Hope Media on the iPhone App Store

My second iPhone application has made it to the iPhone App Store. Developed for the Hope Media Ltd, better known for their Sydney's Hope 103.2 radio station, it streams their four online streams, including the new Christmas Hope station, using HE-AACv1 (aacPlus). First version is pretty basic, just playing the stream, volume control, and persistent buffering logic to reduce the amount of interaction the user needs to take with the app when listening.

Install the Hope Media from the App Store and give it a listen :).
Available on the iPhone App Store.

Tip 'n' Fart 4th in Search List on the App Store!

I was pretty excited yesterday to see on both my own iPhone, and on an iPhone which had never searched for my Tip 'n' Fart application before, that when typing in "tip" in the search field "Tip 'n' Fart" comes up in the suggested search phrases. And not just in the list, it's visible immediately as the fourth item in the list! Yey! It doesn't seem to be making me rich though.

Unfortunately if you search for "fart" it doesn't show up, which would probably have more success for me :).

iPhone OS 3.0.1 Update Development

If you've just updated with the iPhone OS 3.0.1 Update and do development on the iPhone, you'll soon discover you won't be able to load up your apps onto your iPhone anymore. But there's an easy solution, as detailed in Apple's iPhone OS 3.0.1 Advisory, you just need to execute the following command in your Terminal to be back up and running.

ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0\ \(7A341\) /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0.1

Most developers will know what that does. But for those that don't and are curious, it will create a symbolic link "3.0.1" pointing to the existing "3.0 (7A341)" directory. To XCode it will appear like you have a 3.0.1 SDK and a 3.0 SDK installed, even though the 3.0.1 directory just points to the contents of the 3.0 directory. Since 3.0.1 is exactly the same as 3.0 in terms of the SDK, that's exactly what we want.

iPhone/iPod OS Update Error 3014 SOLUTION

Update: If you are getting a 3014 error updating to iPhone OS 3.1, or any other version, or even an iPod Touch instead, this fix will work as well.

I attempted to install the iPhone OS 3.0.1 update for my iPhone today with great disappointment. For the past few hours my iPhone has been a useless brick. The update started normally until iTunes tried to verify my iPhone with Apple. It failed displaying a "3014" error and taking me to a generic "somethings gone wrong" page.

I took a hint that while it doesn't make total sense, it must have something to do with my network, as I have the latest version of iTunes (6.2.1) and it's what everyone keeps tlaking about. I fiddled with my ADSL modem, router, firewalls, everything, with no success.

The Solution
I almost resorted to using iRecovery, an application that goes into your iPhone and changes something so I could go back to using my phone with plain 3.0, but I don't like the idea of having non-Apple software stuff around with my iPhone. Luckily I discovered an easy painless solution: Use another network!

I couldn't really use another network at home, so I downloaded AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield that lets me use their VPN network free of charge, tunnelled through my own internet connection. It worked, I installed Hotspot Shield, started up iTunes and away it went, no problems at all.

What is Hotspot Shield?
Hotspot shield is a piece of software that tunnels your network traffic through Anchor Free's network and back out to the internet, encrypting all the data sent between your computer and their network. This type of technology is called a VPN, or Virtual Private Network, and is primarily used to ensure the data between you and a work network or public wifi connection is secure. In this case however we are taking advantage of the fact that being connected through a VPN is like being connected to a different ISP or network all together. For those of us who have ISPs that are incompatible with Apple's servers, it is the perfect solution.

iPhone Dev: Detect if the iPhone's in Silent Mode

I have been writing an application that delivers audio to the user using the AVAudioPlayer, apart of the AVFoundation. If the iPhone is in Silent mode, then the audio isn't heard, however from the applications point of view the audio has been played. If the iPhone is in Silent mode, I want to warn the user so they know that when they press the button that plays sound, they're not going to hear any.

The following function is based on some info I found scattered around on forums, as well as some of my own tinkering to actually get it to work. It will return a boolean indicating if you will be able to play audio using the AVAudioPlayer.

- (bool)isAudioEnabled {
UInt32 cfRouteSize = sizeof (CFStringRef);
CFStringRef cfRoute;
NSString* nsRoute;

AudioSessionGetProperty(
kAudioSessionProperty_AudioRoute,
&cfRouteSize,
&cfRoute);

nsRoute = (NSString*)cfRoute;

return ([nsRoute length] == 0);
}

Note: If the iPhone is in Silent mode with headphones attached, this function will return true, and the AVAudioPlayer should still be able to play audio.

iPhone: Multiple Recipient SMS's are Sent as MMS

I discovered today that the iPhone doesn't support multiple-recpient SMSs. In fairness, no phone I know really does. Most phones when sending such SMSs will send a single-recipient SMS separately to each recipient. The phones just save you the trouble of typing the message X number of times.

Today I discovered adding a second recipient to an SMS on the iPhone automatically causes the SMS to be sent as an MMS, regardless of whether there is any multimedia in the message being sent.

This is a huge disadvantage in Australia. A large percentage of the people I know aren't able to receive MMSs. For myself it costs more for me to send a single MMS than it does to send two SMSs, and that's the best case scenario assuming I'm not being charged per recipient.

Oh well, I aint going to get hung up on it, but if you send multiple SMSs a lot and you see MMSs on your bill, you'll know why.

A discussion has already been started on this at Apple's Forums.