the animation is too slow currently…i feel that i’m doing things in a really inefficient way at the moment. i had also tried using UIImageViews and animating them, but i couldn’t figure out a way to get the spinning layer to composite using the overlay blend mode…which you can easily do with core graphics contexts.

i’ll try again later, but i really need to get away from the computer and onto my bike to train (which is a matter of about five feet now that it’s dark and icy out). i’ll post a video if i can get the animation on the phone to happen more quickly.

the winter show went very well – it seemed that cloud reader was well received. most of the favorable comments were split among two categories…those which really liked the performative aspect of the project and could envision it large on a wall….and those who reacted strongly to the intimate aspect of seeing it running on the iPhone screen.

since the project was originally designed for the small screen in ITP’s 2×2 class, the comments were enough to encourage me to finally get around to iPhone application development. i’ve looked over various objective-c, cocoa and iphone docs over the past year, but never really made a commitment to actually learn or apply it. now i’m driven, and have come to love square braces

separately and coincidentally, sean from golden cheetah decided to extend justin and i write access to the svn codebase and the website. he’s been quite busy and gc development has stalled for it. although i’ve been busy with school, between the three of us we should be able keep abreast of patches and implement new features.

i’m trying to be cautious with the project…i don’t want to do something that will expose me as a (programming) fraud! justin and i were able to get it working happily in xcode…although the QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -DGC_BUILD_DATE=”`date +’\”%a_%b_%d,_%Y\”‘`” compiler directive in src.pro was causing qmake to create non-parseable xcodeproj files…i think it may have to do with escaping special characters. justin sent a bug report to Qt…hopefully we’ll hear something at some point…for the time-being i’ve commented out the line in the .pro file and added a conditional define in MainWindow.cpp.

so, tinkering with the golden cheetah code has be getting me comfortable with code that isn’t java and i think i’ll be well on my way to get to with with cloud reader for iphone…come on apple and approve my developer application!