Recover hard disk space when developing for iPhone OS 3.0

If you've upgraded your iPhone or iPod Touch to iPhone OS 3.0 (and remember, you can't downgrade these devices back to OS 2.2.1 once you've upgraded), chances are you'll no longer use that mobile device and the Mac for iPhone OS 2.2.1 (or earlier) development.

If this is true, then reclaim at least 277.7 MB of hard disk space (more if you have more than one software image). These software image are created whenever you restore your iPhone or iPod Touch to the latest SDK, and these software images remain on your hard disk even after the OS in your iPhone or iPod Touch are upgraded.

To delete the software images,

1. Launch Xcode
2. Navigate to the Window menu and click on Organizer menu item.
3. An Organizer window will appear. If you look at its left column towards the bottom, you'll notice the IPHONE DEVELOPMENT section
4. Click once on Software Images and Xcode will display a new window similar to
5. Right-click on any Software Image you no longer need (e.g. because you've installed it to your device and you do not expect to need to re-install that version again) to reveal a pop-up menu.
6. Choose Delete Software Image to move that image to the Trash, and empty Trash from the Finder.
   

Happy coding!

Twittering/Tweeting

As some of you have noticed (and emailed me), I'm spending an inordinately more time on Twitter than Blogger, and I've committed the "cardinal sin" of not publishing my tweets here.
To make amends, I've added a Twitter gadget here (with click-able URL no less) on the left "navigation column".

Does this signal the end of my blog? Nope, I'll still post worthwhile articles to the blog. By worthwhile, I'm referring to information that's helpful to you, are of timeless nature, and anything else that meets my "high degree of journalism" standard. 8)
Besides, Twitter only allows 140 characters.

Here's to hoping you find the posts on this blog as helpful as before, and again much thanks for (the much needed) kick-in-the-butt for not updating my Twitter info.

June 16 update:
Due to the high number of spammers bots following with unsolicited adult-content, I've temporarily removed the Twitter feature. Thanks for your understanding.

Missing iPhone Disk Image?

If you're

• an iPhone developer on the Mac, and
• you've recently (inadvertently?) upgraded your iPhone or iPod Touch (using iTunes) to the latest iPhone OS 2.2.1

you may find yourself unable to "Build and Go" apps from Xcode. Fortunately, Apple has released the latest iPhone SDK which when installed should resolve this issue.

If the Organizer window in Xcode still lists your iPhone or iPod Touch device with a yellow status and Xcode complains of "…go download the disk image…", chances are your developer disk image was not installed properly. I'd usually advise your launch Terminal.app and perform the requisite
sudo /Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all
before reinstalling Xcode…but if you're adventurous, you could attempt to

1. launch the latest iPhone OS 2.2.1 SDK,
2. double-click to open the Packages folder,
3. double-click on DeveloperDiskImage.pkg,
4. follow the installer's instructions and don't forget to specify the location (usually /Developers).

Your iPhone or iPod Touch should now be listed sans problem under Devices in your Xcode's Organizer window.

G'luck and happy coding!

Happy New Year to you

As we draw closer to the end of 2008 (oh, what a year) and look forward to 2009, I'd like to wish you a Happy New Year. May 2009 be a great year filled with good health, prosperity, and joy for your loved ones and you!

Thanks to you for your emails, IMs, Skypes, Tweets, and RSS subscription. Your encouragement and continuing support are most appreciated.

Before you download iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 2.2…

…know that the Apple iPhone OS 2.2 documentation link will not work despite you pressing on the button.

Update:
The Subscribe button worked since Dec 27 and downloaded a 90+ MB work of documentation.

Lastly, resist updating your iPhone or iPod Touch devices to 2.2 if you plan to test your apps on your devices as the 2.2 SDK doesn't include disk image for 2.2 and you'll end up with the error message:

The Developer Disk Image could not be mounted. Xcode could not find an appropriate Developer Disk Image to mount on ***********. Please contact Apple for the 2.2 (5G77a) device support package.

A funny ad you might enjoy

As some of you are aware, I'm traveling in Europe for about 2 months.

Turning on the TV, I saw a really creative and funny ad that I think you'll enjoy…

Humor in the face of disaster…

…well, maybe not quite a disaster. For software developed for mass market (versus software developed for a specific client), it's inevitable that occasionally that bugs and exceptions creep in despite the best effort of programmers and QA team.

So what does one do in such a situation? When an app misbehaves or does something the user doesn't expect, one way is to establish an easy way
1) for the app (to recover or failing that, not lose data), and
2) for the user to inform the software vendor/developers.

An example is this gem from Firefox 3.0.1. when the app didn't do what I expected it to:

The idea here is to not make an excuse, but admit ones foibles.

Was I annoyed that Firefox failed? Yes. But the gem with the "tongue in cheek" humor helped me remember and appreciate that behind Firefox are "faceless" human beings engineering the complicated piece of software that is Firefox.

Malaysia CocoaHeads (MYCocoaHeads) Sept Meet

MYCocoaHeads will be meeting this month (Sept '08). This month's meet will be led by Jinny.

Topics
• Cocoa look-a-like Web Frameworks: Cappuccino & Objective-J and Sproutcore by Adrian Lo
• Discussion about an event in Nov/Dec 2008
• Bug-squashing and code help session :)

Any last minute offers to present ANY topics, give me the heads up!

Date: September 20
Time: 3-5pm (as usual)
Venue: Epicenter, Pavilion KL

Ex-students: Please update your email contacts

Hi, if you've attended any Mac Programming and Cocoa courses conducted by me in the past, please update your email contact to be informed of updates in the new portal currently being planned.

This new portal will consist of

• selected post-course challenge exercises from course, and their answers
  
• source codes library contributed by the instructors and students. Usage and license information will be indicated on the source code.
  
• discussion forum
• jobs (full time/contract, on-site or remote) listing
• chat (*tentative)
  

This new portal will be accessible using a Mac Universal-binary app (OS X 10.5 Leopard) currently under development. The plan is for this app to allow multi-user edit of source and RTF files among fellow ex-students and peers.

To update your contact details, send your contact details (full name, email) to me. A separate email has been sent to all ex-students emails so if you're received that email (at the email address you prefer) announcing this, there's no need to update.

This is a chance for you to influence the features this portal as it's developed so I hope to hear from you soon.

AppKido has been updated for Xcode 3

AppKido 0.981 has been released and for those who are impatient, here is the download link.

With this release, the points raised by my earlier blog posts are no longer relevant.

• AppKido crashes with latest i(cool gadget) SDK on April 24, 2008
• Follow-up to AppKido and Xcode 3.1 b*** [1-5] on May 22, 2008