Archive for July, 2009

Geocoding Service

Friday, July 31st, 2009

2D Maps, 3D Maps old maps, new maps, satellite maps and every other type of map we have out there. We are living in a time of massively heightened sense of geographic awareness. with this new found need to use and see maps geocoding and referencing is becoming more necessary.

Here is a nice look up database running under the creative commons licence http://www.geonames.org/.

Here is the documentations http://www.geonames.org/export/ws-overview.html the api supports xml and JASON so it should work with any web-enabled technology.

Silverlight Hosting/Streaming Free

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Well Silverlight 3 is here and wow they sure are kicking up fuss at Microsoft. In all fairness the progression made in the span of six to nine months between releases is  truly astounding. They have added an array of features like out of browser support, perspective 3D and graphics card support just to mention some of the headliners.

With every  release of Silverlight I have noticed one relatively unsung hero one could say. Now with H.264 HD video support in SL3 all more need for it. The biggest problem  with video is  the silly amount of money expected for hosting the files and the cost of bandwidth needed for hosting the files. Microsoft saw this problem and resolved it, at the very start of their Silverlight Quest with there FREE Silverlight Live service: https://silverlight.live.com/

The Silverligh Live service has been around since the beginning it address the biggest issue that people have with Flash video content. Simple premise you host your SL3 files on the live servers and you get 10GB of hosting space. 5TB of bandwidth a month at 1.4 Mb/s per stream. With those kinda numbers you should be more than capable of running a rich with media site built on Silverlight.

Whats odd is since its launch I have heard very little about the site. Wonder if a campain is up and coming?

Google Chrome OS

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Anouncment: here

So google are looking to notch up there OS. They have a success full Mobile OS and now they have there sites on something greater.

Google seems to be after the netbook market. Admittedly the netbook market is a bit on the slow side. Armed with knowledge that netbook users who have suffered to date with painfully slow experiences, Google are going to cut down Linux to a insta boot browser.

It is all well and good for the on the go surfer. Let’s hope they have not forgot that geeks also like to buy netbooks. With that in mind lets see if google let you have access to the main App repo and let us put back some of the things they would have removed to speed it up.

Don’t forget the new Nvidia Ion chips. They will bring netbooks on par with some laptops. Linux as a base OS is great because it lets the Geek in side some off us out. Lets hope google does not lock us in.

Extending(Subclassing) UIButton in Objective-C

Friday, July 10th, 2009

After playing around with UIButton class for a while I found Apple have been very sneaky with some  of their UI classes.

What it appears they have done is use the UIButton class as a sort of wrapper for a number of private button classes. “UIRoundedRectButton” is one of those classes.

“UIRoundedRectButton” is a private class so it can not be extended(subclassed). The initilizers normaly return an instance of self and if that self is not the class type trying to hold it there will be trouble. The problem is if you initialise UIButton with buttonWithType the class it returns is a private class. If you try and extended the UIButton once your custom class is initialized it returns a “UIRoundedRectButton” object which is private so you can not contain it.

If you try the code below which uses the description you can see the object description is not UIButton.

[c]UIButton *myButton = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeRoundedRect];
NSLog(@"myButton type: %@", [myButton description]);[/c]

In short you can not extend UIButton and initialize it with buttonWithType  in Objective C. On the other hand you can extened UIButton for a button in interface builder. If  you use interface builder you need to use initWithCoder as the initialiser. While interface builder does the private stuff.

Kodu the Visual Programming Language

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Here is an interesting product on XBox Live. Its a games Programing tool with out the coding. If this is a sign of things to come all use Developers will all be out of jobs 😉 Check out the Video!

More Kodu News & Previews

Get here if you want it:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-GB/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8025855024c/

Stackoverflow Inspiration and Learning Event

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

The popular code question and answer site http://stackoverflow.com/ are having a few inspiration and learning events this year. I am keen to see what android and objective-c stuff will be on offer you can get tickets from: http://stackoverflow.carsonified.com/