Learning iPhone Programming (Book Review)

Learning iPhone Programming
by Alasdair Allan
Paperback, 384 pages, $ 29.99
(ebook editions also available)
ISBN: 978-0-596-80643-9
Published by O'Reilly, March 2010

With two million iPads sold in the first two months, and a new generation of iPhones just announced on Monday, June 7 (2010), it is obvious that the iPad/iPod/iPhone app gold rush has just begun. Two varieties of programmers will emerge: the full-time professionals, and a larger group of part-timers who will program for the pure pleasure of the work. As an enthusiastic member of the second group, I have been looking for a unique book. Learning iPhone Programming is almost exactly what I had been looking for.

The book is comprehensive, but it is not too large. It covers not only the nuts and bolts of the programming, but everything you will need to know before and after you develop your apps. It begins with a solid answer to the question; Why write native applications? Chapter 2 (Becoming a Developer) teaches how to register as an iPhone developer, install Xcode, install the iPhone SDK, and generate and deploy the developer certificates. Here also you will find a handy list of the four essential Apple websites that every developer will use again and again.

Chapter 3 guides you in the creation of your first app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Although the book's back cover recommends that you should have C-language experience before reading, there is a good deal of help for the uninitiated, including a concise introduction to key programming terms for new programmers. For those of us who have programmed in one of the members of the C language family (I have worked with C++), the author explains how the iphone's Objective-C is similar and different.

The heart of the book, the chapters about app development, contain easy-to-follow code and explanations, along with a generous supply of screen shots. Other sections that interested me included one about reasons why your app may be rejected; another about Regular Expressions; an overview of the PhoneGap platform; and a whole chapter about distributing your application after it's done. The final chapter (Going Further) provides a summary of books and resources for extending your education about Cocoa and Objective-C, the iPhone SDK, web applications, core data, push notifications and more.

The great strength of Allan's book is that it gives you a clear view of the big picture about iPhone development, and fills in most of the essential details. I can hardly imagine a better book to begin the great adventure of developing extraordinary apps.


--Michael Pastore


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Apple iPad Reads Ebooks With An App Called iBooks

Steve Jobs demonstates how to read ebooks on Apple's new iPad. The ebook reading software is called iBooks.

Jobs said that when the iPad launches, it will sell ebooks from five of the largest publishers, "and we're going to open up the floodgates for the rest of the world starting this afternoon."






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Uncompress Your Files With the Freeware Unarchiver: Zipeg

When your files take up too much space, or when you want to combine a number of files into one file — like putting all your groceries into one bag — you can use data compression software, and "zip" them into one convenient package.
There are many data compression formats, such as zip, 7zip, tar, and (for Mac computers) dmg. To open a compressed file, you double-click its icon, or drag it into your unarchiving software. It's usually a simple process, but sometimes it doesn't work.

Recently I received a compressed file with a password. I was surprised that it couldn't be opened with the unarchiver that comes with my Mac and Leopard. Fortunately, I found a solution, in an excellent freeware unarchiver named Zipeg.

Zipeg — available in versions for Mac and Windows computers — can extract compressed files in many formats, including ZIP, RAR, ARJ, LHA/LZH, 7z, TAR, GZ, TGZ, BZIP2, CPIO, RPM, ISO, CHM, Z, CBR, CBZ, WAR, EAR and possibly more. In addition, Zipeg lets you look into the compressed file, see what's inside, and extract only the file or files that you need. And Zipeg easily let me open my password-protected compressed file, the moment that I entered the password.

Zipeg has been created by Leo Kuznetsov, who obviously has a great sense of humor: read about him on the Zipeg website, or look at the Zipeg icon, or listen the lighthearted jingle that plays when you use Zipeg to extract a file. Zipeg works great, and it's fun!

For more information, and to download a Windows- or Mac-compatible copy of the latest version of Zipeg, visit the website: http://www.Zipeg.com

Zipeg is freeware, but you are welcome to make a donation to help to continue development.

—Michael Pastore


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Books (freeware book cataloging for Macs)

Books is the name of a freeware book cataloging application for Mac computers. It's free, simple to use, and filled with useful features.

You can download Books after visiting the project's home page, here:

http://books.aetherial.net/wordpress/

Installation takes almost 8 seconds: unzip the downloaded file, and then drag the icon into your Applications folder. (I always take another few seconds to make an alias, and then drag this "shortcut" to my desktop.)

You can immediately begin to add books. I typed in some titles by hand, but there are other options: you can import book information in many ways: from Amazon.com, from the library of Congress, from a .csv file, or from Delcious Library — a shareware book cataloging tool with pinache: whenever you delete a book the book bursts into flames.

You can add book covers by simply dragging an image onto the Books interface.

Once you have some books listed, the fun begins. Now you can create "smart lists" for sorting your books, similar to the tagging system used in Delicious.com. For example, you can create a smart list for books you want to read next; or for books by a certain author; or for books written in the Greek language; or for books loaned to your Aunt Fanny, and so on.

Books has many other features: export your book list; create your own custom fields; keep track of books loaned; link to reviews of the book, and much more.

Now that ebooks are getting more and more popular, you'll need a way to catalog your ebooks. Books can do it admirably. From the Books main screen, I made a separate list for my ebooks. Then I tagged each ebook with useful tags of my choice, for example: ebook file format, genre, source (where I acquired the ebook) and location.

For the ePub ebooks that I keep on Bookworm, I make a note in Books to help me to remember that fact. My PDFs are stored in a file called "My Ebooks 2009". Books lets you add a file link to every listing: so my PDF ebooks (and text and HTML ebooks) can be opened and viewed in two easy clicks. Books uses Apple's default PDF viewer, Preview, which is my favorite way to read PDFs on the Mac.

I haven't yet tested Books when thousands of books are entered, but I have a feeling that it can handle large libraries. (I will report back here with an update).

The Books development team will cheerfully accept your donations, here: http://books.aetherial.net/donate/ You might also want to donate time and skills, either developing software or translating into other languages.

Books is a great answer to the problem of organizing your book collection, not only because it is specifically designed for book cataloging, but also because it gives you all the power and flexibility of a database application, with none of the cost, and only a fraction of the learning curve.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

(Thanks to Teleread for alerting us to this great freeware.)



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MacHeist Bundle: The Last Day

The MacHeist Bundle is a collection of Mac software applications offered — for a limited time only — for a very low price.

It's a great deal for Mac users, and today is the last day of this zany sale.

Ten percent of your purchase goes to charities.

I bought my "bundle" about a week ago, and already I've been using some of the applications: Acorn, a graphics editor (list price: $ 49); Picturesque, for enhancing images (list price: $ 39); Kinemac, for creating 3D animations (list price: $ 299); WireTap Studio, for audio recording (list price: $ 69), and Times, an RSS reader (list price, $ 30). All these — and 8 more applications — were snagged for the insanely low price of $ 39.

There is some drama in this event: if a goal is attained ($ 500,000 for charity), then the final two applications will "unlock" — meaning, they will be made available to the MacHeist buyers.

Take a look at the MacHeist page, and if one of these featured applications is something you can use, then don't hesitate to buy. It sounds too good to be true, but it is true: you get the full versions of these products, with no gimmicks and no strings attached. Payment options include major credit cards and PayPal.




Update:
At 10:45 am, EST, Macheist achieved its goal of $ 500,000 for charity. Congratulations to the MacHeist staff! Everybody wins: charities get half a million dollars; customers get a great deal; and software developers get more than 50,000 new customers. And other businesses might want to look at the MacHeist model for innovative ideas to promote their work.

The goal has been met, but the sale continues through today. (Do check the time zones; MacHeist time is not EST).

MacHeist Bundle, 2009
www.MacHeist.com


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Process 3 is An Ingenious Task Manager for Mac

Is it possible to find a task manager that gives you the perfect combination of "powerful features" and "easy to use" ? ... Process 3 does it all. You won't need to watch a 10-minute video tutorial just to create your shopping lists. New projects and new tasks (called "items") are made with a keyboard shortcut or a couple of clicks.

The first great feature is the big yellow note pad that sits under every new task you create. Whether you are organizing your doctoral thesis about the polarization of Xenon nucleii, or doing something far more complex -- such as finding a birthday gift for your niece -- Process's yellow pad lets you immediately add essential information. And whenever you click on the task, that information appears exactly where you need it: right in front of your eyes.


If your task needs to link to more information, then you simply drag any file to the bar above the notepad. Drag a photo or URL link, and you'll see the picture or the website in the viewing window. If you link this task to a word processing file (such as .txt or .rtf) then this file appears, and when you make a change in the window in front of you, your source file is updated as well. That's a useful feature found in my $ 1,200 InDesign software: I hardly expected to discover it here.

Of course you can set priorities for your tasks. It's easy, and the result is a colored bar that lets you see the big picture in one glance. When you're ready to get the most out of this software, you can set up "smart projects". You choose the conditions, and whichever tasks meet those conditions are placed into the smart project. For example, I can choose to place all the "highest priority" tasks, from all my projects, into this one smart project. The result shows me what needs to be done today, or very soon.


I'd love to see some new features added in the future: a folder to hide projects I'm not currently working on; a global search; and a way to back up all the projects with one click. These are small things compared with the essentials that Process 3 provides, including many features that I haven't yet tried (such as sharing projects with colleagues and friends). Simplicity, power and elegance -- at a low price -- all combine to make Process 3 my favorite task manager. Judge for yourself: visit the developer's home page, and try this amazing software, free, for 15 days.

All my project ideas are now in one place, and all the new ideas can't possibly get lost. Ah, to be organized! A strange and wonderful feeling!

Process 3
"Your sublime outlining application."
from Jumpsoft http://www.jumsoft.com/process/
$ 39 for a new purchase, or $ 19 for an upgrade


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Open Office Now Available for Mac

Open Office version 3.0 has been released, with great news for Mac Users: it now works natively on Mac OS X. It's still free, although the Open Office team would appreciate your support via a donation in money or time. The free Open Office suite contains tools for word processing, drawing, creating spreadsheets, databases, and presentations. The word processor exports to PDF (and many other useful formats), and imports many file formats including MS-Word documents, RTF, text, and XHTML.

Download Open Office 3.0 here:

http://download.openoffice.org/

To install OO version 3 on your Mac, you'll need to meet these minimum System Requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or higher
• Intel Processor
  
• 512 Mbytes RAM
• 400 Mbytes available disk space
• 1024 x 768 or higher resolution with 16.7 Million colours

You can also get a free "Getting Started Guide" which teaches the basics of OO version 3, here (PDF file): http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/userguide3/0100GS3-GettingStarted.pdf

... and OOdles of information about OO, here: http://documentation.openoffice.org/

Another excellent (and free) office suite for Mac is NeoOffice. NeoOffice earned my donation when, thanks to its large number of importable file types, it eased my transition from a PC to a Mac.

Open Office, of course, works on all major platforms: Mac, Linux, and PC.


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Find Your Information Without the Camels

Sixty-four years ago, in 1944, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story he called “The Library of Babel.” Borges describes a library that contained all the knowledge in the world. And not merely all the knowledge was held there, but all the conceivable information, including "the interpolation of every book in all books", and a detailed history of the future.

"When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books," Borges writes, "the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be masters of an intact and secret treasure." But soon, this "inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression." Some of Borges' characters grew frustrated, others went mad. The library contained everything, but because it was so imponderably vast, no one could ever find the book they needed.

The problem — how to find it — is not new. Around the year 1200, a Persian scholar named Abdul Kassem Ismael, decided that he must take his entire library with him when he traveled: a library of 117,000 books. He stored these books on the backs of 400 camels. The camels had been trained to walk in alphabetical order, so that the scholar could, with relative ease, find any one of his precious books.

For my book collection, I can train the camels; for searching the Web I have Google. How can I find the information on my own computer’s hard drive, which every year grows larger, and is now (on one computer alone), 500 gigabytes?

(One gigabyte, by the way, is slightly more than 1 billion bytes. My hard drive can hold approximately the same amount of information as stored in -- if the novel is 50,000 words -- 1.6 billion novels.)

So how to find my own vast quantities of data that I create or store? … There are three approaches: you can make a search tool; you can buy a search tool; or you can use a free search tool.




1. Make Your Own Search Tool With Ferret

The camel can’t do it for you, but a Ferret can. Ferret is a powerful text search engine library that works with a programming language called Ruby. You can use the team of Ferret and Ruby to find data on hard drives and on servers. Ferret, a 100-page book by David Balmain (published by O’Reilly, 2008) is written in a concise and friendly style. The book shows you step-by-step how to create a powerful tool for finding your data in many kinds of file formats, including text, Open Office, MS-Word, HTML, PDF, the EXIF tags information stored in jpeg files, and the tagged information stored in mp3s. You’ll learn how to install Ferret, set up your index, fine tune and optimize your index, and how to search. There is an enormous amount of information on the Web about Ruby, but hardly anything about Ferret: a beginner-level programmer like me could never get along without a book like this. More information about the book may be found at the publisher’s website: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596519407/index.html.


2. Buy a Search Tool

Mac Users who want to drop 99 Euros might look at the newly released search tool named “Fox Trot”, (http://www.ctmdev.com/foxtrot/), which I have not yet tried. “Confidence,” wrote Robert Benchley, “is going after Moby Dick with a fishhook and a jar of tartar sauce.” … Confidence might be redefined this way: creating a search tool for Mac that’s better than the already-amazing “Spotlight”. Time and testers will tell.

Windows PC users who want a superb tool (that I use frequently), can test File Locator Pro ( http://www.mythicsoft.com/Page.aspx?type=filelocatorpro&page=home ). It’s fast, it’s flexible, and it finds everything I’ve ever lost. This software lets you search with simple words, or Boolean expressions, or Regular Expressions. The cost is $ 29.95, and it pays for itself in the time it saves. File Locator Pro is “the best of the best” in the world of Windows shareware.

3. Use A Free Search Tool: Google Desktop or Spotlight

Google’s free tool “Google Desktop” works on Windows PCs and Macs, and finds your computer’s information using a Google-like interface. You’ll need to download the software to your computer, and then (just like Google’s picture-organizing software, Picasa) let it run so it can index your data. It will find data in text files, HTML files, Microsoft files, zip files, and PDF. You can search additional file formats by installing any of the 81 (at the time of this writing) plug-ins, to extend the power of the search. For more information, take a look at a Google Desktop’s overview, here: http://desktop.google.com/features.html#overview

Spotlight is the search tool that comes free with every Leopard Operating system for Mac computers. Like many aspects of the Mac, it just works: type in your search term and you’ll find things in a blink. Spotlight has its plugins, too (see this page: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/). And Spotlight offers many advanced features, all explained in documentation on Apple’s website.

Years ago, your 40-megabyte hard drive (which you were proud of, thanks to its enormous capacity) was manageable: you could organize your data into folders, label these folders (work, projects, persons … ) and then use nothing but your eyeballs to find your files. These days, with home-computer hard drives moving toward the tremendous terabyte, you need to take some time to find the tools that are just right for you, and then take a bit more time to learn how to use these tools proficiently.

You've got it, but can you find it? ... As the African proverb reminds us: “Gold has no value if it remains inside the mountain.”

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Book Review: Digital Prepress Primer

Reviewed by Michael Pastore

When you create a document with Pages (the word-processing software included in Apple’s iWork), you can save it in a number of different file formats. To do that, simply select Export (from the File menu), and then select from four options: PDF, Word (.doc). RTF, or plain text (.txt). Saving to PDF is especially useful for everyone who wants their documents to be viewed the same way, and to remain impervious (well, somewhat) to changes. Your word-processing life gets even more interesting when you chose Print (from the File Menu), which allows you print you file, or to save it to these formats: PDF, Postscript, and PDF-X.

You may or may not know that PDF-X is a type of PDF file (a “restricted subset” in the jargon) that meets certain requirements for printing: all fonts must be embedded; images must be encoded in CMYK or spot colors; active content (forms, sounds, movies) canned be embedded ... and so on. When I need a clear and concise explanation of PDF-X, and everything essential about preparing documents for digital printing, I open up the handy little book titled: Digital Prepress Primer.




Digital prepress involves “all operations necessary to prepare a (printing) job for output to digital device." The book’s 14 chapters are divided into four sections: Job Creation; Digital Image Caputure and Reproduction; Job Engineering; and Digital Output. Author Marin does excellent work in explaining some of the more complex aspects of this field, especially color theory and reproduction; and digital trapping and imposition.



The book is written mainly for printing pros, but the clear language will make it interesting for everyone curious about how modern books are made. Especially notable is Chapter 8, ‘Graphic Arts Workflow’ which takes you inside the mind and office of a book-printing professional, as it describes the basic steps of print production: concept and design; prepress; press; finishing and binding; and shipping.


A glossary at the end defines more than 100 printing terms. The book is generously illustrated with screenshots, diagrams, and photographs. A handy reference, the Digital Prepress Primer reminds me of Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style” for everyone involved in the work of book production.


Digital Prepress Primer
by Joseph Marin
Paperback, 114 pages
Published by PIA/GTF Press
ISBN: 978-0-88362-563-7


Links:
PIA/GATF: the Printing Industries of America, Inc. / Graphic Arts Technical Foundation
http://www.gain.net

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