So, I’ve not posted anything for a while — firstly I must apologize for that, I’ve simply been extraordinarily busy recently. However, I am aware of the changes in the Leopard version of BackRow, and hope to have an update ready for that soon. This will include copies of ATVLoader and the BDK for Leopard (yay ppc support), and some documentation on the changes required for other existing plugins to run on the Mac OS itself.

However, before that will come some information about Time Machine. I’ve not got an example put together yet, but I’m going great guns on working out the API used by apps like iPhoto and Address Book for their built-in Time Machine support. Back when it was first announced, this was to be a public developer feature, but it seems that plan went by the wayside. However, the APIs are in there, they just require a little working-out since we don’t seem to have headers for them. I hope to deliver those by this weekend, along with a working sample application.

Eh? Eh?

Didn’t I say that there would be an iPhone SDK coming along at some point? Well, okay, I didn’t say it here, but I did say it in IRC. Yes, really. Really. Fine, don’t believe me then.

But anyway, go & read this. No permalink unfortunately (shakes fist at Apple), so you might have to scroll down a bit.

sits back & looks smug

Well, I’ve got my iPhone project worked out. This is likely to be a goldmine for experienced developers, if you can get your stuff sorted out in time. And I plan to be picking little flakes of gold from the seat of my trousers in about 12 months’ time.

Mmmm, gold. It’s shiny.

Now, all I want for Christmas is docs for BackRow. Well, that & a moon-pony.

Mmmm, pony.

Why am I not surprised that one of my favourite writers/actors/critics is able to accurately describe the Apple users’ ethos so accurately:

Why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that?

Full article here, if the site regains its composure after the thrashing it’s doubtless receiving from Fake Steve Jobs.

MacRumors today reports on a story at Gearlog, quoting Apple’s VP of marketing Greg Joswiak, in which he outlines Apple’s stance on iPhone development:

Apple takes a neutral stance - they’re not going to stop anyone from writing apps, and they’re not going to maliciously design software updates to break the native apps, but they’re not going to care if their software updates accidentally break the native apps either.

This to me echoes the reports that Apple was unconcerned about third-party Apple TV developers — that they would not be specifically doing anything to hamper that process, but that no support was offered and people who manage to brick their ATVs have only themselves to blame. The Gearlog story was in fact updated to clarify this with regards to the iPhone.

A second update to the Gearlog story mentions that Apple now says that “software updates will most likely break” native iPhone applications in the future. I take that to mean much the same as the Apple TV 1.1 update, which changed the APIs somewhat, but not extensively. So, after a software update your third-party apps may not function, but their developers will probably be able to create new versions without any real difficulty.

Recursive functions are great. They’re a very useful tool for a great many things, and in the BackRow framework’s RUIPreferenceManager class, they’re put to (presumably) good use when handling preference domains. There’s a single funnel function which uses CFPreferencesCopyAppValue() to fetch a preference from a given domain/app; if unable to find a value, it splits the domain, removes the last component (provided it’s got more than two components here) and then calls itself again with this new, shorter domain.

That in itself is not a problem. The implementation, however, has one small flaw that will at least throw an exception, and at worst cause a crash. See if you can find it:

- (id) _valueForKey: (NSString *) key forDomain: (NSString *) domain
{
    [_preferencesLock lock];
    id result = (id) CFPreferencesCopyAppValue( (CFStringRef)key, (CFStringRef)domain );
    [_preferencesLock unlock];

    if ( result == nil )
    {
        NSMutableArray * components = [NSMutableArray arrayWithArray: 
            [domain componentsSeparatedByString: @"."]];
        unsigned count = [components count];

        if ( (count == 0) || (count <= 2) )
        {
            [components removeLastObject];
            result = [self _valueForKey: key 
                              forDomain: [components componentsJoinedByString: @"."]];
        }
    }

    return ( [result autorelease] );
}

Yes, that’s right. The recursive call will return an autoreleased object. Which then gets autoreleased once more.

Oops. Time for another software update there

So, the iPod touch was announced yesterday, and made available to order. I’ve placed an order for the 8GB model (having bought a 30GB iPod classic not long ago, which is plenty big enough to contain everything I have), pretty much purely so I can do some iPhone programming.

According to MacRumors, the iPod touch and the iPhone both run the same operating system, on the same hardware, to the degree where the apps on the iPod touch are “the same damn binaries” as on the iPhone. This means that I’ll be able to do some work with ‘Touch OS X’, be it the UIKit or more esoteric items such as CoreSurface (low-level graphics), GMM (Google Maps), DeviceLink, ITSync (iTunes sync, which probably uses DeviceLink internally), MultitouchSupport, MusicLibrary (in Obj-C, no less), and the iPhone Preferences.

My order is due to ship by September 28th, and due to arrive by October 5th. Hopefully it’ll ship ahead of schedule, but once it arrives, we’ll see whether there’s a disk mode I can enable, and whether that gives us the ability to see the OS drive. Personally, I have my fingers crossed for a Journaled HFS+ partition with a custom UUID, like the Apple TV’s software restore partition. That’s at least mountable on the desktop.

I can hardly wait !

PS: I’m now following John Gruber’s example and making all my posts using MarsEdit by Daniel Jalkut. It seems to work really quite nicely, so go & buy it now. Yes now. No, you can’t wait until later. Oh, okay, if you’re actually in the middle of something then you can wait until you’re done. But as soon as you’re done you’re going to buy it. Bokay?

A minor update to the BDK today: I’ve rebuilt the BackRow header package with the ones on my machine, since it would appear that the current release didn’t actually have the latest ones, and was missing some enumerations & such.

Download it here

I’ve just been informed that a section on ATV Loader is going to be broadcast as part of The Lab with Leo on G4 TechTV next week. The show in question will be on TechTV in Canada on Tuesday August 7th at 6pm EST, and will also be broadcast on the HowTo Channel in Australia (although I don’t know the exact date/time for that, sorry).

I’m not sure when the air date is in the US — I would guess that it would air on the same schedule as the Canadian version; if anyone can confirm that, please post a comment. Same goes for the Australian times for the HowTo Channel, and anywhere else that rebroadcasts the program elsewhere.

So, I (finally) got myself an Xbox 360 last weekend. Fairly impressed with it so far, although partially regretting not waiting for the Halo 3 edition to appear with its HDMI support (mmm 1080p). However, since my young brother in law is visiting now, I figured this would be a good time to splash out on a console and a second controller. Not that the second controller will actually communicate with the console at all, but hey.

Anyway, I have a gamertag now, and a fairly small (yet ready to grow) library of X360 games, and some original Xbox ones (such as Halo 2) which can do multiplayer. So, look me up, name of ATV Quatermain. My gamertag is there over on the sidebar.

A relatively minor update to the appliance here (although not for those unable to download anything with AppleTV Software v1.1 installed). This includes a Swedish localization by fooBar, and fixes for sshd installation and for AppleTV Software 1.1 compatibility.

The link below downloads the installer, the link on the AwkwardTV site downloads the appliance alone, for those building Patchsticks.

Download version 1.0.8