Tristan O’Tierney | Mac Geek

Hot on the heels of my recent ObjectiveYouTube release, I bring you two for one! ObjectiveYouTube 0.2 for developers and FlickrBooth 2.0 for users. As you can probably guess, the big new feature for this release is YouTube uploading of videos. YouTube videos are big, and take awhile to upload? No problem! I’ve also added a handy little upload progress window to view the status of your YouTube uploads as well as the ability to cancel them should you change your mind :). To top it all off, FlickrBooth now automatically checks for updates. Head on over to the download page and give it a spin.

So I had time tonight to package what I’ve got working, and would like to get some more eyeballs looking at it. Please check it out! Download available at Google Code.

So after going through all the trouble of writing a generic multipart form generator, and screen scraping youtube, etc I’ve completely rewritten it to use the new spiffy YouTube write apis that came out literally a day after I completed all that prior work. Oh well, the good news is this library will be shielded from things like YouTube updating their website since I no longer have to screen scrape. So the downsides are the lib will only handle authentication and uploading, mostly because those are all I need right now. I may let the community fix that problem if anyone else needs that functionality. Look out for a post in the next couple days while I finish up the readme/licensing.

Broken iPhone
Originally uploaded by tristanotierney

So awhile back (just after macworld) Quynh’s iPhone mysteriously cracked. We didn’t drop it, we didn’t step on it, it just spiderwebbed in the corner for no apparent reason. Needless to say we were hesitant to take it to an Apple genius because anything involving what appears to be user-inflicted-damage is shrugged off. Well, we were browsing the mall today and said screw it lets give it a try. 20 minutes later we were blessed with a brand spanking new phone! I had a similar experience with Ikea, in which we actually brought in an photo of a broken drawer shelf (on our iPhones of course) and they didn’t even ask questions! They just went into the back room and gave us the new board we needed to repair the drawer. Not to go off into too much of a tangent, but I think these two companies share a lot in common.

(Most) everyone knows about the iPhone SDK, so I’ll try not to be redundant. In short, I think what was delivered was awesome. It’s a pretty good compromise on almost all levels. If you want to distribute software on the app store for free, you can. If you want to charge, they take a pretty fair percentage. The enterprise additions were all icing on the cake to me. Normally I wouldn’t care, but I’ll directly benefit from Exchange support since VMware is an Exchange company (ugh). It’s increasingly depressing that no one seems to be giving Microsoft Exchange competition, still, and it’s the year 2008 but that’s another blog post all together. Another thing that has me pleased and amazed is the $100 million iFund. This is a drop in the bucket for Apple, with nearly $18 billion in the bank. Yet that’s a lot of money. I’m frightened, in a good way, to think what can come out of this initiative.

Frankly I wasn’t quite surprised that they chose not to make a Windows compatible SDK. The entire iPhone development suite, from building tools (gcc, xcode, ib) to debug tools (instruments, which depends on dtrace) are just entirely incompatible with Windows. Even if Apple did keep Yellow Box alive in secret, it would be a monumental effort to port all those tools. So I guess that’s that — in order to code for the most popular mobile device within the next few years, you’re going to need a Mac. If that doesn’t pull in a whole new class of switchers, I don’t know what will.