Greg Fiumara's Blog

App Store Cleanup is Nice, but App Store Search is Still Broken

Sat, 10 Sep 2016 15:57:00 +0000

Update (10 December 2016): Three months after I originally posted this article, and one month after “old” apps would be forced to update by Apple, there is only a single change—the removal of Elixr. However, it seems the creator, Mobelux, pulled this app from the Google Play store as well, indicating that the Apple clean-up had nothing to do with it.

Apple recently announced that they would be cleaning up the App Store. This is a long-awaited move that should help resolve one of my gripes about App Store. While this clean up is nice, it’s only the first step in fixing App Store search. I thought I would document a search I routinely run to discover new apps for Untappd (or, perhaps more honestly, to gauge the popularity of Tappd That). This cleanup process should remove a number of the top 25 results, but only a handful are actually relevant to the search term in the first place.

Apple Watch Complication Truncation

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 17:54:06 +0000

Tappd That ships an Apple Watch complication showing how many distinct beers you’ve consumed, along with a ring indicating how close you are to receiving your next distinct beer badge from Untappd. I recently ran into an appearance bug showing these values with the ring where they would be truncated with an ellipse. Originally, I had code to show an image if the value was four digits or larger, but that wasn’t enough.

Shared Library Debugging under El Capitan

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 09:23:31 +0000

In my day job, I do a lot of debugging of apps that use libraries in non-standard locations. This has traditionally been performed by exporting DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH in your environment and then debugging your app as normal. 1 2 3 4 $ export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/lib/dir # ... code $ lldb ./myapp (lldb) r myapp_arg1 myapp_arg2 Under El Capitan, dyld environment variables are purged when spawning processes, thanks to System Integrity Protection.

Cargo Cult App Store

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 15:59:09 +0000

Several months ago, Apple announced the new Apple TV, a long-awaited update for their TV puck. The new Apple TV finally allowed anyone to write apps for the device, which could be distributed through the App Store. Apple practically gave away prototype devices, and so I was quick to request one. I decided this would be a good opportunity to play around with Swift as well as to learn a new Apple SDK.

The world's best Thanksgiving dinner beer pairing

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 07:50:11 +0000

Whatever you have in your fridge.

Identification Please — Introducing Twenty One

Sat, 21 Nov 2015 13:39:18 +0000

Two weeks ago, I went over to Dogfish Head’s website to check the availability of their 20th anniversary beer. Before I could do anything, a familiar dialog appeared over the content of the website, forcing me to input my date of birth. I’ve seen these _age gates_ (in the parlance of web developers) hundreds of times before, but it really bothered me this time. I was on my iPhone in an area with really bad data service, and having to type into the birthday field made the page zoom into crazy dimensions.

Untappd Knows Where You Live

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 21:17:30 +0000

Yesterday, Untappd rolled out version 2.3.7 of their app for iOS. There were a couple neat features added like “Check-in Alerts” and (unfortunately) a quarter-star rating system. One new feature caught my eye, the ability to go back to old check-ins and add a venue. But wait…how does Untappd know what venues you were near when you checked in? As it says on the knowledge base page, “When you check-in a beer and have enabled geolocation, your checkins are geotagged, just like your photos are Geotagged with Instagram.

Don't Block the (Text)Box

Sat, 06 Sep 2014 15:28:06 +0000

Sometimes the location where the user is trying to type on the screen is directly underneath where the on-screen keyboard will appear. Apple has provided a solution to this, but it doesn’t work out-of-the-box these days. With iOS 8 and custom keyboard extensions just around the corner, it’d be a good idea to take a look at how you prevent view obstruction in your apps. First things first, your text field should be within a UIScrollView.

International Date Formatting Gotchas

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 11:33:05 +0000

Any iOS developer can tell you that you should always be formatting dates with an NSDateFormatter object (or the underlying C equivalent strptime, if you’re extremely concerned about speed). In Tappd That, I constantly need to parse dates that come across the wire in the format “Thu, 09 Jan 2014 12:03:00 +0000”. This is trivial using an NSDateFormatter, since I can just refer to the Unicode Technical Standard #35, revision 25 to set a dateFormat of @“EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z”.

Retrieving Response Body via AFNetworking with an HTTP Error Status Code

Sat, 04 Jan 2014 20:38:00 +0000

I use AFNetworking as a convenience layer to the NSURLSession classes in most iOS apps that would traditionally have a non-trivial amounts of networking code. I tend to not like using much third-party code, but the way Mattt Thompson has structured AFNetworking and the great community backing the project have led me to make an exception. AFNetworking makes it trivial to interact with the now-common JSON and XML-based APIs right out of the box.

There are several schools of thought regarding transmitting error message via web APIs. Many APIs simply return an error HTTP status code (4XX, 5XX) in the header of the response. Others will return a successful status code, but the body of the response will contain an error message that the client must parse. Others, like Foursquare and Untappd, use a hybrid approach — an HTTP error status code is set in the header and the body contains a JSON object with the error message. In AFNetworking 1.x (in the NSURLConnection classes), the NSError parameter of the failure block of AFHTTPClient convenience methods would report the body of the failed response in their userInfo property’s NSLocalizedRecoverySuggestionErrorKey key. This could be considered a bit of an abuse of NSError, but it worked well. As of 2.x (in the NSURLSession classes), this functionality was not implemented and there is no way out of the box to retrieve error messages sent from a web service via AFNetworking.

301 HTTP Redirects and iOS Caching

Sat, 04 Jan 2014 14:15:23 +0000

I just learned the hard way that iOS permanently caches HTTP 301 (“Moved Permanently”) redirect responses from web servers. This makes sense, given that 301s are reserved for _permanent_ redirections. As a result, I ended up permanently blocking access to my application’s web-based components for anyone who had my app open at the time of the change. The problem was that I was merely testing something, and blocking one entire subdomain was a bug in my configuration.

OS X Mavericks and Keychain Not Accepting Password

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 21:24:21 +0000

I just spent way too long on the phone troubleshooting an issue with my father who was unable to unlock his keychain after upgrading to Mavericks and so could not check his e-mail in Apple Mail. He had not setup the iCloud keychain yet. Here’s a completely unedited brain-dump of what I just had him do to fix his problem.

IronKey S200 OS X Mountain Lion Fix

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 10:40:50 +0000

_(Updated 25 November 2016 with updated link.)_ If you have an older IronKey flash drive, you might be surprised to notice it won’t let you launch the decryption app under OS X 10.8 (“Mountain Lion”). If you have “basic” IronKey like me, you can’t upgrade the firmware either, so you’re out of luck if Imation ever fixes it have to wait for a “restore file” (via Imation’s comment, though their website currently disagrees). Fortunately, you don’t have to give up your flash drive quite yet. Follow these steps for a workaround.

Lion iCal Default Event Times

Fri, 25 May 2012 22:35:12 +0000

I noticed a neat attention-to-detail feature in iCal under Mac OS X Lion today and had to share it.

Disappearing UILabel under iOS 4.3 (fine in iOS 5)

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:24:17 +0000

I noticed some UILabels in my iOS projects would disappear when run under iOS 4.3 after I upgraded to the Xcode 4.2 final revision with the GM iOS 5 SDK. I noticed that all the labels that were missing were in italics. Then I saw the reason out of the corner of my eye. Somehow in the Xcode 4.1 to 4.2 project conversion, the font properties on my labels were changed from System.

GPFRemoteAlert

Sat, 28 May 2011 16:23:40 +0000

A lot of people have been sending me e-mail about the solution to a problem that was not very well documented to DAS Calc. Sending the same stock reply to these people helps them out, but that’s only for the people who have spent the time to send a support request. The rest are probably frustrated that they can’t solve the problem and either don’t purchase or regret their purchase of the full version of the app. If I could somehow notify the users of the solution as an alert in the app, everyone’s happy and I stop getting e-mails. This isn’t a unique solution, but I’ve wrapped it up for you to use. I call it Remote Alert, and you can find the code on GitHub.

It's The Little Things... (Part 2)

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:32:41 +0000

At first, I thought to myself that this must be some isolated display glitch, but I didn’t have time to restart the phone. Today I did. Several times. No difference. Then I thought, let’s ask the Internet if anyone else has seen this. Looks like people have. Again, Samsung, it’s the little things…

It's The Little Things...

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:29:11 +0000

Despite changing language settings, the spelling has been wrong for “Favorites” in every single update for my Samsung Epic 4G from Sprint in the Phone app. It’s the little things, guys!

Disable Twitterrific 4’s Blue Menubar Icon

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:19:17 +0000

Since Twitter doesn’t seem to appreciate third-party developers anymore, I’ve decided to switch from the official Twitter app to The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific. I really like it, but I absolutely can’t stand how the menubar icon turns from black to blue with every new tweet. I constantly see it change out of the corner of my eye and subconsciously move the mouse to click the icon. I’m not a fan of this incessant interruption. Here’s a hack to disable it.

Removing Elf Toolbar/Conduit for Mac from Safari

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:48:31 +0000

Well…it looks like the Mac is finally getting hit with malware! I’ve had to remove the “Elf Toolbar” or “Translation Toolbar” aka “Conduit” from a number of Macs in the past few weeks. Judging by the increasing number of recent forum posts on Apple’s Discussion Boards, it’s spreading fast. Here’s what it is and more importantly how to remove it.

The Soft(ware) Train

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 13:38:22 +0000

During his last rant on the last day of my graduate Software Engineering class, the professor gave each of the students a pack of train-shaped sponges. What the… I thought. I laughed like crazy, trying to write down everything he said so I could tell everyone about this hilarious last day.

Why I Can’t Stand Far East Movement’s “Like a G6”

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 21:55:12 +0000

Pop music of today routinely pisses me off, but Far East Movement has piled on the last straw for me lately. Let me break down the lyrics of their new hit single, Billboard’s #6 (and rising), Like a G6, and maybe you’ll understand why I feel the way I do.

Get latest tweet without API key in pure PHP

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 23:07:43 +0000

Update: There were several serious shortcomings in the code below that have been resolved (Twitter #failwhale, control characters in Tweets, greedy regex).

I’ve been working on a backend for a website and needed a way to show the latest Twitter update. There is plenty of code floating around that does this, but I couldn’t find anything simple that preserved formatting, like hyperlinks to @replies, e-mail addresses, URLs, etc. Anything that did was either very bulky (lots of source files) or required a Twitter API key…so I wrote my own, self-contained in a single function call.

Starting an Android Service at Device Boot

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:12:36 +0000

I haven’t been messing around with the Android SDK for too long but I’ve already found some things that I think are worth sharing. Android has a concept of Services, or a process that can sit in the background and run a task without needing to interact with the user. There’s plenty of reasons why a Service might not need to be running all the time (say an alarm clock app with no alarms scheduled), but for the most part, Services need to be started at boot. Here’s how, tested from Android 1.5 to 2.2, since no other example I could find on the Internet was complete for this ever-changing SDK.

Using iAds While Maintaining Backwards Compatibility

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:36:59 +0000

iAds are going to be all over apps in the AppStore in just a few short weeks as developers try to make some money from the average iPhone user. The only problem is that you won’t make any money unless the user is running iOS 4.0. Versions of the iOS prior to this don’t have the iAd framework and therefore can’t display ads. So what’s a developer who wants a few clams to do?

MultiDetailView

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 10:42:09 +0000

UPDATE: Well, glad I spent the time preparing this…Apple decided to post it on their site…

* *Happy iPad release day! Now that the iPad NDA has been been lifted, there are a lot of topics I’d like to write about. iPhone OS 3.2 brings about several new features including a new UIViewController called

UISplitViewController. This allows you to, in landscape orientation, have two UIViewContollers side-by-side. On device rotation to portrait orientation, the left-most UIViewController (the “rootViewController”) disappears from view and is replaced by a UIBarButtonItem in the right-most UIViewController (the “detailViewController”).

Application cannot be executed. The file is infected.

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:01:19 +0000

One of the worst things about being a “tech guy” to non-technical people is that you are constantly bombarded with questions or favors and you feel obliged to give in a large amount of the time. It’s even worse when the knowledge of your “skill” is spread to friends and neighbors of your friends whom you don’t even know. Most of the time, especially recently (being unemployed), I don’t so much mind helping out but people definitely take advantage.

Mac OS X on Dell Inspiron Mini 10v

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:55:05 +0000

I spent today doing a lot of favors for people, including getting Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) running on a friend’s Dell Inspiron Mini 10v. Making a hackintosh out of these machines used to be a pain, but it’s really quite easy now.

Reed Switches (Or How I Fixed My MacBook Pro)

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:35:02 +0000

A few months ago, I dropped my 15″ MacBook Pro from about 3 feet. Upon immediate inspection, I only noticed a small dent near the DVI connector, but I figured that was the extent of the damage since the computer was off (or at least in sleep mode) at the time.

Graduation Day!

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 00:26:05 +0000

Well, now it’s Christmas Eve, but yesterday at 10AM I participated in the graduation ceremonies at UMBC. Not sure how ready I am to leave that place. On one hand, it will be nice to not have homework or projects for a bit and I can let my stress level lower dramatically. On the other hand, now I have to drive at least two hours to see anyone I know. With working full-time in the future, this is going to be a huge pain.

Snow, Round 1

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:40:19 +0000

Before... ...and after.

UMBC Campus Friend

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:07:36 +0000

I gave my final presentation for my iPhone Development class tonight on my project called UMBC Campus Friend. It’s an app that tells you places you are near on a campus. From a developer’s perspective, it’s very cool in that all you have to do is provide an XML file with POI descriptions and another XML file with building coordinates to get the app to work, with zero programming experience necessary.

Hello, World

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:44:19 +0000

Every story has a beginning, and so it goes this blog. It’s only fitting to start with hello world, as all computer scientists have done dozens of times over the years when learning new languages. It’s a necessity, a tradition — you have to. So today, this afternoon, less than a week until I’ll be walking across a stage laid out on a Catonsville basketball court waiting for a piece of paper and a severe butchering of my last name in exchange for $40,000, I bring you my new beginning, earlier than even I expected.