So far, the experience of setting up a Blackberry development environment has been reasonably straight forward, maybe influenced by its similarity to setting up the Android development kit. If you don’t already have Eclipse, you are going to need to get it. In my case, I had Eclipse and still had to get it again since it seems Blackberry development is more straightforward and supported on Windows than it is in OS X. There appears to be a difficulty with running the simulators under OS X so I figured it was easier to just install Eclipse in my Windows VM and work from there.

Once Eclipse was installed, I had to get the Blackberry JRE (latest version is 6.0.0) from Blackberry themselves which was remarkably straightforward to download and install. An exe that you can use to do a double click install is a reassuring experience. I’ve also installed a simulator for the Blackberry Torch so that I can have a look at the app as I develop.

Having then reached the point of development, I’ve spent the last number of development hours porting classes from Plendi for Android over so that they will build against the Blackberry SDK, a particularly convenient porting process that certainly takes less effort than the port from Plendi iPhone to Plendi Android. Time will tell how much of the Plendi Android code other than the classes can be reused.

So, that’s about as far as we are at this point. The only major gripe that I have so far, it’s pedantic, is that namespaces for some classes differ in irritating ways from other platforms. The main example so far is of classes in the net.rim.device.api.ui package, which are prefixed Ui such as UiApplication. Anyone coming from iPhone development is going to instinctively expect that to be UIApplication and encounter plenty of frustrating build errors!

Hattrick Anywhere

Have gotten some great reviews with limited commerical success with Where Is Coffee?, we had been holding out for strong opportunity before committing to another in house app and we got that opportunity in early November when Hattrick relaunched their developer API. The world’s leading online football management game suddenly made it possible to create mobile apps for their users and we couldn’t turn down that chance.

What we produced is Hattrick Anywhere, currently an iOS application, that integrates fully with the Hattrick API and has been on sale in the app store now for a little over a month with great success. We’ve released two major updates in that time and published our first localized iOS app aswell, with Hattrick Anywhere available now in both Spanish and English.

Further major updates are in the works with more localizations planned, Hattrick Anywhere is a work in progress with a bright future on multiple platforms.

Take a look for yourself: Hattrick Anywhere

Plendi

Easily one of the most exciting new businesses in Ireland right now, Plendi is an expense management and receipt tracking service with a difference. Real people will take photos of receipts you snap and upload with your mobile device and transfer the data into the Plendi system, all you’ve got to do then is head over to http://www.plendi.com and track all of your expenses. The peace of mind offered by the human data aggregation alone makes this service second to none in the online expense management field.

We’ve worked really closely with Plendi and their server-side developers to built both Plendi apps, one for iOS and one for Android. This was our first commercial experience in Android development and it was great to work with some really open and forward thinking people at Plendi to get a great app out there. We’re hoping to continue working with Plendi on some exciting additions to their business in 2011 and to take on a few more platforms while we are at it.

SafeFood

When we were approached by Alan O’Rourke from SpoiltChild about a project to connect a mobile website with an existing API, little did we realise that we were about to start putting together a great little mobile weight tracker for an international body. The site we ended up building is a .NET web application that connects to the same API as the main SafeFood website and you can take a look at it in our portfolio or at http://m.safefood.eu

The design that Alan put together looks fantastic on a phone and we couldn’t be happier to put our name to the project.

Irish Angler

Since we last spoke, we’ve worked with the guys over at Ireland’s best selling angling magazine, Irish Angler, to create their rather beautiful fly tying iPhone app. It looks great, has a built in database of flies to learn and contains tips and instructions from one of the worlds leading fly tying experts. The Irish Angler app project was a great experience and we are absolutely delighted with how it turned out.

Take a look at: Irish Angler for iOS

So, now that we are all up to date, how about we forget about the nine months downtime and get back to building great apps?

We were delighted to be featured and to see our App recognised like this was a real treat, thanks to this feature we are delighted to announce that Where Is Coffee? has stormed up the iTunes App Store charts in Ireland to reach Number 1 in the paid navigation chart and sits at number 29 in the overall chart at the time of writing.

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the App so far, we really hope that they enjoy using it and find it useful in their search for great coffee.

This post is a direct result of my installing of Tom Tom’s Sat Nav application for iPhone a couple of days ago, which I must admit is functionally outstanding and is guaranteed to be one of my most used Apps over the next few years. But what device will that be on?

The iPhone 3G seems to struggle at times to move between menus, the GPS functionality is limited and slow and so only the impending delivery of my Tom Tom Car Kit is going to save me from driving aimlessly down one way streets in city centres while the Sat Nav catches up. I’m told the iPhone 3GS is a significant improvement in both departments and that the upcoming next-gen iPhone will be an even greater improvement, so based on that, I’m beginning to wonder just how many of the existing iPhone Apps out there are going to work well on upcoming devices?

Much as a I enjoyed Super Mario Bros. for my NES, it took a radical update in Super Mario All Stars for SNES before it could be truly enjoyable on a next-gen console. Will a number of iPhone Apps from iPhone generation 1 suffer the same fate? In particular a lot of the games with more advance graphics already look slightly dated and certainly don’t compare favourably with the latest titles on other handhelds.

My question is, will updating iPhone hardware be the death of previous generation devices entirely as new Apps begin to have minimum hardware (or generation) requirements much like PC applications?

Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing, technology must move on and from a consumer and user point of view this is a good thing. As a developer of Apps I can’t help but be a little concerned at the prospect of having to develop multiple versions of my Apps and as a result also have to support across multiple Apps, devices and generations.

In my opinion, one thing is for sure, the only people likely to produce an iPhone killer at this moment in time are Apple themselves.

The question is, where is the AppleTV going? This article at MacRumors Apple Preparing To Add HDMI to Macs seems to point towards a confluence between the Mac and the AppleTV. Do Apple envisage a situation where my AppleTV is replaced by a MacMini which offers all the power and performance benefits I crave for my AppleTV with the outstanding UI and High Definition output that is so loved by AppleTV fans?

I REALLY hope so!

As a software developer building apps for iPhone, I can’t help but get excited about the way the Apple platform appears to surely be going. Anyone that’s used the Remote app for iPhone to control their AppleTV must be seriously praying that the iPad has a similar App that let’s us pretend we are Tom Cruise in Minority Report while we browse our movie collection to watch Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

This interaction between devices and the comfort that it affords to the user mean that any future app designs from MagnoSphere Software will be heavily influenced by the potential for device interoperability, we want to get on board with what we believe Apple are building towards. How can the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV (if they remain separate entities, which appears unlikely) interact to provide the complete user experience?

Finally, games developers worldwide must be excited about the prospect of a Mac with HDMI output, a Mac that is essentially a games console as well, that can be connected to your 42″ HD TV out of the box. Who needs a peripheral controller when the Remote app proves just how usable the iPhone can be as a remote device, how can the iPad do this even better?

The AppleTV has long been neglected as a device and somewhat forgotten by the community, however it appears now that it could prove to be the missing link in the evolutionary chain towards the ultimate Apple games console and home media device. We watch with interest.

While this concept is not too difficult to comprehend, designing custom class hierarchies that implement the Delegation pattern can be quite a different proposition and can be confusing without an example. This tutorial hopes to help with that.

As an example, let’s consider the contestants in a quiz. Each contestant can answer or pass on a question whilst the quiz can accept responses of both types from it’s contestants and manage things accordingly. This should achieve good object orientation and should delegate the work to the correct classes using the Delegation pattern. Here’s our contestant:

After the @end we specify the ContestantDelegate protocol that objects should implement if they wish to be delegates for Contestant objects:

So now we have a Contestant who can answer a question and can also pass on a question. They can have a name and also they can be active or not, a status which can be used in the quiz.

We have a delegate protocol that tells any class which implements it that it should be able to handle an event when a contestant answers or passes. This wraps up our Contestant and any information it needs to give to delegate classes.

Next we need to create an object that implements our delegate protocol so that it can manage the quiz and it’s contestants, unsurprisingly it’s called Quiz:

As you can see in the Quiz class, it implements the methods from our ContestantDelegate protocol and also has a method of it’s own for adding contestants to the quiz. The contestant adding method looks after setting the delegate of the Contestant to the Quiz, so the viewcontroller has one less task to worry about. The implementations are simple enough to avoid confusing the tutorial, obviously your answering methods will be a bit more complex.

With our Quiz and Contestant classes complete, all that’s left to do is implement a View with a ViewController to run the quiz for us. All the necessary files are included with this tutorial in a zip file. The view controller will need a Quiz member variable that looks after the running of the quiz. You can set the Quiz and it’s member contestants up in the viewDidLoad:

After that, it’s really up to yourself how the Quiz interacts with the user. In the attached ZIP the quiz has two contestants and buttons for each to answer or pass, ultimately you’d probably extend the example to have a current active contestant and only one button for answering and passing. Since that doesn’t really add much to understanding delegation, I’ve left it out. One simple example to just clarify the point:

When you press the Player One Answer button in our example, this fires the answerQuestion method on the Contestant class. After that, you leave everything to the delegate pattern to get the information out to the right classes. We call a helper method at the end to update our pretty basic front end.

Using the example application you can download here, you can run a pretty rudimentary quiz where the right answer is always “CorrectAnswer”. When you press the buttons, the application will fire the methods of your Contestant objects and you will see that control gets passed to the Quiz object delegate. This allows the Quiz to manage answer validation or pass acceptance and deactivate Contestants when they get something wrong or pass on a question. The example application will notify you that the game is over when all Contestants are deactivated.

Ultimately, you could implement changes that react to one user being deactivated that declares the other user the winner or reacts to a correct answer by showing a message. Perhaps QuizViewController could implement a new QuizDelegate?

Sample App: DelegationExample.zip

You can find the full review at Where Is Coffee? Review

Our thanks to theiphoneappreview.com for their review.

Minority Report and Surrogates contain advanced forms of technologies such as location based advertising, viewer specific advertising and individual location and tracking. Whilst these movies are set considerably further up the technology chain than our current level, the concepts are far from implausible given the technologies readily available on modern mobile devices. The iPhone SDK, for which Where Is Coffee? is built, is a clear example and exposes full device location services to every developer.

Having recently acquired Quattro Wireless as their own mobile advertising branch, are Apple gearing up for an assault on the location based, mobile advertising market? Apple’s recent declaration to iPhone developers that location services are not to be used for advertising only points more to a desire for a reduction in competition than it does to any moralistic interest in protecting users from spam and data mining.

Where Is Coffee? will tell you what coffee shops are in your immediate vicinity and adds some value to that by accepting ratings and reviews from it’s users. The aim here is to build a coffee community and to try and improve the coffee experience for our users. There are many apps on the App Store that follow this model of location based services, do we really want to move away from that model of usefulness toward a model of exploitation, forcing information on our users to gain profit from ads rather than from increased sales due to recommendations of our functionality?

AT&T recently launched their FamilyMap Application for iPhone, an app for locating members of your family via their iPhones. Is this a step towards Apple being able to locate every iPhone owner on Earth? (Perhaps I am being naive to believe that this isn’t already the case).

Whatever the case might be, if science fiction movies and novels have taught us one thing, it is generally that large corporations with wide ranging influence over a significant percentage of society are inevitably a bad thing. Personally speaking however, I don’t really see Steve Jobs as the type, do you?