As usual, you prepare a AdHoc build and zip the .app bundle, attach it to the email along with the mobile provisioning profile and send it to your customer. On macs, things are pretty straight forward. On Windows, however, your customers are prone to fall into these common pitfalls which might cause a troublesome nightmare for you.

First Pitfall:
Extracting the .zip file you sent using Windows Explorer’s built in Compression Engine.

I repeat. DON’T DON’T DON’T extract the zip file using the Windows’ explorer’s built in “Extract Here” command. The default compression engine bundled with Windows messes up the CRCs by adding temporary files into the .app bundle. Ask your testers to use a better de-compression tool like 7-Zip, WinZip or WinRar.

Second Pitfall:
Opening the .app folder out of “curiosity” to “see” what’s inside.

Never double-click and “open” the extracted .app “folder” (On windows the .app bundle appears as a folder) . Windows is a sh**. I agree. It automatically creates a “Thumbs.db/Desktop.ini/folder.htt” (some created by Virus, some by Windows) file whenever you access a folder and that again changes the CRC of the bundle. Just drag the .app “folder” immediately after extracting into iTunes. Also drag the provisioning profile into iTunes and sync the app.

If you think your users’ might not follow all these steps, you can send them the .IPA file instead of the compressed .app bundle. This .IPA file can be generated on your mac by dragging the .app bundle into iTunes. When you drag the .app bundle into your iTunes library, it internally creates a .IPA file. This IPA file can be located in Finder from iTunes. Just Cmd click your app on iTunes and click “Show in Finder”. Send this .IPA file (and the mobile provisioning file) to your testers.

Hope that clears the air around AdHoc provisioning on Windows.

–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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“The version of iPhone OS on “ABC’s iPhone” does not match any of the versions of iPhone OS supported for development with this installation of the iPhone SDK”

So does that mean, you should re-install the SDK? Just like me, you will probably have confusions like,

Will installing it corrupt or overwrite your 3.2 beta?

Should I re-install 3.2 beta again?

I too had these. Fortunately, I decided to hack things myself and got the 3.1.3 working without downloading the entire SDK. This is how I did. Type the following command into your terminal.


ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.1.2\ \(7D11\) /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.1.3


Now quit and restart XCode. Voila! you have effectively “fooled” XCode! and you have saved countless hours which you can effectively use on programming another cool app!

Note that this hack will work *any* minor OS updates. However, if you are using a feature specific to the new version you will probably find yourself in trouble. In other words, don’t try to apply the same technique when 3.2 or 4.0 launches.

–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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Recently, Twitter’s switch from tinyurl to bit.ly as it’s default shortening service infuriated companies like tr.im as they announced that they will probably be shutting down their service, though they reverted their decision later. When such companies go out of business, what will happen to your URLs? Dead and gone for good? So why not host our own URL shortening services? How difficult is it to write our own URL shortening service? Turns out that a few couple of PHP files, and a MySQL database and a mod-rewrite enabled Apache server is all what you need for hosting your own URL shortening service. Writing those PHP code is not for the those who are not conversant with PHP (including me). For people like us, two smart guys, Lester Chan and Ozh Richard at yourls.org have written a custom URL shortener that you can use it for free on your blog. In this post, I will briefly explain how to host your own custom URL shortener using YOURLS. Later we will also look at how to host your own “TwitPic” service.

Steps for hosting a custom URL Shortener

Hosting your own custom URL shortener with YOURLS is a 3hr work. Yeah, believe me, these people have made most part of the work required. In fact, it took me more time to write this post than host YOURLS. I’ve explained it in four easy steps below.

Step 1

Purchase a short and sweet domain. I recently purchased a domain mk.sg and it costed me a paltry 30$ (45 SGD) from Vooju. You can explore possible domains using domainr, a nice tool that automatically checks for available domains from the letters you choose. Though this step is not mandatory, it’s good to have a short domain name given that domain names are this cheap.

Step 2

Download the latest copy of yourls from their website. Create a MySql database in your server and fill in the details of your MySQL database in the config file as explained in the config section Upload your files to the root of the server.
For example, I host my primary domain mugunthkumar.com and mk.sg in the same hosting account. mk.sg actually points to a folder inside my public_html folder. FTP these files into that folder and point your browser to http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/admin. Click install. Done!

The configuration file provides options like whether it’s a private URL shortener or public, the usernames and passwords allowed for accessing the service and a whole lot. Believe me, it’s as feature-rich as bit.ly. You can track who clicked your links, from which location they clicked and a variety of other tracking features. However, it doesn’t allow users to “preview” the short links. Not a deal-breaker though.

If your installation is going to be private like mine, you can access the service from http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/yourls-api.php You can rename yourls-api.php to something else as well. If you specify the installation as private in the config file, you have to provide a user name and password for accessing this API like below.
http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/yourls-api.php?action=shorturl&username=test&password=test&format=simple&&url=%@
If you want your URL shortener to be used by everyone, set it appropriately in the config file and you can ignore the username and password parameter from this API.

Step 3

Install the YOURLS word press plugin that automatically links your posts, creates a short URL and tweets it. Any post or page you publish is now automatically tweeted by this plugin.

Step 4

Now, how good is a URL shortener if your favorite twitter client doesn’t support it? Fortunately with the release of Twitter 2, my favourite twitter client, you can use a custom URL shortener as described in developer.atebits.com. Open Tweetie 2, Go to Settings, URL Shorterning -> Custom, type the entry below.
http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/yourls-api.php?action=shorturl&username=test&password=test&format=simple&&url=%@
Hopefully, other twitter clients will follow the crowd shortly. And I believe, if most twitter clients support custom URL shortening, the market share for bit.ly and others might go down.

With this, you can get your own custom URL shortening service up and running within, say, 3 hrs.
Next, we will look at how to host our own “TwitPic” service.

Steps for hosting a custom “TwitPic”

Hosting your own “TwitPic” is even easier. Thanks to the WordPress plugin Twitter2Press, that completely automates everything! Below are the detailed steps for hosting your own “TwitPic”.

Step 1

Create a subdomain or directory and install wordpress into it. Note that yourls and wordpress cannot co-exist in the same directory as both handle URLs differently. So install it into a subdomain and make that subdomain as short as possible. Mine is b.mk.sg.

Step 2

Install the Twitter2Press plugin and open the settings page. Choose YOURLS and specify the API username and password. This is the same username password that you provided in the config file while setting up YOURLS. Choose a page for the image gallery. This is the page that shows the images you tweeted (much like twitpic or yFrog’s home page). It can either be your home page or a dedicated page, say Image Gallery or something.

Step 3

Twitter2Press has an API that is supported by Tweetie 2 and hopefully other twitter clients will follow. For tweetie to work with your Image Service, you need to provide the API endpoint. If your Image Gallery Page is “gallery”, the endpoint is
http://YOUR-SHORT-DOMAIN.COM/gallery/index.php
All parameters are posted to this service by Tweetie 2. If you don’t have a dedicated Image Gallery Page, omit the gallery from the API endpoint.

That’s it. Now even if tr.im shuts down or twitpic eats all your files, you are safe. Your data lies in your server. Go, start yours now!

–

Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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Ego Searching with Safari

And now in Google Website itself…

Ego Searching in Google

Am so happy now…!
–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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Google’s creating useful 404 pages didn’t work out either as it offered only to show me a text box with keywords pre-populated. I wanted something similar, but with the results of the search in the 404 error page itself, just like the AskApache’s Google 404 plugin. The smart 404 plugin didn’t work for me and many others as well after 2.7.1 upgrade. The askapache needed some .htaccess tweaking which is handled very poorly by godaddy’s Windows hosting. So I decided to write one myself and the result is what you can see here

The first thing I did was to change godaddy’s default error behaviour to redirect to a custom error page titled 404.html just under my root. After about one hour or so, my site got updated and all the 404 behaviours were directed to my page.

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There are two ways (atleast that which is handled by my 404) in which one would come to your site. One is by typing the URL wrongly or from a old outdated bookmark. Or from one of your old blog redirection. In my case, my old blog was at blogger.com and I’ve set it up to redirect to my new domain. However, because I changed my permalink settings to avoid showing the classic year/month in the URL, all my redirection from blogspot.com were hitting 404′s… If smart 404 worked as promised, i would have been happier. But unfortunately, even after the release of 2.8.3 (at the time of writing this), the plugin didn’t work. So the first thing I did was to extract keywords from the referrer url, document.referrer. In case the document.referrer is empty, it means the user has typed a wrong url in the address bar or followed a old bookmark. In that case I extract keywords from document.location.href, which is the wrongly entered url. I strip of everything except the post name which by far has the most keywords related to the URL and pass it to Google AJAX Search API.

Based on inputs from various other sources including my favourite Jakob Nielsen’s suggestions, I decided that my 404 should look like a real *error* page rather than a blog post. It should possibly have a sitemap if it’s a website or links to popular posts in case of a blog. It should take your users to important places in your website as in my 404 page offers links to my homepage and blog. Above all, it should have a search box where user could search for what he was looking for without hitting the browser back button.

My version of 404 error page looks like this.

404 Error page @ mugunthkumar.com

It uses plain html and javascript. It’s not a server scripted file like PHP of ASPX. You can go ahead and copy the file (Cmd click -> View Page Source) from my error page and use it in your own site. I would be glad if you could attribute me by linking to this post or blog, though it’s purely optional and I leave it to you.

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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1. Ego Searching to the core…! I know… For ages, I’ve been an egosearcher… But just...

To make more and more people aware of the security risks involved with IE, a whole lot of campaign started on Twitter, including  adding a Twibbon to support a cause, “IE 6 must die”

You as a wordpress self-hosted user can also help the cause, by installing this plugin.

http://www.incerteza.org/blog/projetos/shockingly-big-ie6-warning/

Thanks to incerteza.org

PS: I have added it to this blog. Try visiting it from IE6. You will see somthing like this.

Warn IE6 users about it's pathetic security holes...

The plugin can also be configured to crash your visitor’s browser if they visit from IE6!!! Super cool!!!

incerteza.org rocks..! Doom to IE6…

–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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1. Help your visitors with a *useful* 404 Error page A 404 Error page usually informs visitors that something they...

Even plugins like TwitterFox or Twitter Clients like TweetDeck doesn’t work as they also have to cross your company’s firewall. Yet not out of luck.  Fortunately, there is a work around, that your company can never prevent.

Welcome to the world of Web Apps. Though a variety of web apps are out there, my favourite one is Seesmic. Login to Seesmic and authenticate using oAuth. You may have to access a *.twitter.com URL. Note that this has to be done only once. Either do it by tethering or do it when you carry your laptop home.

Once you are authenticated, Seesmic can act like your web based twitter client. But wait…! What if your office blocks access to Seesmic? There is yet another work around. Thanks to bit.ly!

How to Tweet from Bit.ly

link your twitter account with bit.ly by clicking the Advanced options. Again this is required only once. After linking, you can tweet directly from bit.ly. There is one catch however. You can only post tweets but cannot view it. If you know any other way, do post them in comments.

–

Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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1. Help your visitors with a *useful* 404 Error page A 404 Error page usually informs visitors that something they...
2. Ego Searching to the core…! I know… For ages, I’ve been an egosearcher… But just...

This product *may* work. We don't guarantee anything...!

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So,that doesn’t mean this product didn’t work as expected, but before buying any bluetooth device, try it out first. If none of your friends have the device to test it for, buy it from IT Show or Electronics Fair where they usually have a couple of products to test compatibility. Usually the shop from where you bought will NOT give you a refund if your mobile doesn’t work with the receiver…

Now that doesn’t mean that this device doesn’t work with iPhone. It works fine though I have some complaints. Before buying this device I got a Philips SHB7100 as it had previous and next track buttons separate from volume control button.I should have done a basic search on the Internet. The third link was someone complaining that this thing doesn’t work with iPhone 3.0 software update. Pretty unfortunate. I sold it out at hardwarezone.sg and got this iTech Clip Music 801.

iTech Clip Music near a 20 cent (SGD) coin

Though it looked a bit bulky, the build quality was good unlike the Philips SHB7100 and it was very lightweight. (15 gms) After opening I paired it with my iPhone 3G. Pairing was a breeze, and quick. iPhone recognized the device as a headset and seamlessly switched the music through the device. The iPod screen will look like this if your pairing is successful.

The volume control will be replaced by “Clip Music 801″ and the blue tooth icon.

Oh No!!! the volume control is gone!! was my first reaction.

I tried increasing the volume through the hardware button. No luck. Seems like the device volume controls are the only way to increase/decrease the volume. With the iPhone 3.0 software, the previous/next controls  also didn’t work though it worked with the Mac.Apple might soon release a bug fix.

Coming to the audio quality, it was good though there was some compression artifacts. The sound had clear mids, deep bass but the trebles and highs was slightly missing, which is noticable even if you are NOT an audiophile. However, it can be easily adjusted by choosing a different eq setting. I usually use “Bass booster” on my iPhone. Changing it to “Classical” did the job. No wonder, Apple chose Wifi for their AirTunes rather than bluetooth. The volume was pretty loud, as if the earphones are directly plugged into the iPhone.

Phone voice quality was awesome. The microphone picked up even the lightest sound (though not the background sound). However, while listening to music, when you get an incoming call, the music doesn’t “fade out”. All of a sudden you will hear the ringing tone. The tone is not your ring tone but a different tone played by the headset. When the call ends, the music doesn’t start automatically. You have to manually press the “Play” button.

Quite cumbersome, but still manageable.

Similarly, when you remove your headphones from the headset, it doesn’t pause the music like how it happens on the iPhone. However, when you insert the headphones into the iPhone, music is automatically routed through the plugged in headphones. When you remove it, music is streamed through the device. Nice little feature.

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As with many other devices, the music DID skip or “miss a beat” because of bluetooth streaming but it was not very obvious. I had a very nasty problem with my old Philips SHB7100 paired with my mac. Now is it very obvious? It depends. If your iPhone is not “busy” doing other things, the audio is smooth. When you are downloading an email attachment, you might get some stutters. Browsing the Internet on WIFI causes the audio to stutter a LOT. LOT means a LOT! Like, as in twice every 5 seconds. Once the page is rendered fully, it resumes normally. Note that browsing on 3G doesn’t cause issues. I think it’s because the bluetooth and WIFI are actually present within the same chip.

All these artifacts are only when you pair it with the iPhone. When I paired it with my mac, there wasn’t any stutter. I could be in the same room, or nearby rooms so long as the distance is less than 5m. But the compression artifacts, were still obvious. Voice calling were working even at far distances though and was clear without skips. This headset even has a “cool” feature called distance alert that will ring a tone when you move away from your mobile phone. So you won’t miss your phone at the restaurant table

However voice calling through Skype or Fring didn’t work via bluetooth. The “call connnect” and “call disconnect” tones are routed through bluetooth but calls aren’t. Pretty bad Apple. Pretty bad. On the Mac also, I could see the same behaviour. Skype calls weren’t routed through bluetooth though the ring tones were. Not sure who is the culprit. Games were however not affected.  Sound is routed through bluetooth in this case. I think it’s because the “headset” profile is not accessible to other applications but the “headphones” profile is.

To wind it up, I should say that this headset is good. A 3.5 star rating. However, The technology still has to mature. Compression artifacts are still noticable and A2DP is definitely not for the audiophiles. But for casual music listeners, and specially gamers, cutting the cord is more important that those slight sound artifacts. Playing a game with your iPhone accelerometer without the earphone cords hanging around is really a boon.

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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In my review here, I’ve splitted it into two parts. What’s great vs What’s missing…

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What’s great about Boxcar Push Notifications?

- You don’t have to switch to a different twitter client. This is a great boon for me. i just love using both Twitteriffic and Tweetie. Boxcar supports both and they even claim to support Twitterlator Pro in a later release.

- OAuth authorization which means, you don’t have to share your password with yet another third-party guy. finally OAuth done elegantly on a client app. Man of Tweetie, Loren Brichter, Please note this… Enough of cribbing

- Speed of push: Boxcar checks your twitter account every two minutes. Much faster than a majority of twitter clients out there. In my testing it was faster that Tweetie on Mac to recognize a @mention

What is missing from BoxCar Push Notifications?

-Badge icons on BoxCar app is missing when you get  a new @mention. The alert sound you get is loud and is similar to the SMS message tone. So I disabled “Sounds” expecting to see the badges pushed. But, no luck there… You can see that from my home screen here. I just love the subtle sound of Mail’s alert tone.

Boxcar Push shows only alerts not badges.

The “B” icon, Boxcar’s app icon doesn’t seem to show the count. This happens even when alerts is turned off.

-Second thing, though not a huge issue for me, *could* be a deal breaker for some. I’ve got just 400 followers and I get atleast 25 @mentions a day. For hard core twitter users, It would be great if Boxcar supports twitter user groups and push notifications only for those users. I don’t think that would be too difficult for those guys…
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Though these two are not a deal breaker, Boxcar is definitely a great buy for 1.99$. Go get it from AppStore now… or visit their website here…

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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Bing has this cool feature called “Popular Now” shows what people are searching for recently.

Today, Michael Jackson died and people were searching for his name it seems, and Bing rightly highlights two search keywords releated to that, 1) Michael Jackson 2) UCLA Medical Center.

Bing is too “cool” to be used as a browser home page for Mozilla Firefox than the damned “Firefox customized” Google home page.

Though I don’t use Bing search *much*, I still have this as my home page just to look at those cool wallpapers.

Interested in downloading them? you can go ahead and use my “Bing Downloader“.

–

Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Ego Searching to the core…! I know… For ages, I’ve been an egosearcher… But just...
2. Help your visitors with a *useful* 404 Error page A 404 Error page usually informs visitors that something they...