Now in my client code I show an alert like this:

    RSAlert* alert = [[RSAlert alloc] initWithTitle: @"Title" 
                                            message: @"Message!" 
                                             target: self 
                                           selector: @selector(dismissedAlert:buttonIndex:)
                                  cancelButtonTitle: @"OK" 
                                  otherButtonTitles: nil];

and handle the result with a selector, similar to NSAlert:

- (void) dismissedAlert: (RSAlert*) alert buttonIndex: (NSInteger) buttonIndex
{
    NSLog(@"dismissedStartupAlert with buttonIndex: %d", buttonIndex);
    
    [alert autorelease];
}

I realize this is an infinitesimally small annoyance, but sometimes it’s the little things that keep us happy.

RSAlert.h

#import 

@interface RSAlert : NSObject 
{
    UIAlertView*    alertView_;
    id              target_;
    SEL             selector_;
}

- (id)initWithTitle: (NSString*) title 
            message: (NSString*) message 
             target: (id) target 
           selector: (SEL) selector
  cancelButtonTitle: (NSString*) cancelButtonTitle 
  otherButtonTitles: (NSString*) otherButtonTitles, ...;

- (void) show;

@end

RSAlert.m

#import "RSAlert.h"

@implementation RSAlert

- (id)initWithTitle: (NSString*) title 
            message: (NSString*) message 
             target: (id) target 
           selector: (SEL) selector
  cancelButtonTitle: (NSString*) cancelButtonTitle 
  otherButtonTitles: (NSString*) otherButtonTitles, ...;
{
    self = [super init];
    
    if ( self )
    {
        target_     = [target retain];
        selector_   = selector;
        alertView_  = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle: title
                                                 message: message
                                                delegate: self
                                       cancelButtonTitle: cancelButtonTitle
                                       otherButtonTitles: nil];
    
        if ( otherButtonTitles )
        {
            va_list argList;
            id anArg;
            
            [alertView_ addButtonWithTitle: otherButtonTitles];
            
            va_start(argList, otherButtonTitles);
            
            while ( anArg = va_arg(argList, id) )
            {
                [alertView_ addButtonWithTitle: anArg];
            }
            
            va_end(argList);
        }
    }
    
    return self;
}

- (void) dealloc
{
    [target_ release];
    [alertView_ release];
    [super dealloc];
}

- (void) show
{
    [alertView_ show];
}

- (void)       alertView: (UIAlertView*) alertView 
    clickedButtonAtIndex: (NSInteger) buttonIndex
{
    // Do nothing
}

- (void) alertViewCancel: (UIAlertView*) alertView
{   
    [target_ performSelector: selector_ 
                  withObject: self 
                  withObject: (id) 0];
}

- (void) willPresentAlertView: (UIAlertView*) alertView
{
    // Do nothing
}

- (void)didPresentAlertView: (UIAlertView*) alertView
{
    // Do nothing
}

- (void)             alertView: (UIAlertView*) alertView 
    willDismissWithButtonIndex: (NSInteger) buttonIndex
{
    // Do nothing
}

- (void)            alertView: (UIAlertView*) alertView 
    didDismissWithButtonIndex: (NSInteger) buttonIndex
{
    [target_ performSelector: selector_ 
                  withObject: self 
                  withObject: (id) buttonIndex];
}

@end

If you are not yet planning to attend Macworld 2010, there is still time! It looks like some great events are planned this year, including a special iPad event where Macworld editors will have an iPad on hand to show off. There are also a ton of interesting and entertaining speakersthis year including, filmmaker Kevin Smith, the legendary Guy Kawasaki and the cranky, but lovable John Gruber of Daring Fireball.

The Expo takes place from February 11-13 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. We have a number of free exhibit hall passes to give away. If you are interested, send us an email here : macworld2010@roguesheep.com

Brad here. The Designer Sheep. I’m going to be speaking at 360|iDev San Jose along with Dave Wiskus in April. Our talk is entitled “Core Elegance” and we’ll be talking about how to think, look, and do like a mobile app designer should.  We’ve got a kick ass presentation lined up, should be a good time.

In commemoration of the event, I’ve created a wallpaper.  Its a Möbius Strip, a shape with one side.  Simple in concept, beautiful in presentation. Check it out here.

Also, you can use promo code “CountingSheep” during registration to save 20%.

RoseGlobe

RoseGlobe is a romance-themed version of the SnoGlobe application we released last December. RoseGlobe is just beautiful and every bit as mesmerizing to play with as SnoGlobe. Be sure to check out the demo video that Brad created at the product website. It’s almost as pretty as the app itself. I think he is going to create a blog post soon to talk about how he worked the magic to motion capture the iPhone to create the animated phone in the short.

Valentine ~ Postage

We have also created a newly themed edition of Postage for the upcoming holiday next month. Valentine ~ Postage has 14 love inspired postcard designs, one for each day of February leading up to Valentine’s Day. Grab it and send your sweetheart a special little message every day next month. I guarantee it will win you some big relationship points!

Postage ~ Postcards

Finally, we have also updated the premium edition of Postage with several of the new postcard designs form Valentine ~ Postage filling out the love category with ten total designs. Be sure to update if you haven’t done it yet.

User Desire

As a user, my hope for iPhone OS 4.0 is a way for third party developers to provide background media playing applications. I understand why Apple wants to be careful with allowing any ol’ process to be granted the ability to run in the background. Sure… power users will be able to manage background processes by hand, no problem. As we have seen on the desktop though, ordinary people just don’t want to be bothered with that level of device tweaking. We have been playing with a few Android devices here at the labs and its clear its pretty easy to start installing apps that quietly add background processes that start to suck down the battery without realizing what you have done.

On the other hand, applications like Pandora on the Android phones are so much better than their iPhone equivalents. Being able to tune in that Pandora radio station and having it play in the background just like the built-in iPod application when you launch another app would change the value of these applications immensely.

My suggestion for how Apple can do this without opening Pandora’s box (zing!) is to create a media service API that allows third party apps to hand media streams off to the iPod player. So the flow would work something like this:

You launch Pandora and use their UI to navigate their music offerings. You tune in the station that suits your current mood and give a bit of a listen. Under the hood Pandora is playing their stream via this new service API that is using the iPod application to serve up the audio. Now, you get the urge to catch-up on your news and launch NetNewsWire for some tasty RSS. When Pandora’s process is terminated the music keeps on playing, because it is the iPod application that is playing the audio. Its all Apple code running in the background, managing how much power is consumed just the way Apple wants, certified to the level of quality Apple is comfortable with, but we get audio from other providers.

There are of course some wrinkles to work out. If I launch the iPod app while a background stream is running, what is ‘Now Playing’? Perhaps the iPod application shows an appropriate image indicating the Pandora app is the current offering and allows you to quickly switch to it. One can even imagine a more sophisticated approach where the Pandora app could provide a plugin bundle that hosts its UI inside the iPod app, though I doubt this is appealing to Apple. There also needs to be some interesting mechanism for the iPod application to ask the originating service for the next or previous media file so that mini-controls that can be used to control the iPod in the background work as expected. Perhaps this is solved through a call-back into a simple code-bundle provided by the third party application? I’ m confident though there is some low impact way to achieve Apple’s goals and still enrich the media-playing experience on the device.

Developer Desire

So that’s my biggest desire as an iPhone user, but what about as an iPhone developer? What I would love to see next is a basic suite of video editing APIs. The problem with the iPhone OS and video right now is that if you want to do anything to process frames of video you need to have your own code to decode the video and re-encode after you have done your processing. This is not exactly trivial code to do well and open source starting points are potentially fraught with licensing and patent peril.

Even if you roll your own codec, perhaps even getting down and dirty with some ARM assembly, you still can’t get access to the built-in hardware assist that allows Apple’s software to capture and encode video at decent performance. The last thing we want to do as an iPhone developer is invest a lot of time in developing a codec for the iPhone and find that the best we can do is H.263 at a miserable frame rate. We also don’t want to force the user to wait around in our application for an encode to finish. Once again we need some way to hand this off and allow the OS to encode in the background for us so our users are not trapped in our application waiting for their edit to finish.

A basic QuickTime derived API that would allow us to take a video file, access individual frames and provide our own sequence of frames to encode into a new movie would be just the ticket. I realize that the advanced encoders typically have licensing requirements and perhaps Apple’s current license for their iPhone software doesn’t allow for this to be opened up. Hopefully it is something that can be addressed in the next version of the OS anyway?

Surely we are in for a interesting ride with the big announcement tomorrow. No doubt the next 6 months will be an interesting one for those of playing with Apple technologies. I suspect WWDC will be chock full of new content this year!

If you have never been to Macworld you have been missing out. Its a great time to meet and mingle with Mac and iPhone enthusiasts from around the world. Many of the prominent independent Mac and iPhone developers such as The Omni Group, Rogue Amoeba, FireMint, Riverfold, Marketcircle and Boinx will be presenting their wares there as well. It’s a great way to meet some of the best known names in Mac and iPhone software development.

The expo takes place February 11th-13th in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. We have some passes to give away, so if you are interested in attending drop us a line here : macworld2010@roguesheep.com

To begin with, it probably won’t be called iTunes LP. The documentation released by Apple some time back shows that iTunes LP (.itlp extension) and iTunes Extras (.ite) are actually two specific incarnations of a general purpose package format. Apple hasn’t named the general format, so I’ll call it the iTunes Media Format. As others have pointed out, it is basically a self contained, mini-website, complete with images, videos, audio, fonts, and of course text content. Given all that, it seems possible that an eBook incarnation of the format might be called iTunes eBook (.iteb?), a magazine incarnation might be iTunes eMag (.item?), or maybe there’s a variant that does both. But will publishers really want to distribute their content in such a way? Why not PDF or EPUB format?

I think publishers will certainly entertain the idea. Although PDF represents an easy migration path right now, it is fundamentally a static page description. Adobe’s Adobe Reader Mobile SDK does support reflow, but the quality depends on the metadata within the document as well as the ability to infer page structure when none is available. EPUB is somewhat at the other end of the spectrum, it has a rich content model that intrinsically supports reflow, but layout is limited to a subset of CSS2. The iTunes media format, on the other hand, is a good compromise between both extremes — it supports HTML5 and CSS3 and can let a publisher decide where on the layout vs reflow line they’d like to be. But how will publishers author content?

That’s a great question for another day.