My Hoptoad (Airbreak) Problems
So iPhone users have this knack for never syncing their phones to iTunes and as a result lots of crash reports never get sent to iTunes Connect for developers.
To work around this problem I started using Hoptoad (Now being renamed Airbreak) which is a neat little tool that will capture the crash as it’s happening and interrogate the runtime to create a symbolized crash log. On app relaunch it will ask the user if they’d like to submit the log to the developer (through the Hoptoad web service). Overall, a pretty cool idea.
I used it in Dex and things went great. I ended up with a nice collection of stacked and collated crashes and used them to fix a bunch of bugs. As I was working on TwizShow I installed Hoptoad and had my first problem.
TwizShow is a universal app and during development I had a tendency to use my iPhone 4 but I when I went to give demos I used the iPad, version 1 at the time, (so more people could see the game in action). The iPad version crashed a lot and even worse did so in a manner that didn’t cause a Hoptoad log or any other logs to be generated. In time I’ve come to believe was because of excessive memory use due to the iPad’s limited RAM (256 MB) and the fact I was using lots of high res art) but have not much to back this up with.
Now in deployment TwizShow is generating some crash logs but they are no longer symbolized. I don’t know why.
Dex, which was once working great, is no longer getting crash logs. The last one was June 3rd. The last update to Dex was April 19th so I assume the change and cause of the bug is on their end.
All the old crash logs of Dex are gone. This is part of a new Hoptoad policy where they remove old crash logs to save space. They say:
In order to reduce space consumed by old or redundant data Hoptoad may remove backtraces and extra request information from individual error occurances. If data is removed, the Rails environment name, error class, error message, file, controller, action, and date are preserved.
We’ll that nice and dandy for the Rails apps, but for iOS crashes this is all that is left after they removed the backtraces for my crash:
Not bloody useful. Why they need to save storage space which is crazy cheap and they are a pay for service (I pay $15 a month) I’ll never know. If they are insistant at least leave 10 or so backtraces per crash so I can have some idea what’s going on.
All in all I think I’m on my way to drop Hoptoad and move on to another service, maybe HockeyApp. If you have any feedback or advice based on your own apps, I’d love to hear it.
Posted on: July 21, 2011 – 2:58 PM | Comments (1)
Photoshop Resources
We had a Lunch and Learn today at IndyHall and resident designer Johnny Bilotta did some demos and shared some resources covering Illustrator and Photoshop. Here are some of bookmarks I took note of:
- 960 Grid System - Layout system.
- 365psd - Sample PSDs to learn from.
- Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials
- iOS widgets - Good for rich templates.
Other Resources:
One recent bookmark of mine was this tutorial on setting up Photoshop for pixel art.
People interested in prototyping Mac or iOS apps using Photoshop should also check out Sasser: Coda Confidential a session from the belated but always loved C4 conference.
Posted on: July 20, 2011 – 1:39 PM | Comments (0)
Exceptions, Unit Testing and Breakpoints, oh my!
Today from my laptop monitor I’m watching Unit Testing with Xcode from iDeveloperTV with Graham Lee and Scotty. On my main monitor I’m working through my ProfitTrain tests, doing some updating and additions.
In ProfitTrain I have unit tests for lots of the models and business math. Some of this math throws exceptions when unexpected values are present. I have a unit test that tests that an exception is thrown when I try to setup some trash value with STAssertThrows().
The problem I now have is that I also like to leave the project running with breakpoints running and that All Exceptions breakpoint set. When I run my tests it hits the breakpoint and pauses the tests. If I turn off breakpoints all test pass fine.
I’m not sure what the right way to handle this is. It kind of bugs me that I have to be mindful of my IDE state before running unit tests. This post is a request for some feedback.
One idea is to turn off breakpoints before running the test, either as general rule for the project or something that is more automated in the scheme (using pre and post shell scripts?). I’m not sure I like this idea as I’m guessing there will be points where I do want to step through test code using the debugger.
A second option is to augment my error code in my app. Perhaps have it look for a macro or flag of some kind and avoid raising the exception? Not sure I like this either.
Feedback very welcome.
Posted on: July 18, 2011 – 1:54 PM | Comments (7)
Opening a screencast from a Mac OS X app in QuickTime
One of the upcoming bug fixes for ProfitTrain is how it handles opening up the introduction screencast. Rather than build my own movie player I opted to simply open the introduction screencast using QuickTime.
Sadly however with Snow Leopard, by default, the user only gets QuickTime X, which has it’s own bundle identifier and thus broke my previous code. I rewrote the code and it now uses in preferred order: QuickTime 7, QuickTime X or a default player (which in testing seemed to be Safari).
https://gist.github.com/1054401
Enjoy!
Posted on: July 17, 2011 – 2:40 PM | Comments (0)
ProfitTrain Lion Compatibility
I’ve spent some time the last few weeks testing the current release of ProfitTrain (2.0.7) on Mac OS X Lion and best I can tell there are no major workflow bugs. I did however notice a few auxiliary issues and have an update ready for testing.
ProfitTrain 2.0.8b1 is available for anyone looking to test. In addition to the bugs this was also built with the 10.6 SDK. I’d love to get a few people to run it through its paces before releasing to the general public.
Bugs Fixed:
- The Play Screencast action is much more forgiving if you don’t have an older versions of the QuickTime player installed.
- The Open Blueprint button on the Edit Invoice Sheet now stays in position during resize.
- Edit > Select All will now work properly for the to do item table.
- When dismissing the Edit Invoice sheet we now force active textfields to finish their current editing.
- Now uses less memory for large Billable imports.
Hope to have more ProfitTrain news to talk about soon. Feedback on your current needs is very welcome.
Posted on: July 17, 2011 – 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
TwizShow Free Download Week
It’s by birthday this week and to celebrate I’m giving you a present! :)
For this week only, TwizShow, my latest iOS game, (normally $1.99) is a free download on the App Store. I’m currently brainstorming some improvements and would really love to see a large download spike and to hear some feedback about the game.
TwizShow is a new game for iPhone and iPad that tests your knowledge of your Twitter friends. Who has more followers, who authored a given tweet, who did you follow first? It’s your own personal game show.
Find out how well you know your social network on the TwizShow!
So please, spread the word, download the game, and let me know what you think.
Thanks again!
Posted on: July 9, 2011 – 5:58 PM | Comments (0)
Q&A with Steve Jobs, WWDC 1997
It’s 1997. Apple had just purchased NeXT Computer. Steve Jobs is back at Apple but is not yet CEO. He is an advisor to current CEO Gil Amelio. At the annual developer conference it’s typical to have open question and answer sessions at the end of the week. This is such a session.
YouTube: Steve Jobs’s Closing Keynote at WWDC 1997
Running time is about an hour and the video quality is a little lacking but wow is this content insightful. There are lots of interesting takeaways from this video but for me one of the most interesting ones is how the interaction between Apple and developers has changed over the years.
I have a much longer post on this topic but it’s currently a rambling mess. I don’t want to postpone linking the video though so here it is. Credit to John Gruber for my original introduction to this.
Posted on: July 1, 2011 – 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
Conferance Season
I addition to being able to attend WWDC a few weeks ago I have a handful of other conferences lined up this summer, some I’ll be speaking at.
First, here in my hometown of Philly, I’ll be attending the Wharton Web Conference July 12 to the 14. The conference has three main tracks and opens with full day workshops covering HTML5, jQuery, and UI design. Really anxious to catch up with some web development technologies that I’ve been lax about learning since spending the last year or so doing iOS stuff. Should be fun.
Next I’ll be in Washington DC for iOSDevCampDC. This a one day, single track get together. Here I’ll be speaking on how to Monetizing Your App, giving lots of hard learned lessons from my own app offerings. Should be a fun day catching up with @louielouie and others.
Finally I’ll be going to SecondConf in Chicago, September 23-25. There I’ll be doing a blitz talk (5 min, 20 slides) covering The Philadelphia Coworking Story. Having been a long time MacHack and later C4 attendee I’m really anxious to catch up the Chicago contingent and see how things are going.
After a few recent years being a hermit of sorts it’s great to get back out there and catch up with everyone. I’m even considering a few road trips to nearby CocoaHead meetups (NY? Pitt?) if they’ll have me. We’ll see.
Posted on: July 1, 2011 – 9:42 AM | Comments (2)
Interview with TUAW/MacTech
During WWDC, TUAW and MacTech teamed up to do developer interviews; asking for keynote reactions and how they might relate to our products. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit down with them and the video has now been posted.
If you’d like to see other developer interview such as BBEdit wizard Rich Siegel check out the WWDC category on TUAW.
Thanks again to Victor, Neil and everyone else for having me.
Posted on: June 27, 2011 – 1:51 PM | Comments (0)
TwizShow Cocos2D Donation Drive
To help celebrate the release of TwizShow and to help raise money for Cocos2D, the framework that helped make it possible, we are holding a donation drive of sorts.
If you buy TwizShow and forward the iTunes receipt to support@clickablebliss.com with the subject line “Cocos2D Donation” we’ll add $2 to our donation bucket which we’ll be sending off to the Cocos2D team July 15th. Yes, we are eating the Apple surcharge on this purchase but it’s all for a good cause.
If you’d like to donate to Cocos2D directly that’s cool too.
Again, a huge thanks to the Cocos2D team for such a great open source framework. I really enjoyed using it for TwizShow and hope to do more with it in the future.
UPDATE: August 7, 2011 I didn’t see as many donation emails as I’d like but none-the-less today Clickable Bliss sent off a donation of $250.00 to the Cocos2D project. My thanks again to everyone who helps make Cocos2D possible.
Posted on: June 21, 2011 – 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
Hi. My name is Mike Zornek (
