I would like to welcome you to join the new Palm Beach iPhone Developer Network! I have organized this group due to the fact that no active iPhone Development groups exist in my immediate area.

I usually travel an hour and  a half to the South Florida iPhone Development Group in Miami Beach. I have no plans to stop going to their meetings because they always have great presenters and great meeting topics but rather I would like to supplement their meetings with our own local ones. I know for a fact that there are iPhone developers in the West Palm Beach area and I’m trying to get us all together.

If you are in the area please sign-up and also help spread the word to friends and colleagues so we can make this a successful meet-up group. If you are interested in presenting to our group or if you are a vendor whose product(s) and/or services would be beneficial to the group please contact me directly.

Download the latest version from HERE

From the authors website:
Test and demo your iPhone apps the way they’ll actually be used!

Because of the iPhone’s high-resolution screen, Apple’s iPhone Simulator may use an area on your Mac’s display that’s physically far larger than an actual iPhone. This makes designing and testing user interfaces troublesome. Software that’s easy to use with a magnified screen and the precision of a mouse can be difficult on the actual device. PhoneFinger puts things in perspective and reveals hidden usability problems.

I think this is an amazing and overdue addition to the iPhone developers arsenal. I can already here a number of you bitching and moaning that Flash is nothing more than animation overkill but I must strongly disagree with you. Flash Action Script 3 will give developers a powerful tool to wield. Besides there are already numerous non-traditional frameworks used to create native iPhone apps why not have one created by the largest designer/developer friendly company in the world? I can only see good coming from this. Maybe i’m not impartial because I love working in Flash. It’s just fun.

From what I can tell the full blown Flash Player is still not going to be allowed to run on the iPhone because it would allow code to be downloaded and executed which is Major Apple no no. Seems like the next release (CS5) of Flash is going to have the ability to compile native apps.

Watch as Adobe makes the announcement of Flash for iPhone in this clip from todays MAX2009 Keynote:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As for the apps on the store already compiled using the Beta version of Flash CS5 take a look for yourself . . .

– South Park Avatar Creator
– Just Letters
– Finger Paint
– Red Hood
– Chroma Circuit
– FickleBlox
– That Roach Game
– Trading Stuff

Seems like Adobe slipped these apps into the store without Apple’s knowledge of the technology behind them so no one really knows exactly how Apple will react to the news. It’s a shame that Adobe has had to resort to these types of methods without the full support of Apple. Hopefully all goes well and by next year we’ll be seeing many amazing new apps built using Flash CS5!

Official Post on the Adobe Developer Connection

Adobe Applications for iPhone:Developer FAQ

Flash CS5 Beta on Adobe Labs (not yet available – in private beta)

Steve Job’s is back and did a large part of the presentation. He has the liver from a 20 something male who  died in an unfortunate car accident and donated his organs.

iPhone & App Announcements:

30 million iPhone sold.
App store a year old. 75,000 apps.
1.8 billion apps downloaded.

iTunes Announcements:

iTunes 9. (Available for download NOW)
“Genius mixes.”
Manage apps on the iPhone via iTunes!
“Home Sharing.” Copy songs, movies, TV shows among up to 5 authorized computers.
iTunes LP – Albums w/ photos, lyrics and more!
Share on Facebook or Twitter with iTunes.

iPod & iPod Touch Announcements:

iPod has 220 million sold. 73.8% market share.
20 million iPod touches sold.
Number of games: PSP: 607. DS: 3680. iPhone: 21,178

8GB iPod touch new pricing: $199
32GB touch is $299 and 64GB touch is $399. 50% faster.
iPod Classic now $249 + 160GB (up from 120)

iPod Nano Announcements:

Black, silver, pink, green, and blue. $59 for 2GB, $79 for 4GB.
Special edition stainless steel for $99.
new iPod nano: video camera, larger 2.2-inch display, polished anodized aluminum, mic and speaker, VoiceOver, FM Rradio, pedometer.
8GB: $149. 16GB: $179.
Syncs back to your mac and has one click sending to YouTube.

Bda, Bda, Bda, That’s all folks!

Coming to you direct from Addison-Wesley Professional, which has published some of the leading books in the field, the Voices That Matter: iPhone Developers Conference is taking place October 17-18 in Boston! This conference is designed for Mac developers looking for a succinct, easy way to get up to speed on the specific skills needed to build, test and distribute successful applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Erica Sadun, author of The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook and our event’s technical chair, will lead an epic group of speakers at the conference including Aaron Hillegass, Andy Ihnatko, Jon Rentzsch, Steve Kochan, Fraser Speirs, Lee Barney and lots of others. At this unique event, you will:

• Learn the skills needed to build, test, and distribute successful applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch
• Choose the session topics you need to become an iPhone development master
• Network with developers equally as passionate about this exciting platform and where its going
• Leverage your existing skills in a new and profitable way

SPECIAL SAVINGS! As someone that reads #iPhoneDev, you can save $100 on your conference registration by providing priority code PHBLOG when registering. Register before September 12^th and save a total of $300 as this $100 discount is combined with the early bird pricing!

Even cooler, after I did a little more searing around I found that the article had been translated into two different languages (one which I think is Chinese and the other I’m not sure but seems like it may be middle eastern) and posted on different foreign blogs.

Just in case the links go down I took screen shots (below)

Original Article

Chinese Translation of the article

Unknown Foreign Language Translation of the article

I had my 15 minutes and I didn’t even know it.

Now there is this guy Tim Haines who had the smart idea to put up a spreadsheet on Google Documents and link this with an online form where people could add themselves. Everybody who develops for the iPhone is invided to leave his mark. By adding your name and apps you will get an entry in this Google spreadsheet.

You could go through the list and follow 900 people manually on twitter, or – much quicker – fire up a ruby script written by David Clements to do that automatically.

*Update*

HOW TO – Dr Touch was kind enough to provide a step by step how-to for us ruby newbs!

Mac users are lucky because their Mac comes with a fully fledged Ruby system. There where some bumps, but nothing a little RTFM could not fix.

First make sure that your Ruby system is fresh.

sudo gem update –system
sudo gem update

Install the Google Spreadsheet Gem as shown in the Read Me.

sudo gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
sudo gem install gimite-google-spreadsheet-ruby

Install Twitter Gem 0.4.1, because the newer versions don’t work with the script. Otherwise you get something about invalid arguments at line 22.

sudo gem install twitter -v 0.4.1

Modify the script to use the 0.4.1 twitter gem instead of the newest one. You can omit this step if you haven’t installed a newer twitter gem.

require “rubygems”
require “google_spreadsheet”
gem ‘twitter’,'=0.4.1′     # inserted to force specific version
require ‘twitter’

Execute the script.

ruby iphone-dev-tweeters.rb

** UPDATE to the UPDATE **

If you are impatient like me and decided to go ahead on your own and try to get this script running without the fore mentioned tutorial than you probably went ahead and installed ruby via macports. I had no idea that OS X came with a full blown version of Ruby already installed. Apparently when I installed the latest version I hosed something with my Paths and the old ruby install was being called first and was causing all sorts of unpleasntness!

So, Deep Breath, I exercised my Google muscles and after about an hour of searching I came up with the solution . . .
(from HERE)

Open Terminal and type:

touch .bash_profile
open .bash_profile

This will pop open a TextEdit window. Add the following two lines to the end of the file and save it (it may be empty to start with):

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH

Now go back to Terminal and type:

source .bash_profile

What have you just done? MacPorts has created an /opt/local folder under which it will install any software you ask it to. The lines you added to your .bash_profile file ensure that when you run something like ruby in the Terminal, your shell can find the MacPorts installed version, and, importantly, find it before the regular OS X one.