Credit: Distantsuns.com

A guest post by Mike Smithwick, author of Distant Suns 3 for the iPhone/iPad and blogger at distantsuns.com. Mike is a seasoned iPhone/iPad developer who has developed numerous iPhone applications. He has recently released Distant Suns 3. Follow Mike’s work on Twitter for more information. [Read the first part of this story]

After leaving my cameras in the men’s room at Gate 25 of the Santiago, Chile airport (D’oh!), it became Hey! Look! An eclipse!necessary 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.

Read the rest of this article

Credit: Distant Suns

A guest post by Mike Smithwick, author of Distant Suns 3 for the iPhone/iPad and blogger at distantsuns.com. Mike is a seasoned iPhone/iPad developer who has developed numerous iPhone applications. He has recently released Distant Suns 3. Follow Mike’s work on Twitter for more information.

So I was on my way to South America last week for the July 11 eclipse, and a funny (as in really stupid funny) thing happened to me. I left $600 of camera gear in the men’s restroom. Fifteen minutes later when I discovered this little jewel in the crown of stupidity, my new Canon ELPH, and relatively new Canon SX10IS had vanished to the hands of some lucky, bas….er, “fortunate traveler.”

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. Read more…

A guest post by Mike Smithwick, author of Distant Suns 2 for the iPhone/iPad and blogger at distantsuns.com. Mike is a seasoned iPhone/iPad developer who has developed numerous iPhone applications. He has recently released Distant Suns for iPad. Follow Mike’s work on Twitter for more information.

Credit: Distant Suns

Another in a very occasional series of columns covering the craft of programming and what it takes to create one of those app things.

Even though this article is about computer languages it is not meant at all to teach one how to “speak” in any of these languages, for that is light-years beyond the scope of this article.

A computer program is likened to a recipe. A recipe with potentially millions of steps that could come crashing down in a smoldering heap of code if as much as one of those steps is in the wrong order. The recipe might tell the system that if the user does something, then load in an image, draw it to the screen in green, rotate three times, do the hokey-pokey and fade it out. And that might be just one little task of thousands in a complex web of tasks, actions and behaviors.

As with any kitchen recipe, there is a specific lingo invoked that serves as a precise form of shorthand that the iPhone can understand as well as the programmer. And it is this shorthand that forms the basis of a computer “language.”

The earliest computers were programmed at the lowest level, in bits and bytes; frequently hand-entered by switches on the front of the machine, paper tape or even punch cards. It was a system that was extremely tedious, highly error prone and very hard to read. Back to the kitchen analogy: think of the instruction to take a cup of flour and mix it with one egg. Short and to the point. But the earliest machines didn’t know what flour, a cup or an egg might be. So the recipe would now have to actually instruct how to make a measuring cup, how to grow and harvest wheat, then grind it up into flour, and…well, you get the point. There had to be a better way, and as a result, FORTRAN (FORMula TRANslator) was invented in 1954 at IBM. Considered the first modern computer language, it used a combination of basic mathematical symbols, punctuation and simple English words to describe program flow. Instead of having to describe how to raise wheat, the system now already would understand what “wheat” really was. Very quickly other languages were developed such as COBOL, LISP and ALGOL. And many other that are still in use today.

Why so many languages? Languages are generally tailored to different tasks. One might be science-oriented such as FORTRAN, and another database-oriented such as SQL. Apple’s OS-X and iPhone OS are programmed in what had generally been a somewhat obscure language called “Objective-C.”

Read the rest of this article…

A guest post by Mike Smithwick, author of Distant Suns 2 for the iPhone/iPad and blogger at distantsuns.com. Mike is a seasoned iPhone/iPad developer who has developed numerous iPhone applications. He has recently released Distant Suns for iPad. Follow Mike’s work on Twitter for more information.

Credit: Distant Suns

Sorry for the long delay since the previous column. Something called an iPad I think, came out last week and I was in a rush to have something in the store on day 1. This column is to either help software neophytes get going on their own great app ideas, or to at least illustrate the process for the curious.

We left off the previous story with our hero puzzled over something called Objective-Cand Xcode with very little knowledge of what to do. As with any craft, developers have a set of tools. With iPhone and now iPad programming the main tool is something called Xcode.

By comparison, Microsofties use Visual Studio while Android types opt for an open-source system called Eclipse. While Xcode and Eclipse are free, Visual Studio can cost upwards of $1000 depending what options you need.

So, what does Xcode do? It will simply let you input, organize, “compile” and test your program from beginning to end. Software input is via a fancy-pants text-editor. In just the same way that Microsoft Word has all sorts of little tools and utilities to compose a book, Xcode’s editor has equivalent tools for typing in a program. It has things that keep track of the specialized syntax needed for the code to minimize errors, color coding parts of the text to make it more clear, or linking parts with the documentation.

After typing in your code, then comes the moment of truth, compiling. Compiling is taking the human readable (well, for some humans at least) text and converting it, or rather, compiling it down to the binary codes the iPhone’s chip can understand. If you made an error, the compiler will typically flag it for you, in which case you fix it and compile again. (and again and again) Read the rest of this article…

Credit: Distantsuns.com

A guest post by Mike Smithwick, author of Distant Suns 2 for the iPhone and blogger at distantsuns.com. Mike is a seasoned iPhone/iPad developer who has developed numerous iPhone applications. Follow Mike’s work on Twitter for more information.

When I reserved my iPad, I selected Apple’s flagship store in Palo Alto for pickup. I had never quite understood the Apple line mentality. After all, most people could just save a lot of time and either order one online or wait a day or two.

Now I see the light.

Plus I absolutely needed to get a unit ASAP to test my software, Distant Suns. It was already live in the App Store and had over 80 downloads, so I needed to see what others were to make any fixes for things the simulator didn’t show.

I got there at about 7. Already one news van was parked across the street and about 150 people were in line. The reserved line was the shorter of the two, with maybe 50 or so.

Everyone seemed to recognize the silliness of it all, but also just how fun it was to hang out with fellow Apple fans. The store employees were top notch, handing Krispy Kreme doughnuts and coffee.

One lovely woman behind me, illustrated her geek-cred by telling us how her husband still had his Apple III, and that it was working order. They wanted to get rid of it, but only to someone who could appreciate it. Up went my hand immediately nearly breaking the sound barrier. So not only do I end up with an iPad by day’s end, but a rare working Apple III. Read the Rest of the Story.