Well, Subnet Calc is still in Apple’s pipeline under the status of ‘Pending Contract’. This means that Apple havn’t accepted my free applications contract yet – over 2 weeks since I submitted it. I’m not the only developer to run into this kind of problem and I really hope it gets resolved soon. The contracts department at Apple say it’s the finance department which need to sort out this phase, so I guess I’m just going to have to wait and see really.

So, come on Apple, please accept me!

I’ve finally submitted my application to the App Store today . It’s called Subnet Calc and there’s only one application on the App Store which does a similar sort of thing. So I’m hoping that it gets accepted!

You can follow the progress of it at http://iphone.galloway.me.uk/iphone-apps/subnet-calc/ – I’ll be moving over to a dedicated section of my site at some point, but for now, it’s hosted on this blog.

So when my app is out – please download it and try it out!

Here’s the latest screenshot:

I finally decided to pay my cash and join the iPhone developer program. It’s a fair amount of cash, but I thought that I’d take the plunge and thought that it might give me more of a push to actually create applications for the iPhone. Also, it means I can compile applications and put them onto my iPod Touch!

So I’ve managed to get my current development application up and running on my iPod. It’s called ipCalc and it’s designed for network admins who constantly use the command line tool, ipcalc, to find various bits of information about the subnet they’re working on. The maths behind the code is pretty straightforward, but hard enough that it gave me some design issues to overcome. But it’s now looking pretty good and I’ve been cleaning up the code with the aim to (hopefully) submit it to the iTunes App Store. It would be absolutely awesome to get something on the App Store!

Also, here’s 3 screenshots from my app actually running on my iPod Touch – yay!

I’ve been hard at work recently developing my iPhone application called ipCalc. It’s probably not an application that most people are going to want to use, but it has fairly simple logic behind it so I decided that it would be a good way to learn about the iPhone SDK. So far I’ve managed to learn Objective-C and I can safely say that I really do like it, and I’ve also managed to get my head around programming GUI applications which is so very different to command line applications as there’s so much more to think about.

Apple have made it so that you have to pay $99 in order to get a license to test application on an actual device (for me, my iPod Touch) and to submit applications to the App Store. I seem to have managed to apply to this program, but my application is currently pending. I hope that I manage to get accepted because then I will decide what to do with my ipCalc application… I will have to think about whether or not I want to charge for it – although my first thoughts are that this application will be free.

So, I’ll continue to improve the application and I might even release some tutorials on here about my experiences with the iPhone SDK as I have definitely found other tutorials that are out there very useful!

First Attempt	Current Version

We’ve just arrived in Ipswich at Helen’s new house and it’s really nice! I’ve uploaded a couple of photos of her new room – very very nice!

Also, Ed, who owns the house, came 2nd in the UK Robot Wars 4 years ago and won the world Robot Wars! And now he does the Craig Charles bit for the live Robot Wars. Cool!

Recently I have been learning the programming language Objective-C with the view to creating native Mac OS X programs. I bought the book “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” which was a brilliant read and had excellent examples to work through – I’d certainly recommend it to anyone thinking about learning about Cocoa.

I found it hard to get into the mindset of programming using objects (which are all pointers) rather than the usual C/C++ way where you work primarily with data types. But it’s all started to fall into place and I think I have got to grips with it now.

My next step is to create a program which is actually useful! Not sure what I’ll create yet, so keep an eye out!

[Please see my new iPhone apps page]

Last week I decided to give iPhone programming a try after having download the iPhone SDK a while back. I started to get frustrated with Objective-C because it’s quite a lot different to my old friend, C++ and so I had problems getting into it. In order to learn, I decided to set a challenge of creating an IP calculator program (something which there are only non-free ones of in the App Store).

I managed to get quite far with the programming and had the software displaying a reasonable GUI which seemed to be pretty good, but I was struggling to work out where to put code and exactly what I should be doing about calling functions on objects (quite different in Objective-C compared to C/C++). Feeling a bit depressed by not being able to understand the code I decided to buy Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X which had very good reviews.

The book arrived today, and I read a few chapters and managed to actually finish the first version of my software! Woo! So, I am now an iPhone application developer… apparently… Hopefully I’ll keep creating better things and improving on this very crude first version.

(Unfortunately I can’t test on my iPod Touch yet as I don’t have a license to install on real devices – it costs $99!)

Yeh, sorry about the lack of post here… I was in London but only managed to get WiFi to create the title!

Anyway, I’ve just been in London for FOWA ’08 (Future of Web Apps 2008) which was an awesome conference that we (Senokian) had a stand at to promote Tactile CRM. I had lots of fun and managed to chat to some interesting people and find out some interesting things.

Paul and I also met up with Sam and had a brilliant night on Wednesday – thanks for that Sam!

Whilst on the world tour which Helen, Adam and myself were on, I decided to use my Garmin GPS to track where we drove. This went (mostly) well and I managed to create some very nice images from the tracks using an online tool called GPSVisualizer.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

As I’m sure everyone is aware, the main news at the moment is the so called “credit crunch” which is happening all over the world. I’ve been following it with interest because I’ve always had an interest in economics, but it has come at a very apt time for me because I’m just having to start thinking about my career, pensions, savings, mortgages and so on.

So from what I can see at the moment, if I put money into a pension fund, it’s likely to lose money! But according to my financial advisor at HSBC there are some no-risk and low-risk options where essentially the money is stored as cash and therefore isn’t subject to the market falls and rises. So there’s definitely options there.

As is common in all economics, you have to look at the long term and the short term. In the short term, anything you invest today is going to lose money. In the long term, anything you invest today is going to make money, you hope. It’s this ‘hope’ which is the inevitable part of all investments which makes it exciting for some and daunting for others.

So all this got me thinking about whether I care or not that the markets are tumbling at the moment. Realistically it isn’t going to affect me – at least in the long term. It might even be a good thing for me because in a year or so I’ll be thinking about buying a house and by then the markets may have stabilised a little so that I can at least get a mortgage, but still enjoy the lowered house prices.

It’s also quite poignant for me that the banking sector has destabilised because I went for a job in a hedge fund in London which is the exact sector that is being legislated against at the moment with the introduction of a ban on the short selling of 29 particular shares (mostly stocks from the banking sector). I’m quite glad not to be in that industry now that I see what’s going on as my job could have been in jeopardy even before I’d started!

From all of it I can conclude that this won’t affect me all that much, but I shall definitely have to keep an eye on the news to see if I can make the most of what the banks will be offering in the way of bonuses on savings rates in the months/years to come.