Designing a major piece of software such as a billing system for an airline, or Kill All Humans-3D is a non-trivial thing to do. A large game can cost as much as a movie these days, require dozens of artists and engineers, and take years to complete if at all (See Duke Nukem-Forever). Thankfully the iPhone with a smaller screen and limited input has “lowered the bar” to entry when it comes to games or most any other kind of software. That’s not to say that iPhone apps are cheesy when compared to the PS3, but in the iPhone world, writing a compelling application might only take on

e or two guys and a kitchen table. This is not at all unlike the excitement that surrounded the early days of home computing software when someone could bang out a fun and profitable game or utility for the Apple II in only a couple of months.

The first thing to do is to figure out why you want to do an iPhone application in the first place. To become fabulously wealthy overnight is not the best reason, as most applications may generate only enough each week to buy a bag of M&Ms. A small bag. The runaway hits such as Ocarina are very few and far between. For every Angry Birds there are thousands of iBeer knockoffs.

But if you want to do an app just to learn programming, and to show off to a few friends, now we’re talking. Programming is a fascinating discipline particularly if you are a detailed-oriented type who can work alone. However, if you are the president of the local Toastmasters, maybe not.

Perhaps the best reason to do an app is for yourself: be it a game, utility or educational application, as long as it is something you need that isn’t addressed by any of the titles currently in the store. If it doesn’t sell, so what? You can still have the feeling of accomplishment from actually writing a useful program for yourself. And if it needs a new feature, you can sit down and add it yourself instead of waiting for some anonymous coder to do so. And if it is something you need, guess what? It could be useful to someone else, and who knows, you may just mak

e a little extra spending money on the side to cover the cost of an iPhone 5.

And let me tell you, it’s really great to check into your iTunes Connect account the day your application was approved and see the very first sale.

So let’s assume you have finally decided on what your app is supposed to do, and maybe even sketched out a few screens. Each programmer has his or her own style of working. Some will create detailed specification documents up front before the first line of code is written, others could dig in with only a vague idea of what the target might look like. I belong to the latter group. With Distant Suns, I knew I just wanted something to display the stars and planets, so started there. The interface was only secondary and would be driven by the display.

The look of your app is strongly dependent on what genre it is. If it is a utility for example, there is no need to get too fancy on the interface, so using the built in screens, toolbars, list-boxes, etc, should be fine. If you want to do something much more on the entertainment side of things, Apple recommends using a more creative interface. iPhone games in general tend to have fairly simple UI requirements interestingly enough, although the underlying code is likely to be some of the most complicated out there.

Examine the built-in apps on the device. They tend to be pretty no-frills, such as the mail client or iTunes. There is an exception when it comes to the calendar and contact applications however. Both use a book metaphor

by supplying some nice artwork to customize the otherwise standardized iOS widgets.

If you are looking at more of an entertainment application, the sky’s the limit. In this case, be prepared to hire an artist and spend a lot of time fussing about some of the tiniest details. One side effect of this is that if you do use your own custom widgets, it would make porting it over to other devices and environments much easier.

The basic design process can be divided up into two major categories:  1) The User Interface (or “UI”) and 2) all the other stuff.

The UI is typically both the most fun and confounding part of any application, and can be much more than merely having a button labeled “Do something cool!” Subtle details build upon subtle details ad-nauseum and can follow increasingly more convoluted pathways rivaling the health care bill in complexity.

In games, the UI is usually pretty straight forward, but in other applications such as astronomy software, it can be frustratingly opaque. And no matter how robust you think the UI is, someone is bound to find a way to crash it  (usually someone who is about 7 years old.)

The first rule to follow when designing the UI is that of “the Law of Least Astonishment.” No matter what your application is likely to be, ensure that it will never have your users pause and mutter the immortal words, “what the…?” Make the job of achieving a specific task the most straightforward and obvious way. Too many programmers design the UI to follow the natural flow of the code, when normal people care nothing of the implementation; they just want to get the job done. For example, don’t have a shortcut such as ctrl-Q to mean “Yes I’ll buy that Sword-of-Dragon-Smiting!” when in all other packages, ctrl-Q means quit.

In an iPhone app, typically there will be an obvious hot-spot you can touch should you want more information onwhatever is being presented. In theory, Distant Suns should be no different if a user would like to pick an object such as a planet or star to expose more details. I decided to go against the common model since the data density can be so high compared the to the finger density of the user. That is, the width of their finger might actually cover up and therefore “pick” a dozen stars with no real way to distinguish what the intended star was (The iPhone UI guide recommends buttons no smaller than 47×47, a lot of stars can fit into that size of square). The solution was to have the user double-tap on the screen that would bring up a cursor in the middle of the display. Dragging the desired object into the cursor would leave no ambiguity as to what the user wanted. This failed in two ways: 1) how would they know to double-tap the screen to bring up the feature in the first place (don’t assume they read the documentation), and 2) on iOS devices, double-tap usually means to zoom-in or out. The next version still had the double-tap, but gave them a floating cursor that would track with their finger. Its use becomes a little more obvious, but still leaves much to be desired. The real “fix” would be to do exactly as the user would expect: touching the screen would display data about an object. Since the results would still be ambiguous, I need to have design that offers up an intuitive way to either show the user the one-true-way of picking (as in “we tried it YOUR way, let’s try MY way the next time”), or add some additional visual means to help separate the desired object from the undesired ones. Apple solved a similar dilemma which cut/copy/paste operations presented, by adding a cute little magnifying glass widget to expose the spot covered by the pointing device (ie, “finger”).

Another rule suggests that is perfectly fine to follow in the footprints of the pros. So let’s see how Apple does things once again. Their design ethos is a simple one. True, their products really are that elegant, simple to use, and are frequently beautiful when compared to their competitors and so on, but what unifies those pieces into a consistent whole is their secret sauce of interface design: they do beautiful and fun transitions between states.

In the natural world, you’ll never see anything instantly appear and disappear. Why should you on a computer screen? On iOS notice the smoothly sliding windows, transparency changes, crossfades and the blooming effect when an app is launched. The transition of an app into the background seen in the new iOS4 multitasking model is particularly fascinating: the app’s screen quite literally seems to slide into the background and fades to black while the new app in turn, comes out of the shadows to fill up the screen. It is brilliant and makes something as trivial as swapping to another program a beautiful little moment of visual joy.  In the past little tricks like this required endless reams of low-level custom code keeping us graphics guys fully employed. But fortunately for all of us, Apple chose to expose the very animation toolset that they used to create those kinds of effects.

And that is one reason why the iOS products are simply a total hoot to program.

Next stop: go forth and code!

The main issue is that the compass doesn’t work in landscape mode, and some people have mentioned that it tends to drift towards the north at times.

You may disable APN for each app at any time simply by going to your device’s Settings->Notifications panel.

If you recevied multiple notifications of the same thing today (the Perseid meteor shower and my half price sale), that is because there is at present no way to limit a single message to someone if they have mulitple apps with APN. In this case users of Grand Tour, Weather Planet, DS-Lite and DS-2 would likely be interested in the same things. And if you have all of those apps….oh well. That’s why I try to limit messages to no more than one a month, and then to topics likely of interest to my kind users.

So, yes, it is a bit clumsy right now, and kinda annoying (chorus: ‘kinda?’ you’re kidding, right?) and I want to find a way to still get the message across without having to launch one of my apps, and do so just a little bit quieter.

You can turn off push notifications in the devices preferences, but they are meant for astronomical announcements an sale info.

So sorry.

Yes, and no. Yes, as that is what I would like to have done…No…is that Distant Suns 3 was originally the iPad only version. I had a narrow window to get an iPadable version of the app out when the device went on sale, and Apple didn’t communicate well enough with the developers to let us know just how iPad apps would be handled. If the iPad version was swapped out for the iPhone version and then the release was botched by Apple, it could cause trouble and potentially kill the app for several days (which happened once last summer). That was too much of a risk.

Now days, Distant Suns 3 will always be targeted to the beefier equipment, iPhone 3GS and up (although it works ok for now on 2G machines). DS2 will continue to be a lightweight version for older gear. Furthermore AT&T restricts over-the-air downloads to 20 megs or less, so I wanted to have one version that could be downloaded in the field for the instant gratification angle.

Sorry for any confusion. If Apple permits migration of users from one app to another without requiring purchase, then the story changes considerably.

After leaving my cameras in the men’s room at Gate 25 of the Santiago, Chile airport (D’oh!), it becamenecessary to make my iPhone 4 my exclusive camera to shoot the July 11 total solar eclipse.

This posting is merely some observations about the phone’s handling in less than ideal conditions.

The eclipse’s path began in Argentinean Patagonia, the most southern province in Argentina. Our target was the town of El Catafane, pop. 25000, a popular destination for summer vacationers.

While Patagonia was not known for clear skies during the winter, about 20 eclipse chasers and me (the only certifiable “eclipse virgin”) came from all across the US and Mexico hoping against the odds to see a sunset corona. Totality was to take place when the sun was a mere 1 degree above the horizon immediately before sunset.

The promised clouds and snow never materialized, as Sunday dawned perfectly clear, and surprisingly warm, with a temp peaking about 45F degrees.

Four of our party brought pretty hefty DSLRs, everyone else would use their small pocket cameras and me with my iPhone. One woman from San Diego had just purchased a Nikon DSLR but still didn’t feel comfortable using it so told me I could us it instead while she’d take the iPhone.

Our viewing site was about 20 miles south of town up on a rocky hillside, about 1000 to 1200 feet elevation. Snow covered about half the landscape, the rest made up of some large rocks or very prickly bushes. The iPhone did quite well in the cold, my hands not so well. Since the touch screen required raw flesh to work right it was necessary to keep my right hand ungloved. As the temperature dropped that became much more of a nuisance. Several times the camera’s screen stopped responding, so I had to restart the camera app and one time, restart the camera itself. I don’t know if this was due to the cold or the heavy use. I would suggest getting gloves with the fingertips removed for cold shooting conditions.

When handing it over to Lucille while I took her Nikon, I instructed her to only take pictures over places that didn’t include rocks in case she dropped it. Not long after that I heard two words that no iPhone owner wants to hear: “Hey, whose phone is that in the snow?”. I was using my old 3GS case, which is too big for the ‘4, so it slipped out easily from time to time as it did here (and at a Tango show, where it popped into a wine glass, breaking the glass). Fortunately it only got a little wet, which seemed not to hurt it at all.

First contact (when the moon first starts eating away at the sun) came at about 4:45 PM. Totality would be in an hour. I went around testing the Nikon, setting it into burst mode and Lucille went around having a blast with the iPhone, when she wasn’t dropping it at least. Her job was to shoot video of the entire totality, about 3 minutes worth.

As the sun/moon closed in on the horizon, there was some discussion about the mountains in the distance and how high above the horizon they might be. Considering we had a scant1 degree to play with, there really was no margin for error. If we were higher then the mountains, then there would be no problem. If lower, sobbing would surely ensue.

Finally the last couple of minutes worth of the crescent rapidly vanished, and the sky darkened. We could sense the shadow of the moon begin to sweep down upon us at several hundred miles-per-hour, as we were the first part of the earth to intercept it. I started the Nikon, Lucille stared the video.

Then and only then we discovered the mountain’s height: 1.5 degrees. Normally cheering breaks out at totality, but in this case it was more of a collective “wtf?”.

Oops.

I had made in intricate schedule of shooting for the first minute, but that went out the door when someone shouted “there’s Venus!”. That and Mercury popped out very clearly as did Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. There was a small cloud hovering over the mountain’s peak, reflecting the eerie light apparently from the corona. But it was only the lunar shadow told us that something oddly beautiful, and surreal must have been in progress. We could only laugh or maybe cry. The weatherman forgot to warn about the partly-scattered-mountain-ranges I guess.

Two minutes 48 seconds later, the distant clouds burst forth again in golden hues, reflecting the no longer visible sun. The sky brightened up, all but Venus faded back into the twilight blue.

Behind us? The tops of the hills we had been in this morning were glowing a ruddy red as if to mock us. Another eclipse group was up there so and had seen the full event.

Oh well.

The video came out surprisingly well,capturing the odd coloring of the sky, Venus and Sirius and the disappointed hush over the camp. It was fairly noisy as one would expect in low light conditions on an inexpensive sensor, but otherwise a nice souvenir of the event. The veterans where pretty impressed as well.

Even though I still hadn’t seen an eclipse, at least I had a fabulous dry run for the Australia 2012.

The following day we visited the Glacier National Park, and fortunately, I didn’t drop the iPhone into the lake unlike an unfortunate fellow eclipse chaser.

As a longtime amateur photographer, I always yearn (yes, yearn) for great opportunities to shoot stuff…with a camera that is! And now I had none…oops, wait a minute there Bunky, I have my trusty new iPhone 4!

So this was going to be an iPhone 4 expedition only. A few years ago I sniffed at people whipping out their Razrs or similar class phones to shoot once-in-a-lifetime photos…now I had to be one. Grrr. Except the quality of the built in phone cameras are much better now, and the iPhone 4 is no exception. So I thought maybe I should document this to show how capable the little camera is. Note that Wordpress does compress images quite a lot, so these will have some noticeable compression artifacts when displayed full size.

The expedition started with a 3 day side jaunt to Chile’s Easter Island, otherwise known as the place of those “damned creepy giant heads.”

Besides being loaded down with my iPhone 4, I had a small Celestron Firstscope to examine the southern skies. Unfortunately, said skies were clouded over most of the time so I only caught a quick glimpse of the famous Omega Centauri globular cluster from off the balcony of our hotel.

But the damned creepy heads (DCHs) were the perfect subject. While the images from the iPhone 4’s camera look very good, the phone is a severely flawed camera as it is way to easy to get some fingerage in front of the lens, or to drop the thing while fumbling around with it. Fortunately, I had much more of the former and none of the latter (so far).

The colors are rich, probably a little more intense than the real scenes, but hold nicely on their own. Low lights did okay using existing light, and the strobe was acceptable, but not super bright as one would expect. Certainly worked okay for some close shots. And certainly was needed when we lost power one night.

We spent three days on Easter Island, flying back to Santiago for the night, then on to Buenos Aires for three more days. At last the sun was out, and weather very Northern California like (as to be expected as we’re at the same Southern latitude as San Jose is Northern.

While on the plane two flight attendants go by my seat handing out drinks, as I am playing with the ‘4. One stopped bent over, looking at the phone and said “is that an iPhone 4??” holding up four fingers. So she stopped her duties, her colleague  laughing and rolling her eyes. The other wanted to see the “retina display” (yup, she knew theproper name), and played around with the magical glass slab for a half minute then complained that they won’t be available in Chile until September. I suspect many people have had similar encounters with either the new phone or the iPad.

The photo to the right is in front of Evita’s tomb. Our guide (in the photo) was a confirmed Evita supporter, and didn’t think very highly of Madonna playing her in the movie version of the play. As you can see, the camera handles the shadows quite well. And even when I had direct sunlight it did acceptably good.

One of our other group members did the same thing I did, left his camera in a restroom. This time he was lucky, finding it where he left it 15 minutes before.

At this point the weather in the eclipse zone wasn’t looking too good. At this time of the year, we had only about a 25% chance of actually seeing the thing. And even if we never did all of the other sights and sounds sure made up for it.

(End of part 1.)

Okay, okay, more detail. We all know now about what the iPhone 4 holds, as a gazillion and a half reviews have already appeared. But I thought I could add a few extra details.

The Screen: OMG! Yes, it’s that good. Screen resolution has been the last real limitations in mobile platforms now since cpu, memory

and battery issues are quickly fading away.  When I first saw the Droid in action, I knew that the next iPhone would have to compete with that. It’s screen was also very good compared to the now quaint 320×480 resolution of Apple’s devices. But once you see anything rendered in the iPhone 4’s display you will never be able to look at your iPods or older iPhones without at least a hint of eyestrain and remorse.

Plus the increase in contrast is also something to behold. A black background in the image seems to almost blend with the black border of the face. Take an iPhone 4, bring up the earth wallpaper and do the same with an earlier model. Compare the black around the earth. You’ll get what I mean. And this isn’t just a “yeah, I think its a little better…”, its more like “what the &^^#*@(??” better.

Size/Shape:

I never cared for the rounded shape of the iPhone 3G and GS. Yes, they were comfortable in the hand, but lost a lot of the cool factor for me. The more regular shape of the 4 is much classier looking all around. Not to mention that it is thinner. But what a lot of other sites haven’t said is that it is also narrower than previous entries by around 3 or 4 mm. Just enough to visually change the proportions such that it doesn’t look nearly as chubby as the other devices. It is a very nice and modern formfactor.

Antenna issues:

Yup, saw it almost the first time I played with the thing. I don’t know how the system interprets signal strength or quality, but the signal doesn’t immediately drop, it takes about 20 or 30 seconds to slowly creep down. And will do the same with you stop touching what you’re not supposed to touch.

Reception:

Haven’t been able to do a definitive test, especially since my iPhone 3GS is now the iPod Touch 3GS, but there seems to be a definite improvement in the signal strength. In my condo my signal could go from 0 to 5 bars over only 10 seconds, and frequently I’d get ”no signal”. I have yet to see “no signal”  over the past day. Right now it is only a single bar, but most of the time it’s been about 3 bars.

Apple nailed it on this one.

And if you find anything that might be an, uh, “undocumented feature” log them here. One that has been reported already is that the toolbar gets clipped if you launch the app from an iPad while it is sitting face up. Launch it from an angle and it should work fine.

Another issue is that sometimes it starts up with no toolbars. One new feature is the ability to remove toolbars by hitting the large X in the bottom right corner to remove screen clutter. It seems like somehow the app might start up with the bar hidden in some cases. If that happens, tap the round marble-like button in the lower right corner.

I will try to answer all questions within a few hours.