MildMannered Industries

More iPhone app news coming soon, but in the meantime, we’d just like to mention a side project for developers that is still in its incubation stages right now.

Last year we started putting together an archive of publically redistributable Objective-C code, together with a structured index, to make it easy to, for example, find all the subclasses of NSTextField.

If you’re trying to get a certain Cocoa control to behave in a particular way, it can often be frustratingly difficult. If someone else has already solved the problem, then it can save you a lot of time. Much of the code is GPL’d though, so be careful not to violate the license terms if you’re writing proprietary code.

You can view, browse, and search the archive at http://archive.mildmanneredindustries.com/

We’d like to add full-text searching, and a Rails front end (yes, sadly, we’re as much victims of fashion as the rest of you), but are absolutely swamped right now.

Baseline 1.1.3 is out now!

This release adds a Date Modified and Kind column to the directory tree view, so that its more Finder like. You can now also change which columns are displayed, via context menu in the table headers, just like in Mail.app

These changes are actually byproducts of some under the hood changes to support some upcoming new features.

Some exciting Baseline updates are coming soon, but I set aside this weekend for playing with the new iPhone SDK.

We’ve got loads of ideas for great apps, but I wanted to get something easy, but useful, up and running as a learning experience - hence Bonjourodrome!

Bonjourodrome is the iPhone equivalent of Bonjour Browser - it allows you to see what Bonjour services are advertising on your local network, and to inspect the services’ address and TXT Record entries. The app monitors Bonjour Services asynchronously, so you can see services coming online and offline, and changing addresses as it happens.

Its very useful if you’re trying to debug a Bonjour service, as you can work on the service on your desktop, and just glance at your iPhone to see whether your service got published, and what addresses it resolves to. Bonjourodrome can also open some services, such as http services. Bonjour could potentially be very important on the iPhone, as it provides a way of detecting what (potentially iPhone specific) services are available, and by mapping service types to URI’s, one can auto-launch iPhone client apps specific to those APIs.

Although I had quite a lot of experience working with the Bonjour APIs, it was remarkably easy to get a fully featured iPhone app up and running - after about 24 hours, Bonjourodrome is fully functional, and just needs some tweaking and polish.

I’d put up some screenshots, but I just need to check whether the SDK NDA terms allow me to do that …

I saw this funny message on an iPhone the other day

Here’s a closer view:

Just in case you think it’s some kind of Photoshop magic, here’s a another picture of the iPhone:

Presumably there’s a Mac Mini or something under there, with a gigantic display attached. I didn’t measure the screen dimensions, but I don’t think it’s a stock Apple one.

Oh, and of course I took the picture with my much smaller iPhone.

Baseline 1.1 is out, with graphical TreeMap goodness! Hooray!