What more can you ask for?

This award-winning cycle "rack" - I use quotes as it's not really a rack as such - is a wonderfully elegant solution to the sort of problem I'm now facing: Where to put your treasured fixie when space is at a premium?

Try this:

It's called "Cycloc", is made from recycled industrial plastic and was the winner of the Consumer Product Design of the Year award. It's clever design ensures that the weight of the bike holds it within the hooks of the holder.

I'd buy one of these without hesitation if it wasn't for the $188 price tag...

More details under http://www.elementalstore.com/just-in/cycloc.html.

I've been working on putting the final touches to my soon-to-be released iPhone game (more later!) and thought I'd look around for some shortcuts to producing the multiple icon files required by iPhone/iPhone4 and iPad devices. While I don't believe in shortcuts in ensuring code quality, I do welcome ways to streamline my workflow and help me to be more productive!

Referencing a post by Aral Balkan about the sizes required and how to include them in your project, I went on the hunt for useful icon-creation tools - and found two great examples!

1. iPhone 4 icon PSD file from Cacoia:

A great layout tool to help you to set up your icon - and with the added bonus of the glows and gradients needed to produce images of the icon for use on websites - very useful indeed!

2. iOS Icons App by Chris Fletcher:

This is a native OS X app that Chris produced to encapsulate the functionality of his icon-producing PHP script, which can also be found on his site. The app is simple to use, which is why I like it!

Two great tools that helped me to create the icons and iTunes artwork for my iOS App within a few minutes - can't argue with that for an efficient toolset!

Here's the workflow I used:

• Create the 512 x 512 pixel version of the icon for use as iTunes artwork using the iPhone 4 icon PSD file template, create a slice around it and ensure that the effects layers are switched off - you don't need them to create the actual artwork file - then "save for web and devices" as a PNG
• Start up the iOS Icons App, previously downloaded and added to my Applications folder
• Drag and drop the PNG file created in step 1 into the large 512 x 512 "iTunes" window
• Click "Preview"
• After checking that all sizes of the icon look good, click "Save" - this creates a full set of icon files with the standard names as referred to in Aral's post referenced above

I actually now have all I need to drag and drop these icons into my XCode project and thus implement all icons required.

EDIT: After wondering for days why the icon wasn't showing on either my iPhone or iPod Touch, I found that the iOS Icons App actually DOES NOT create icons that can be used directly in XCode - the format is not recognised!!!!

By all means use this App to create the icons in the right sizes - it saves time there - but then remember to use Photoshop or Fireworks and good old copy and paste to create the final icons.

Not such a great workflow after all.

I also wanted to have a version for use in Facebook, Twitter and on a website so:

• Back to the PSD and the 512 x 512 pixel artwork I had previously created: "save for web and devices" with the nice glossy shine and glow effects layers visible

Basta!

A few minute's work and all sorted. Neat

I can fully recommend both of these tools as an integral part of your App-building workflow. If you know of any others, please leave me a comment!

Happy iBuilding

So. You've upgraded to XCode 3.2.4 and iOS SDK 4.1 and now you can't run your project in the iPhone simulator anymore?

See something like this:

(admittedly, you are not actually likely to see the bubble with "WTF??" in it - that's a little creative splurge from my side...)

Welcome to the club!

Now, why do all these errors suddenly pop up in Apple's own framework classes?

Easy: It's a bug. It took me a while to find the answer so I hope that this post helps you.

Simply open up your project settings and change the compiler from LLVM 1.5 (which you probably are using, otherwise you wouldn't get the error) to GCC 4.2 and you're sorted:

No more errors when building for the simulator.

You can still use LLVM when compiling for a device but there seems to be an issue with using this frankly more superior compiler for simulator builds.

So, carry on developing with a smile :-)

One week to go!

While others have already posted their choices of sessions and thoughts on the up-coming feast of creative flashness and intense social frenzy that is FOTB, I decided it was time to fix my choice of sessions.

Last year's FOTB was exciting, with a mix of technical and inspirational sessions - some useful for helping me to further my skills, others excellent for the ideas and thought-provoking material they presented. Some new speakers and some old favourites made it a great conference.

I've shifted my focus technically in the last year: While still having a very strong emphasis on, and working daily with, Flash/FLEX and AS3, I've been working a lot on iPhone/iPad development and even dipping my toes a little into the HTML5/CSS3 waters to test the temperature. That posed interesting questions for me while choosing which sessions to attend.

So, after much deliberation and taking into account some recent schedule changes, here's what I'm thinking of attending when the party starts a week tomorrow:

Sunday 26 September
- will be a busy and fun day for me as I'm attending Julian Dolce's "Mobile Development with Flash" Workshop - and wondering if he's had to rework his content following Apple's change of policy re. 3rd-party developer tools!

Monday 27 September - the first day of sessions!
Conrad Winchester, Robotlegs and Signals - a match made in heaven? Quite simply put: stuff I think it'd be useful to know. I've worked with PureMVC, use my own basic MVC patterns and can't miss this opportunity to learn more...

Andre Michelle, Pulsatile Crackle - physics and sound combined, ToneMatrix and all the rest... DJ Andre is in the house! ;-)

Lee Brimelow - Developing for the Mobile Web - given my shift in focus and the ever-increasing interest in this area, another must see!

The afternoon session on Monday has me torn and I'll have to decide on the day (partly depending upon what Lee covers in his morning session):

Either Hoss Gifford - Things I have learned OR Lee Brimelow - Multi-screen Web Dev with Dreamweaver CS5 Lee's session is hands-on, while Hoss' sounds, simply put, pretty awesome...

Tuesday 28 September

Tuesday kicks off with the Elevator Pitches and it'll be fun to watch this frantic collection of highly-charged and fast-paced mini-presentations! After being on the stage with my Elevator Pitch last year, I'm excited to see what this year's speakers have to thrill and entertain with! I have one or two friends giving pitches this year so this is going to be fun ;-) If you've even contemplated sleeping in and missing this then SHAME ON YOU! This session is going to be awesome!

Jon Howard - Where in the World? Intercontinental Ballistic Flash - if only to see what Jon's really going to talk about!

More hands-on: Mike Jones, Flash components in Flex apps - keeping up-to-date ;-)

Seb Lee-Delisle, What the Flux? - Seb's been on a voyage of discovery and it seems that there are some parallels with where I've been during the last year. It'll be interesting to hear his thoughts...

Julian Vallée, Storytelling, Playfullness and Experimentation - something we should all do more and what I'm hoping will be one of those enjoyable inspirational sessions!

Wednesday 29 September

After the frantic (although slightly less so than the Elevator Pitches) 6 of the Best session, it's on to fellow 2009 Elevator Pitcher Iain Lobb with Zero To Game Designer In 60 Minutes - right up my street. I'm looking forward to gaining those XP points...

Doug McCune, Data Visualisation Will Change Your Life - another theme which has been occupying my mind more and more recently, particularly in respect to physical computing, Data Visualisation is an exciting area.

Doug Winnie, Child's Play: Live Wireframes With Flash Catalyst CS5 - I have yet to try out Flash Catalyst but this may just make me want to ;-)

The last session of the day before watching Jared Tarbell creating physical artefacts (sounds interesting too) will be the lovely Laura Jordan-Bambach, Digital Mythbusters. I thoroughly enjoyed Laura's session last year and am very much looking forward hearing her take on the "social everything" trends within our industry.

So that's what I'm planning. There are, as always, sessions I would love to attend but simply can't without cloning myself. Mario, ralph and Hugh are all right there on that list - sorry guys :-( - I'm sure I'll get a chance to buy you each a beer though and am looking forward to catching up with some familiar faces - and meeting some new ones!

See you all there!

The excitement over the new iPod Nano is really bringing out some interesting discussions - and also some neat little add-ons. I found a few nice watch bands on Cult of Mac's Geek Trend today and this one is certainly my favourite:

The Rock Band from iLoveHandles is simply cool - and in my opinion follows the Apple design philosophy perfectly. Their website is also a thing of simplistic beauty...

Now how's that for a great geek watch?!!!

All I want now is for Apple to actually implement iOS on the Nano. I already have some great App ideas for this lovely little form factor :-)