Well, as you may have noticed I missed last week’s notes. I’ve had a pretty harried few weeks trying to close out the two iPhone projects I’ve been working on. Mainly this was simply because I’d finished the time that I’d assigned to the projects and so any further work was not making me any money, but also July is the end of my financial year and I really wanted to get this work invoiced for so that I could include it in this year’s earnings (the second year for my company). Not only was I trying to get these two client projects finished but I also wanted to make some progress on the chess app that has remained untouched for a few months now.

It’s difficult to say for sure but it looks like the two client projects are just about finished. One has zero live bugs and the other just has a few with questions attached which I’m hoping should result in no more work. One thing I’m finding though is that I’m definitely getting my time estimates for projects wrong. These two client projects I originally estimated as 5 and 10 days respectively. The 10 day project was eventually increased to 13 days (I submitted a “complete” app only to be sent wireframes for how the app should work, not sure if there was a communication issue here) but all in all I’ve probably spent at least 50% more time again on each one. I suppose what I’ve been doing is thinking of the time it’ll take for me to get an app together that fits the spec without considering time for the client testing and for the client to make the various modifications they’re likely to request. I’m definitely going to be more careful about any estimates I submit in the future.

I did spend some time getting a “full game view” working on the chess app. This view is intended to show the complete description of a chess game including all commentary and variations. As the game is progressed using the controls the current move should be highlighted and if any move is clicked then the visible game should be altered to show that move. I actually managed to get this pretty much done and working in half a day last week with another half day spent on some other tweaks. I sent it off to the guy I’m working with on this and he tried it out. There did seem to be a couple of issues with handling of incompatible file types (it was crashing rather than giving an error message) and a few issues with handling very large files but in general it seems to be working. I now need to experiment a bit with the placement of the full game view and then I think we’ll just be working out what other tweaks we need to do to it before we can release it.

Last week I also spent an interesting two days with Dave Verwer of Shiny Development. He’s asked me to help him out with some iPhone training so we spent the two days going through his materials and making sure I understood everything and was clear on how he presented it. Dave has been developing in Objective C for many years, initially for the Mac but with the iPhone SDK since it was released, so it was really good just spending the time with him and learning even more about the iPhone SDK from him. I’m basically going to act as the overflow taking on any courses when Dave is already booked up, the first course is booked in for October so it’s going to be really interesting to see how that goes. If you’re interested in getting trained up in Objective C and the iPhone SDK then you should definitely give Dave a call. Whether you want in-house training for a company or you’re an individual who wants to join one of the public training sessions you’ll have a great experience and be building iPhone apps in no time.

Final thing to mention is something I finally got set up today. I’ve been using SVN for a long time for various personal projects including mapme.at but I’ve also more recently been using Git. Git is great as a distributed VCS giving me the ability to check-in code on the train and branch projects with ease, but the lack of an enforced server-side component has led to me being a bit sloppy about how often my code gets backed up to a server. Today I finally worked out how to properly host git modules on a server. I’m actually doing it over SSH so it’s fairly simple, I just need to create a “bare” repository on the server:

    
mkdir foo.git
cd foo.git
git --bare init

Then the following commands link my local repository to the remote one and pushes all my changes up:

 
git remote add origin ssh://git.example.com/path_to_repository/foo.git
git push origin master

I think when I’d tried this previously I was using an old version of Git that didn’t properly support --bare so I’m glad that everything worked easily this time. I then took this one step further by setting up trac as a bug tracking system. It wasn’t too hard to set up on ubuntu using these instructions they’re a bit out of date though so once I’d setup mod_python I then found I needed to do that bit again and use WSGI instead using these instructions. I’ve also installed the Git plugin so that I can browse my Git repository from within trac and also most importantly I can resolve and update bugs from my commit messages using the post-receive script on that page (which must be named post-receive and put in the repository.git/hooks/ folder).

So a busy few weeks. As I’m coming to the end of projects I’m getting to the post-project comedown that I tend to have after being so busy and then becoming quiet again. I’ll still need to finish off any final bugs on these two client projects and get this chess app more complete. I also have emails from clients with various bits and pieces that need doing but I should finally be able to get started on some new projects, I just have to work out which ones!