So what is left? I still have Game Center integration, local score storage, settings layer, how to play layer, and then graphics overhaul and audio. Most of this list won’t take long at all. It is the graphics overhaul and the creation of audio that will take me the longest time.

I have no set end date but have been and will continue to work on this game everyday until finished.

 R.I.P. You will be heavily missed.

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

1. Merge the App Store, iTunes app, and maybe Apple Store app into 1 app
2. iTunes wish list management added to App Store/iTunes apps
3. Remove Contacts app from home screen for iPhone
4. Allow Game Center to search for friends in Facebook and Twitter
5. Allow option to toggle/hide/remove main apps
6. Quick access toggles to airplane mode, bluetooth, wifi, cell data, and maybe a kill-all for running apps
7. Utilize the search panel with said quick access toggles
8. Utilize the search panel with memory usage on device and iCloud
9. Utilize the search panel with music/video controls and lock screen from multitask panel
10. Include a toggle for the device’s LED light for quick access flashlight
11. Utilize lock screen more: maybe next to the clock give option for toggle of unread email and/or quick local temperature
12. Remove or speed up shutter animation in camera app
13. Stop automatically showing bookmarks page when a user opens Safari app on a blank page
14. Add private browsing toggle to main interface of Safari app
15. Improved compass design so to avoid constant interference
16. App Store push notifications for updates

I have several other projects, mostly web sites and mobile applications, that I will be revealing over time. My goal is to first finish the one project that I’ve been working on for almost 2 years now, Annuli. I don’t think this game should have taken as long as it has but I have taken numerous breaks just to help me get away from it and think more on how to implement it. As simple as the game play is I have rewritten the game mechanics several times now. I refuse to release it until I’m happy with it, however long that takes. After this game is finished I, hope, to have learned several lessons on the whole process because I have ideas for 2 more games along with 2-3 more utility applications.

At the same time I have been writing down ideas for simple web sites. Nothing ground breaking but something to help push myself into the web development world. Something that I have purposely avoided for years but feel I need to jump on it before it is too late. I have already purchased a few domains for the ideas just to hold on to the name. However, this does not mean that I’m not willing to sell the domains if someone has better ideas and the means to get them up and running faster than I do. In the near future I will create a page listing out the domains that I own. The count is low but growing over time.

I hope to take advantage of Adobe’s Muse software to help build the web sites. I was playing with Apple’s iWeb but since it was not updated within iLife ’11 I’m not sure if I should rely on it any more as a simple WYSIWYG editor that will keep up with the modern standards. I’m only playing with Muse for now and looking at the code to make sure it doesn’t become a glorified Frontpage. If all else fails I may just use some of the money generated from my applications to pay a professional web designer to build the sites for me. We’ll see how that all goes.

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switch(someVar)
{
  case 1:
    int x = 5; // Expected expression before 'int'
 
    break;
  ...
}

Apparently, this will get a compiler error as it expects an expression to be place before the declaration. I did a little searching around and was unable to find much on why this causes an error. I did however, find a few solutions that seem to work really well.

Considering the error is that the compiler expected an expression before the declaration you can try to rearrange your statements so that declarations are not the first statements within the case statement.

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switch(someVar)
{
  case 1:
    [self someMethodCalled];
    int x = 5; // Compiles fine
 
    break;
  ...
}

…or you can just place an empty semicolon if the above example is not an option.

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switch(someVar)
{
  case 1:
    ;
    int x = 5; // Compiles fine
 
    break;
  ...
}

Last, I found a better solution to the above examples and it is the one I’ll be using. I really don’t know exactly why this one works as it is not really an expression but by adding { and } to separate the block of code within the case statement. We are allowed to place our variable declarations at the top.

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switch(someVar)
{
  case 1:
    {
      int x = 5; // Compiles fine
    }
    break;
  ...
}

I like this solution the best cause it continues to give me the freedom on where I want to place my statements and expressions and, as a double whammy, helps in readability since the block of code will now be indented one block.

I couldn’t have been more wrong…

I see the power of what this new world has to offer and thus as I continue my journey I am finding myself taking new approaches to situations and even finding that some old habits I just flat out prefer to hold on to. Today, I’m talking about the placement of the starting curly brace.

Now, it seems to be common place in the C/C++ world where the starting curly brace is on the same line as the starting block of code. For example…

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void someFunction() {
  //code...
}

In the C# world it seems to be common place to place the curly brace on a new line. For example…

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public void someMethod()
{
  //code...
}

There are various arguments on why each one is better. Commonly I hear that the first method is better because it doesn’t have wasted space which results in less scrolling. While on the flip side, I commonly hear that by placing the curly brace on a newline it makes for easier readability. In the end, it really only comes down to personal preference as the placement has zero effect on the result of the executed code.

Personally, I prefer and have always preferred placing the curly brace on a new line. Why is this? Well, it is what I got used to while using Visual Studio for so long. It has occurred to me that the big named IDE’s out there seem to have a bit of a role, or rather influence, in how the community adopts the typical way a programming language is written out. With the exception, of course, of those individuals who take the time to rummage through the IDE’s preferences and change auto features to their liking.

Which is where my recent adventure comes into the story. While working in XCode I noticed the predicting text feature (amazing by the way, really wish Visual Studio had this) would always place the starting curly brace on the same line as my starting block of code. After a short period I stopped relying on the predicting text feature and just wrote everything out so that I would have to interrupt my typing flow to move the curly brace.

The image above shows XCode’s auto predicting magic (seriously, I have no clue what it is actually called) on an ‘if’ statement. Getting a little tired of having the starting curly brace on the same line I went through XCode’s preferences to change it but was given a little shock. There are no options to change this from the IDE.

I was a little disappointed but had not given up just yet as I did recall that the Apple world revolves around plist configuration files and held hope that maybe there was still a way.

Home: Library->Preferences->com.apple.Xcode.plist

I had found the plist file in the above location and as I opened it and looked through I couldn’t find any settings that would allow me to make the change I wanted. Looking around online I found what I was looking for, I needed the following inside this plist:

XCCodeSenseFormattingOptions as a dictionary along with BlockSeparator inside the newly created dictionary with the string value of a newline character.

I tried doing this manually through the plist editor that comes with the OS but I couldn’t get it to work correctly and so looking around online I found out how to manually edit plists from the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Xcode XCCodeSenseFormattingOptions -dict BlockSeparator “\\n”

By typing in the above line I had achieved my goal:

Now when I type such statements as ‘if’ this is what automatically shows up in XCode.

The issues I had doing it manually through a plist editor was that I needed that hidden newline character ‘\n’ but typing it out manually only cause actual characters to be printed: For example…

if (condition)\n{

statements

}

So, with that if any of you, like me, prefer to have their curly braces start on a newline in XCode. Just the bolded line above in a terminal and you should be all set. Happy Coding!

NOTE: If you copy and paste the bolded line be careful of the quotes. Might just want to type that part in by hand. It has been my past experiences that showed copying lines of code with single and double quotes from a website does not always go over too well everytime.

I searched around online for awhile and saw the typical suggestions of uninstalling and reinstalling and so I did just that. I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes and the issue existed. So I did a full blown search in my C:\ and sure enough CoreGraphics.dll was sitting in “C:\Program Files(x86)\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support\”. No where else was it found.

I then decided to poke around inside the iTunes64Setup.exe install file. Luckily, WinRAR was able to extract the setup which presented me with several Apple install files.

• AppleApplicationSupport.msi
• AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi
• AppleSoftwareUpdate.msi
• Bonjour64.msi
• iTunes64.msi
• MobileMe.msi
• QuickTime.msi
• SetupAdmin.exe

Using msiexec I was able to extract the files within the msi install files (all except for the SetupAdmin.exe of course):

msiexec /a FileName.msi /qb TARGETDIR=PathToWhereYouWantTheFilesExtracted

Since I had everything extracted in their own folders, from there I did a full blown search to see where all the CoreGraphics.dll’s were located. I was under the hunch that we were NOT going to find CoreGraphics.dll within the iTunes install itself considering where I found it on my system. Sure enough, I only found 1 instance of CoreGraphics.dll and it was within the install of AppleApplicationSupport.msi.

I have been unable to figure out WHY iTunes would be shipped without certain key dll’s when it, apparently, won’t run without them. However, by reinstalling AppleApplicationSupport.msi I was able to get iTunes working again.

While I’m not 100% this will fix everyone’s issue with a missing CoreGraphics.dll, I would at least suggest trying to uninstall NOT iTunes but AppleApplicationSupport and reinstalling that install directly. Hope this helps some people.

So what have I been up to? Well, since my last post I’ve broken down and bought a MacBook. For various reasons but most importantly to finally dive in the iPhone SDK. A lot of my attention has been spent playing with Objective-C, XCode, and the iPhone SDK and I have to admit that it is quite enjoyable to mess with. It is taking me some time to get used to as Objective-C is just so strange to me but nothing I can’t handle.

I do hope that if I become familiar with the language and API that I may have something up on Apple’s AppStore but we all know how my home projects have been. I do hope this can finally keep my interest. Here are a few screenshots of what I’ve been doing.

They are not much but the first shows a simple menu screen which goes into the game screen shown by the other 2 images. The last image shows that the squares are clickable. I really don’t know where I’ll be going with this but we’ll see what comes up as I continue learn the environment.

On a side note, I am loving my new MacBook and the Mac OS X. This is my first time since having an Apple II in my middle school where I’ve touched a mac. I had no idea just how easy it is to use, everything just works and works really well.

I came across something interesting today and thought I’d share this small bit of information to the world. While this made me scratch my head for a second or two it really does make sense. In C#, and I assume VB.NET as well, we have the keyword readonly which allows one to initialize a read only variable during declaration or within a constructor. I recently had the situation where I needed to use a readonly but couldn’t figure out the best area to place it, either in my parent class or in each child class created. Being one who believes less code is better I leaned towards just throwing it in my parent class. It turns out though, that a read only variable can ONLY be initialized during its declaration or in the class the read only variable resides in and children classes WILL NOT be allowed to initialize the variable.

Here is a quick and dirty code example of what I’m talking about…

  public class ClassA
  {
    protected readonly String stringA;
 
    public ClassA() {}
  }
 
  public class ClassB : ClassA
  {
    public ClassB(String value)
    {
      stringA = value; // ERROR: A readonly field cannot be assigned to (except in a constructor or a variable initializer)
    }
  }

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  private Int32 someValue;
  public Int32 SomeValue
  {
    get { return SomeValue; }
  }

This is a very simple version of a Property in C# but can you see what is wrong with this bit of code? Take a look at the returned variable name, see how it starts with a capital ‘S’? This code actually does cause a StackOverflowException. Obviously, you want to use ‘someValue’ and not ‘SomeValue’ in your get and set methods. I made this mistake because I was in a rush and using Visual Studio’s little intellisense helper I accidentally selected my newly created Property over the actual variable I needed.

On a side note, I really need to find a good code colorizer/formatter plugin for WordPress. Does anyone have any good suggestions?