Filmmakers Garage

My new office

Hello all.  As many of you will have heard, I’m not working at Sheridan College anymore.  I left at the start of October.  Support staff at Ontario colleges had been on strike starting at the beginning of September.  While I was out on strike, I decided it was time to move on to something new.

So where am I now?  I am working at a company called The Adpharm.  We are an advertising agency for pharmaceutical clients (hence the ‘ph’ in ‘Adpharm’). The Adpharm is a small company and I am the New Media Developer.  Essentially, this means I am developing iPad apps and I am the company’s go-to guy for technical issues.

Now that I am developing apps full-time, I’ve been able to focus on iOS in a way that was impossible before.  I considered renaming this blog, but I think I’m going to leave it for now.  I still have a passion for filmmaking technology.  And I still have a relationship to the film programs at Sheridan College (I was up there twice this week for events).  There is a good chance I might be teaching a new course as a part-time instructor next September.  That being said, I think it is time that I admitted my inner-coder and started posting some iOS related content here.

So, let’s start with an Xcode 4 tip.  My apologies if it this exists (and please let me know if it does) but I searched high and low for a keyboard shortcut key, or a way to map a keyboard shortcut, to toggle between my project windows and the Organizer in Xcode 4.  I frequently move between my code and the SDK documentation (because my brain doesn’t seem to be able to retain much detailed information) so having to reach for the mouse was driving me nuts.  I finally found a solution by accident.  Now I keep my project windows in one Mission Control space and my Organizer window in an adjacent space.  To toggle between them, I use the default keyboard shortcuts that move between spaces – Ctrl-Right_Arrow and Ctrl-Left_Arrow.  So, with that problem solved, here is an XCode4 question that I’ve not yet found a solution to.  When I have multiple projects open, why does Xcode sometimes randomly pop a different project window to the top when I am switching back to Xcode from another application.  Very annoying, since there don’t seem to be any keyboard shortcuts to move between projects, I am forced to reach for the mouse – anyone know a solution?

Next.  I love Storyboards.  For the kind of apps I have been developing lately they are really convenient to get demos and prototypes up and working rapidly.   There are a few things I don’t like about the current implementation though.  I don’t like that I cannot place additional views within view controllers (that aren’t tied to the controller’s view property).  Before storyboards, I used this frequently.  For one thing, during development, I would often have different versions of a complicated view in the controller.  This way I can quickly swap them in and out as I was testing out an idea.

An update about my apps that are currently available in the iTunes store…  I decided to give away StartingLineup for free a few months ago.  This decision was fuelled mainly by a feeling of guilt about not being able to provide very good tech support for the app.  I figured if it was free people really couldn’t complain too much.  Since then, the app has been flying off the shelf.  It rose up into the top 30 free sports apps in Canada this week (today, it looks like it has dropped down to #44).  I think I was way ahead of the curve when I released this app.  At the time, hardly any hockey coaches had iPads – now this is common.  I’m glad that people are finding the app useful since  I put a lot of hard work into it..

I’ve got another side-project that I have been actively brainstorming this week.  I am getting very excited – I think I have some very cool ideas – now the challenge is to see if they can be achieved within the confines of iOS 5!