In my example I will use a UITableView on the iOS, but this same technique can be transferred to any programming language.

Create your enum. Most compilers will set your first entry’s value to be 0, but explicitly set it just in case. Make an entry in the enum for every item in the list, then add one more at the bottom representing the number of items in the enum. Because the first value is 0, as long as this count entry is kept last, it will always equal the number of objects in your list.

typedef enum
{
	TableRowCat = 0,
	TableRowDog,
	TableRowFish,
	TableRowSnail,
	TableRowMonkey,
	//	Leave this one last
	TableRow_COUNT
}
TableRow;

I won’t go through the basics on setting up a table and hooking it up to a dataSource, so I will just show how to setup the two dataSource methods required to show this in action.

In your tableView:numberOfRowsInSection: you can just return the enum count.

- (NSInteger) tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
	return TableRow_COUNT;
}

In your tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: method setup a UITableViewCell. Before returning it do a switch case on the indexPath.row and handle each of the enum entries.

- (UITableViewCell*) tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
	static NSString* identifier = @"cell";
 
	UITableViewCell* cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:identifier];
 
	if(cell == nil)
		cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:identifier] autorelease];
 
	NSString* text = nil;
 
	switch(indexPath.row)
	{
		case TableRowCat:
			text = @"Cat";
			break;
 
		case TableRowDog:
			text = @"Dog";
			break;
 
		case TableRowFish:
			text = @"Fish";
			break;
 
		case TableRowSnail:
			text = @"Snail";
			break;
 
		case TableRowMonkey:
			text = @"Monkey";
			break;
	}
 
	[cell.textLabel setText:text];
 
	return cell;
}

Run the project and you have a nice ordered list. So this wasn’t much code but this method can be used in much more complicated scenarios making the code much simpler and easier to adjust. Go ahead and move an entry in the enum and you will see without any other code changes it ‘just works’. Adding a new entry is as easy as an entry into the enum and handling it in the switch case.

Download the end project here.

The Samsung Galaxy S3 was just recently announced and it blew us away !
On the other hand, the HTC One X is a beautiful and strong piece of device which not only does the job, but give’s you a strong and solid feel when you hold it in your hand comparing to the Samsung Galaxy S series.

Here is a comparison between the two !

Samsung Galaxy SIII extras:

S Voice:  Siri like voice recognition.
Face Recognition and Auto Tagging (Like Google Picasa)
Smart Stay: Screen won’t turn off detecting your eyes with the front-facing camera
Wireless charger (sold separately)

Overall:

• HTC’s Unibody Polycarbonate looks much better and seems tougher. The downside to the unibody is a non-removable battery and no expandable storage.
• Sense UI is more flexible than Touchwiz.
• The RGB stripe display on the One X has a finer picture and more realistic and accurate colors while the PenTile Amoled screen creates sharper blacks and better contrast.
• As far as benchmarks show, Samsung’s Exynos chipset is better than the Tegra 3.
• Samsung has little extra stuff ( Svoice, Smart Stay and other services taking advantage of the 6 sensors) and packs a better battery, while on the other hand these sensors and extra services use more battery.
• Cameras are both very quick but detailed comparison can’t be done until SGSIII’s release.

Highlights

• Australians downloaded 66.8 Million Apps in the month between March and April.
• Broken down by platform – Android 44%, iPhone 46%, iPad 9% and Windows 1%
• Per head, Australians are the 5th biggest downloaders of Apps globally

Without too much detail about how SSL works, data is encrypted from the server and decrypted by the client. The client can verify the server’s certificate to make sure the server is who they say they are. If the certificate is invalid then somebody could be pretending to be the server and capturing all the data you are sending them. You probably don’t have the private key from the server you’re trying to monitor data for, so if you got Charles to encrypt the data the phone would see the connection as untrusted. By default iPhone apps will drop any untrusted connections, you don’t get the ‘allow this site’ prompt seen in web browsers.

Because of this you need to install the Charles certificate onto your phone, so no matter what comes from Charles, your phone will accept it.

Download the Charles certificate from their website. Alternatively you could generate your own. Email this to yourself and open it on the iPhone. Install the certificate. Now any valid SSL certificate OR one matching the Charles certificate will be accepted.

This example will show you how to monitor the Facebook request and response.

This next step is optional, but if you want to ensure none of your other data gets sent insecurely then follow this step. Get Charles ready and send a web request from the app you’re trying to monitor. Identify the url in the left list. For Facebook it is api.facebook.com. [end of optional step]

In Charles open the Proxy settings and under the SSL tab check the ‘Enable SSL proxying’ box. Under the locations list click ‘Add’, if you did the optional step enter the url and port 443. If not then put in an asterisks (*), this will mean ALL data will be encrypted via Charles, and if anybody is sitting out there with a Charles certificate (publicly available on their site remember) can see your information being sent and received.

That is all, now attempt the web request in the app again and everything will be visible. When you’re done it’s a good idea to delete the Charles SSL certificate from your iPhone (Settings > General > Profiles).

Now its worth noting that this happened when Lion came out, now I find the system rock solid, I haven’t had a single system crash for at least 6 months. However my colleague who has been using Mac’s ever since OS 9 has informed me this is standard procedure for Apple and their release cycles, and having used iOS since 2.0, its easy to see a pattern in the release cycles Apple use for introducing new operating systems.

Whenever Apple release a new operating system, bugs are to be expected, big bugs as a matter of fact. But obviously Apple slowly release fixes, the vast majority come within a few months of the first big release, and this makes the operating system stable as time goes by. Exactly the same thing happens with iOS, however since iOS is strictly controlled it contains less application specific bugs.

It’s worth noting that I don’t see this kind of problem happening on Microsoft Windows, I have had XP running for almost 10 years now and it has always been very sturdy (I’d say on average 1 crash per year, and that is usually due to hardware malfunctions). That’s not to say it didn’t have its problems when it first came out, but personally I have noticed that when Microsoft makes an operating system I feel like it has gone through a stricter process of quality control.

As for Linux I can’t really comment, I have only ever used Linux for specific purposes, never for any kind of GUI interface, but I imagine that Linux being community driven undergoes strict quality control testing as well.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft only release an operating system once every 5 years or so, Apple have taken to releasing new operating systems nearly every year or 2. It has long been asserted that Apple drip feed their consumers features, this allows them to focus on specific differences in operating systems while fine tuning the changes.

It seems to me like Apples rapid release cycle is a good idea, having new features every year keeps consumers entertained, and your product fresh. It may annoy people at the start of every release cycle to get a plethora of bugs, and I can see that the corporations wouldn’t be thrilled about having to test their software and security every year with a release, but for 11 months out of 12 you are using new features that you would otherwise not be getting the benefit from.

Get Charles, a free web debugger (there is a paid version as well without the waiting times).

Connect both your computer and iPhone to the same wireless network. Open System Preferences and under the network section select the wifi option on the left. Below your status you will see a message following the lines of “Wi-Fi is connected to YourWifiNetwork and has the IP address 192.168.1.71.”. The last part is your IP address on your network, it will be different for each person reading this, take note of it, we will connect to it later. This step is obviously different on a Windows computer.

Open Charles, click the Proxy menu and open the Proxy settings. The port field should already be populated with port 8888. If there’s nothing there, enter 8888. If there’s something else, note it down.

Now in your iPhone, open the Settings app and in the Wifi section locate your network on the list. Click the blue arrow on the right side of the network. Scroll to the bottom and in the HTTP proxy settings select manual. Enter the details you gathered from above. My Server is 192.168.1.71 and my Port is 8888.

The first time you make a request from your iPhone charles will prompt you, click Allow.

That’s pretty much it, you can now monitor all HTTP traffic going to and from the iPhone. Of course this will not work yet for monitoring SSL connections, which is something I will cover next week.

Having said that, it is vitally important for error messages to occur, users should really have a right to know if something goes wrong in the software they are using. An ideal error message should contain a number that lets the software developer know where in the code the error occurred, and a brief description (for example if the issue is a connectivity issue state that to the user, but don’t start talking about corruption in the TCP packets).

People don’t place enough importance on error messages, they are especially important in the development environment, a badly worded error message can sometimes take hours for a developer to fix. An hour that could be easily avoided if the error message contained helpful information. For me, 2 examples stuck out to me as almost deliberately unhelpful error messages, and they are both made by leading software developers (proving that no matter how big you are, mistakes can be made):

Class UIShadowView is implemented in both /System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/UIKit and /var/mobile/Applications/6B523B2B-2F45-4D2F-AA36-7C6DCA6ACE94/AppX.app/AppX. One of the two will be used. Which one is undefined.

This error (as a I later learned) showed that using the objective c class UIShadowView in one of my apps was not applicable due to the name being reserved in the UIKit framework, however the fact that which one will be used is undefined is a ridiculous notion. The software will eventually have to pick one, and when it does I should know about it, just saying ‘which one is undefined’ is useless for me as a software developer.

Error Domain=NSDictionary+xmlBinding Error Domain Code=6 “complex type ‘xType’: The content model is not determinist.

” UserInfo=0x2cbd80 {NSLocalizedDescription=complex type ‘xType’: The content model is not determinist.

}

This error was produced by TinyXML for an XSD, for what purpose I cannot remember, however most software developers aren’t philosophers so the use of the word “determinist” is unhelpful, instead of knowing immediately what to fix, developers have to spend hours looking up this error and squashing the bug that produced it.

In short, I encourage software developers to assign basic error numbers to their error messages, and a simple but brief description of the problem without using jargon or overly complicated words.

Today, 1.4 billion people live below the extreme poverty line, that’s 60 times the population of Australia!

This campaign asks us to get together and raise awareness. This is isn’t just about limiting yourself, its about experiencing what 1.4 billion people go through everyday.

The challenge is to live with $2 per day for 5 days from 7th until 11th of May.

At the end of this, you’ll appreciate what you have and trust me, this will change your life forever !

Here at b2cloud, we decided to do this and raise some money for the kids in Papua New Guinea. We also decided to have a little fun with it, so we’re having 2 prizes for people who :

1) Collect the most amount of donation

2) Come up with the most creative meal with under $2. Can you do this one?

Please follow the link below to my profile and make a donation. And if you decide to join us as well, I’ll make sure to donate some to your profile too!

https://www.livebelowtheline.com/me/mac

Here’s a few popular alternative development tools.

1. AppMakr

The platform uses a web rendering engine to make developing your own iPhone app quick and easy. You can use html and various social network feeds to create a variety of different approaches for your app. It also support basic features such as push notification, location awareness, CSS and javascript.

The tool is free to use, but a $79 monthly fee per app subscription gets you access to more advanced features. AppMakr works on the iOS, Android and Windows operating systems.

2. GENWI

This platform gives you the freedom to create and manage your application on all popular mobile devices, including iPad, iPhone, Android and HTML5 apps. It supports rich graphics, photos, video, audio and other forms of interactivity.

What’s more, apps can include various revenue-generating capabilities for businesses, like ads, coupons and in-app subscriptions. After a three-month trial, pricing varies by features included.

3. Mippin

One of the greatest strengths of Mippin is its ease of use. It enable you run apps on Android, iOS and Windows, and provides flexibility in designing the app. You can even have Mippin distribute your app for you to the iTunes, Android, Windows and Amazon stores.

4. MyAppBuilder

For just $29 a month, MyAppBuilder will create an iPhone or Android app for you. All you have to do is provide content (videos, books, etc.) and their pros will take it from there. You don’t need a technical background to develop an app with MyAppBuilder. They’ll even take care of the hassle of uploading it to the app store for you.

When it comes to building mobile apps, creating apps using a native approach is still the best option. However, building a really good native app is difficult and in general involves a lot of efforts. Thus, These tools will fill in the gap and can help you come up with the app that’s best suited for your business fairly quickly and cost effectively.