Matt Legend Gemmell Modesty is Lying

MGTwitterEngine works on iPhone

Now that the iPhone SDK is to be lifted, this is just a brief official announcement that MGTwitterEngine works on both OS X and on iPhone - as has quietly been the case for quite some time.

Previously, in order to ensure that MGTwitterEngine did not violate the NDA, iPhone developers needed to change a few constants to valid iPhone SDK values in order to make the code compile for that platform, but this is now thankfully no longer necessary. The ReadMe file included with the source now makes explicit reference to the iPhone, and restores Craig Hockenberry’s original notes on linking to libxml on each platform.

I’m sure you’d all discovered all this for yourselves already, but it’s nice to no longer have to obfuscate the code or avoid mentioning a significant benefit - that of being dual-platform. I have some other iPhone code I plan to release soon too, once I get a chance to clean it up a bit, so stay tuned.

iPhone NDA to be lifted

Apple has today updated its iPhone Developer Program portal with a message indicating that the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) for the iPhone SDK is to be “dropped for released iPhone software” (which presumably means versions of the iPhone SDK which correspond to publicly released versions of the iPhone firmware - at time of writing, this would be the iPhone SDK for firmwares 2.0 and 2.1). I’ve archived the text of the message here.

This change is to take place within a week or so of the date of this post (Wednesday 1st October 2008), when developers will receive an updated agreement with the new terms. This new state of affairs should allow public discussion of iPhone SDK APIs, the publication of books on iPhone development, iPhone SDK development training courses, open source code releases, and more. Unreleased (beta) versions of future iPhone firmwares will remain under NDA until they are released, as is the case with beta version of Mac OS X.

Surely another strong indication that, as I previously asserted, Apple is listening to our concerns.

Apple is listening

Just a small positive note amongst the gloom of NDAs, app rejections and approval delays: Apple have today changed how the customer reviews system works for App Store applications: you now must have downloaded or purchased the app before you’re allowed to post a review on it. Here’s what it looks like if you try to review an app you’ve not actually used.

Since the App Store is the only way to get the apps in the first place, I think this is a strong positive step, and should help make the app reviews much more useful and representative to customers (and less depressing/frustrating for developers).

The wheels may be turning slowly, but they are turning - and I do believe that Apple is listening to our complaints.

(Thanks to my friend Neil for noticing the change this morning. His own app, Escape Pod, has received some frivolous reviews on the US store.)

NaNoWriMo for iPhone apps

I had an idea a week or two ago and it received a fairly positive response on Twitter, so I thought I’d post it here and invite feedback.

You might be familiar with NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind it is that you sign up, and during the month of November you write a 50,000-word novel. The aim, of course, is to get those who want to write a novel to just get started, and to provide motivation via an artificial deadline. It seemingly works pretty well, and many such works of fiction are produced each year.

It occurred to me that we could do a similar thing for iPhone applications. I think that a month is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to create a cool iPhone app, and it could be a pretty interesting community event.

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MGTwitterEngine important update

To all those using my MGTwitterEngine code on either Mac OS X or iPhone OS, please update your code from the Subversion repository. Please note that you should always be using the repository; I’m not making any effort to keep static zip-files of the code up to date. If you don’t know how to get code from the repository, see the notes at the end of this post.

This version brings a few improvements and some fixes, as detailed below.

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