Not working on the radio app anymore

I decided not to work on that radio app anymore, you'll see the very purpose of that app was to provide some income with the minimum possible effort while I was dedicating all my efforts to a Top-Notch app for the iPad I've been working for a while now (Sorry can't tell you about it yet) so instead of producing the aforementioned radio app I'm working in something more consumable for the local market, can' say what it is just yet but I guess a hint can't hurt anyone... It's TV related.

Been working on the new app for no more than 8 hours and I think that one will see the light of the day, if it will survive or not is something I think we will know by friday.

Nothing comes easy in this life

While working on a audio streaming app for distribution in the appstore I stumbled across a problem, there was a mms:// url which refused to play audio, investigating a little revealed the sad true that iOS does not provide any type of native support for mms:// type streams, by visiting Apple forums and Stackoverflow.com I realized that there is way to have it working but working on a mms protocol parser on my own or work with an external library, everything points out that the only solution will be the external lib, devs at Apple forums recommend libfmpeg so I guess I'll take a look at it and see what happens.

Sleeping and waking up issues :-(

Over the course of many years I've gradually developed sleeping problems, mostly at night, sometimes I can't even sleep. This is something I've had since I was kid, hard to remember a exact age when it started. Today I'm 34 and is not the same as when I was 12, back then if I had no sleep then nothing would happen no tiredness no side-issues would be felt but now I do fill tiredness and sometimes I feel so tired that I think I'll fall in the floor asleep but that never happens.

On the other hand when I do get some sleep it's incredibly harder to wake up, of course, my body is tired and needs to sleep.

The problem with all this is that I cannot successfully have a normal life like this, sometimes I can't even get up for work or worst I might have been awake for too many days that I'm unable to productive at all.

For getting awake most of the times what I do is drinking a big glass of water so hopefully I'll get up before time and get ready for whatever I have to do the next day, so what do you do when you need to wake up?

Don't know a solution for sleeping, hope I did, any suggestions are appreciated so please place your comments in the box below.

I'm working on it...

So yes after getting the macbook pro I've been busy figuring out everything iOS related and I think I can safely say that I'm working in three apps at the moment, for obvious reasons no specifics would be told here, suffice to say that each app will be on any of the following categories:

• Educational Games
• Entertainment
• Collaboration

One of them is targeted at the iPad only and another to the iPhone, obviously the third one will be targeted at both devices but in native versions, even though it is possible to develop universal apps I dislike the idea of not taking full advantage of each device capabilities.

There's another app in the stove but I'll be waiting for the rumored September release of the new ipod touch.

For the ones who were waiting

Yes I did ended up with a macbook pro, as of now I'm updating snow leopard to the latest release, then I'll have to continue with boring migration process, transferring files and software, you know the deal.

Since my old mac did not have a magic mouse or even a magic trackpad I have to say that I still need to get used to multitouch and finger tapping on a macbook, must of the times I use laptop PCs and when using them almost 98% of the times I disable tapping on their trackpads because when I'm typing too fast sometimes the plastic presses the trackpad giving a false illusion of a finger tap.

Didn't bought any neoprene sleeves or hard-cases they were sold out at the apple store I went in the evening, so I think I'll be heading to amazon to retrieve the goodies there, I'm also lacking a mini-displayport to VGA adapter so I'll be looking for one as well.

Finally an Oracle driver for X-VR2

Around november 2009 I wrote about the need of an Oracle driver for X-VR2, this last week I've been working on it, have it almost ready. Unlike what I was thinking last year about using OCI the truth is OCCI was selected instead, so far everything has gone well but for some issues valgrind found in the libraries. Most of the problems found seem to be related usage of unassigned variables and some memory leaks which according to the forums I've watched are something related to the version of libstdc++ I'm using, not sure if it has something to do with it.

For the moment it looks like a success, at least in single threaded programs, tomorrows I'll start testing everything with multithreaded code, wish me luck!

Developing for an iOS device

Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about Cisco stuff, actually I'm referring to Apple stuff, for the moment I've been making my best effort towards having a functional working environment, being making my homework and chewing lots of development information but let's be honest, I've never had an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad ever in my life, I'm a software engineer and a good one, I've developed for Android, Blackberry, Windows, Linux, you name it, embedded, desktop or server side, I've worked with every one of them but for some reason I'm having a hard time to properly conceptualize the apps I'm trying to bring to life. I believe this is because of my lack of experience (as a user) with iOS devices however there is one more thing I need to invest in a mac as well, the system I'm using now is too outdated and I'm afraid it won't last to much.

So the question is this, the mac or the iOS device, for the moment I'm afraid that both things are not affordable to me simultaneously so is the macbook or... an iOS device, so if an iOS one, which one?

In forums people speak about investing in a used mac mini, however I don't wanna invest in something that is already or will be outdated too fast since I don't have a fortune each one of my pennies count therefore I really need to be careful towards my decision don't know yet but I promise to let anyone know.