Clockwise

I just got an email that Lexikon version 1.1 is ready for sale. I expect it to hit the store on Monday sometime. While I wanted to do some more refactoring under the hood, I decided to cut a quick release with some new things. Mainly I did two things, I turned off Pinch Analytics use of CoreLocation. This means no more requests to use the GPS. Secondly I polished the UI a bit more. Nothing has changed functionally, but it should look nicer.

I’ve got some plans for version 1.2 that should further refine the UI. I’ll also be exploring some suggestions from users to see if they work. I’m also hoping to refactor the models cause right now they are skinny and my controllers are too fat, when ideally it should be the other way around.

If you have any other suggestions feel free to email them to me or leave a comment. I’d love to do what I can. Unfortunately I can’t provide offline access and beyond switching to the Swedish keyboard provide suggestions for spelling. Though I am looking in to other options to do those, but it would require licensing a Swedish-English dictionary’s content and thus would go in to a more expensive paid app. I’m not sure I can compete with the existing offerings. Personally I find the Lexin dictionary to be most helpful with its examples and structure as opposed to most Swedish-English dictionaries.

I’ve started work on a new iPhone application idea. The key to success seems to be iterating the design on paper first. Then the coding becomes simpler and better focused when you already have things mapped out. To that end I’ve made a PDF that has eight iPhone screen templates. It is A4 in size, but should be easily modified and changed for your needs in Photoshop. It has the status bar and a bounding box with tick marks on the outside to quickly mark a navigation and/or tool bar at the proper size. The template is actual size when printed.

iPhone Screen Template PDF.

I attended the iPhone Tech Talk in Stockholm. It’s all covered by the NDA, but you can see on Apple’s site that the American talks had three tracks and a lab and the European stops had one and a half tracks. They had to cover the full spectrum of attendees in most sessions. There were some interesting things discussed though and the trip was worthwhile. Maybe I’ll get in trouble, but one thing is it would’ve been nice if the food/refreshments were served in a better area, they had one small hallway/foyer outside the main lecture room and then a longer hallway by the other room. Made it hard to network or at least find the developers on your level when you were either packed in like sardines or spread out in lines along the walls. Next time I think I’ll be more proactive about using the Stockholm Cocoaheads group to get in touch with the right people.

One of the biggest things about optimization is covered by Loren Brichter in his post about Fast scrolling with UITableView.

There is still a few things I want to do with Lexikon before I am ready to release it. I’m optimistic that this can happen this week. Then we’ll see how long Apple takes to turn around and approve it. In the meantime here is the icon design that I came up with this week.

I got word on Tuesday evening that I get to go to the iPhone Tech Talk in Stockholm. This is exciting as it should prove useful information, much more than when I attended WWDC in 2004 on a student scholarship as I am actively programming on the platform. It’s good to hear cause we live in Falun which is about 3 hours away from Stockholm and so now arrangements need to be made for somewhere to stay, and to make the most out of the gas money, visiting our friends and my wife’s brother and his family that live in and around Stockholm.

It’s also a good time set in stone to work to having Lexikon finished or almost complete so I can possibly show it off. I’ve made progress in that direction with starting to get the database in place and the main word list UI. I think all the remaining tasks can at least be roughly in place for the tech talk, which might prove useful to get a blast of information to help polish things off. The other great thing about the tech talk is it should be a great place to network. I have some contacts in the IT industry in Stockholm, but not really for what I’ve been doing with web development and not anything Mac or iPhone related.