In preparation of submitting Pinwheel to the App Store I’ve gone and released a beta version via ad hoc distribution. Seems like it should be a straightforward prospect, however the various device provisioning, code signing profiles and entitlements made it a bit of a process for a first-timer.

iTunes also seems to be entirely unhelpful when something goes wrong with the “unknown error” message. What could it be? Code sign error? Unprovisioned device? Incorrect OS target? Mismatch in the app and mobileprovision file? It’s all a mystery in the iTunes universe.

Despite the inconvenience involved with having to generate a new ad hoc mobileprovision profile each time I add a new beta tester device, requiring a recompile of the beta app, it’s nice to finally get an app out to other non-development devices.

The ad hoc distribution process is documented well (enough) on Apple’s dev portal and on several other blogs, but my real stumbling block was navigating the Xcode interface to ensure that the proper code signing profile was being included in the binary (hint, look at the verbose build output for “embedded.mobileprovision” and ensure that the mobileprovision ID matches the correct version.)

I’ve also been getting trouble with Xcode not building using the correct provisioning, despite updating the target info and cleaning out the build folder. A restart of the program usually gets it sorted.

The next step will be to set up a Distribution build for the App Store submission. We’ll see how that goes in the end…

Update: Proof-of-concept demo. Also, updated the script for building with the 10.6 SDK.

Update #2: Source code for demo project released.

I recently had need to use an open-source library in an iPhone project. Recalling the earlier work necessary in compiling the libraries needed for openFrameworks I started looking for a more generic way to build for iPhone development. Thankfully, LateNiteSoft wrote a great article about using a shell script to cross-compile linux projects, building a Universal Binary with versions for the Simulator and Device.

I configured their provided code snippets to build tesseract-ocr for iPhone, referring to the set-up for freetype and freeimage to fill in some c++ gaps. Anyway, the library seems to have built correctly. I’ll know for sure when I incorporate it into a project, soon.

To use it, copy the script into the project directory, next to the configure script. For a simple project which generates one monolithic library, edit the LIBFILE variable to reflect the location and name of the library. I’ve only used this for static libraries…other work may be necessary to correctly generate dynamic libraries (however, the iPhone SDK prohibits linking to dynamic libraries, so in this case it seems moot). Run ./build_fat.sh to kick off the process. Look for the compiled libraries in the “lnsout” directory. There’s no error checking, so caveat emptor.

Cross-compile shell script follows: (more…)

i’ve been dealing with a performance bug in a particle + accelerometer oF app. the same project which has run very smoothly on a first generation iPhone with OS 2.2.1 has a noticeable stutter on an iPhone 3GS with OS 3.0.

there was no improvement despite several rounds of optimizing the openGL drawing code and plugging several memory leaks.

finally, in frustration i bumped the explicit frame rate declaration from the default 60 fps to 120 fps. i realize that ofSetFrameRate(60) is merely the upper limit of the frame rate, and that the hardware won’t actually go faster than it can handle, however this immediately improved performance on the 3GS and the first gen is about the same as it was. further improvement was had with a declared frame rate of 240 fps.

i haven’t had a chance to look into the underlying issue, but i believe that oF is using NSTimer under the hood to trigger a scheduled update() and draw(). has there been some change in the SDK there?

i’m having a time of it tracking down a resource allocation bloat culprit in an iPhone app i’m working on. i’ve narrowed it down to when i’m rapidly updating the center property of a UIImageView. a snippet from the Instruments application is below:

there are hundreds (if not thousands) of these messages, and the object allocation graph trends steadily upwards. when i disable the portion of the method which updates the center property the allocations stop and the memory usage goes flat. this also only occurs on the device…the simulator does not exhibit this behavior.

i’m using UIImageView directly, without subclassing, and it contains data from a small PNG file. i’ve patched up several other leaks successfully today, and really wanted to nail this one too.

There was a recent comment about saving / restoring application state when using openFrameworks for iPhone which got me to thinking about how to do it. Apple’s frameworks provide a fairly thorough way to save state to the disk and restore later. There seem to be three primary ways to do this: simple plist files (usually encoded in binary on the iPhone), archived data (they like to refer to this as freeze-dried object graphs) and core data.

I believe that archiving objects require methods inherited from NSObject, which we don’t have in openFrameworks’ ofSimpleApp. Core Data seems like overkill, so I looked into using plist files.

There are likely better ways to do this, but this ad-hoc solution works wonderfully for a small app I’m working on, and only requires a bit of Objective-C code that could likely be moved up into a nice wrapper class. However, since the question was asked I’d just like to get it out there before working on a more elegant approach. (more…)

Had a really nice time tonight at the oF knitting circle held at Parsons in NYC. Saw several really inspiring projects and spoke to several people about using openFrameworks for iPhone development and showed the current version of the particle game using ofxiPhoneAlertView.

Quite a few folks mentioned that they have become interested in openFrameworks after hearing about it’s use for creating iPhone applications. While not every app is suitable, I saw a few really nice examples. My only regret is not getting the name of the fellow who was working with creating a sound wrapper.

The wiki page for the knitting circle is at the openFrameworks wiki.

Here is a (really) basic wrapper for the UIAlertView in openFrameworks of iPhone. Not all of the necessary delegate methods have been implemented yet, but this is enough for me to get the proof of concept rolling in an app I’m building.

Feel free to let me know how I can do things better, or just tinker with the code directly at github: ofxiPhoneWrappers

Check out the example project. This is a bit of a kludge. I would like to figure out how to avoid having to declare main and testApp as mixed source files (.mm). It works for now, however.

Here are the notes on using the class: (more…)

BarCampNYC4 was hosted by ITP on May 30-31st. It was a great event – I’d highly recommend going to another one.

I did a presentation titled “Using openFrameworks for iPhone App Development” which I think went well, although it was quite dense. Can’t be helped, I suppose. The walk-through of getting set up with openFrameworks has been previously posted, and is also available on ITPedia. Below is an embedded video of the presentation thanks to Mark B… and New Work City. (more…)

[Also available at ITPedia. Watch video of the BarCampNYC4 presentation.]

This is an overview of getting set up using openFrameworks for iPhone development.

What is openFrameworks?

openFrameworks is a “a C++ library for creative coding”. It shares a similar philosophy with Processing (as a library for Java). The intended audience “are folks using computers for creative, artistic expression, and who would like low level access to the data inside of media in order manipulate, analyze or explore.”

There are good resources for reading more about it below, under the Resources heading. This article assumes basic knowledge of programming and of the Xcode development environment. You can simply follow along and launch the demo app, but you should really read the resources to understand the structure of a typical openFrameworks-based application.

Why?

iPhone native application development is typically done in Objective-C. Not pressing the merits and detractions of Obj-C, but it’s *another* language to learn. If you have code / experience working in C++ then you can use oF to migrate those programs to the iPhone somewhat painlessly. Arguably easier to begin working with – espeically if you’re coming from experience with Processing.

Why not?

However, if you already develop in Objective-C, then maybe you don’t need to use oF. OpenFrameworks is not as well documented as Objective-C (even though Apple’s docs are as dense as the proverbial stereo instructions joke). Certain applications are not as suitable (lots of hierarchal views) It’s very easy to overwhelm the iPhone if porting desktop oF code over.

Ultimately, however, this eliminates 90% of Obj-C. Still need to use Obj-C (or Obj-C++) to use iPhone interface widgets. Don’t worry about it right now. (more…)

I’ve had a few days to test the libraries I cobbled together for using openFrameworks with iPhone and also received positive reports from some folks who tried out the Makefiles I provided to them, so here they are for anyone who’s willing to try them out. -please make these instructions better if you see fit- (more…)