heard so..) but now, nobody - except the few who are really interested in those things - buy Opel anymore. Why? Because they had a bad experience or missed something.

Recently I heard something like this from a former PHP programmer:
I gave him some piece of code.. like this: “$a = new foo_class(); $b = $a;” He was pretty upset that I was going to post him a code which included object copying - and that’s exactly what he hates about PHP. Well this might be true for PHP4 but not for PHP5..

What am I going to tell you.. Well, the recent numbers of “GottaGo” made me think. We had an enormous loss of users after the 2.1 update and those are not coming back - probably never. So even if those hardcore fans who sticked to “GottaGo” over the time have updated so far (we only have about 5% v.0.0.1 users) those who missed something in the first version are not comming back - and they are not trying it again. Sad but true :)
As mentioned in an earlier blogpost, I’m not quite happy with the name “GottaGo” anymore. And even less with the logo. (Not the design itself, which is great, but with the message it sends..)
Besides that, “GottaGo” plays only a siderole in the new version, which kinda makes it not being “GottaGo” anymore. Rather a Schedule/Timetable app based on GottaGo. (To talk a bit of the coding side: almost 75% of the code was rewritten for this release - and of course every pixel was redesigned..)

What I think is that “GottaGo” deserves a new release - with a new name. Unfortunatly I can’t go with a cool name - although there were a few very good suggestions - but all geek names again :)
This means, we are most probably going with “Transport” and some other minor changes.. I hope you don’t mind if I rename this and me being an attention whore - but I think those who supported me in this new release deserve it.. And I think those who are not happy with “SBB Fahrplan” deserve it as well.

Let’s see, how this pays out.. It might be a horribly wrong decision, but since it’s a free-time project, I can only learn. :)

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Filed under: General, GottaGo, Information on September 26, 2008 at 1:16 pm by marc.
Tags: apple, appstore, GottaGo, iPhone, naming, Transport

heissi Maroni! - marrons chauds! - marrone caldi! - hot chestnuts! GottaGo in the App Store

Here we go, after two weeks of waiting, Apple released our beloved GottaGo to App Store last night.
Get it here: liip.to/gottago or just update :)

I’ll keep you posted about further development and experiences with an  updated app vs. a new app.

I keep it short now - just enjoy.

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Filed under: GottaGo, Information, iPhone on September 24, 2008 at 11:25 am by marc.
Tags: annapurna, appstore, GottaGo, released