I would like to see a lot more iPhone apps that entertain, encourage, and educate from a confessional perspective. To that end, I would like to encourage anyone who’s interested to start developing some apps and I’d be willing to help to the best of my abilities. One book I can recommend on the subject that I just finished reading is Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. It’s not an iPhone programming book, it’s about how to design the look and feel of and interaction with an iPhone app. It’s the first technical book I’ve read from cover-to-cover in a while.

I read an article on the state of testing in Cocoa. The author, Alex Vollmer, paints a pretty dismal picture of BDD in Cocoa community and I’d have to agree with him. In my decision to use Ruby over Python for my web apps, I mentioned that BDD (Cucumber and RSpec) and the Ruby testing culture was a major reason I went with Ruby. I would really love to see that aspect come over to the Cocoa community. Alex believes that snobbery and elitism are dominant attitudes that prevent the community from adopting testing practices from other environments. I haven’t dealt with the Cocoa community at large, so I can’t comment on the snobbery and elitism, but I do know that XCode and the various Cocoa frameworks didn’t grow up in a BDD world and the fact that the community didn’t grow up with BDD, like Ruby and Rails, makes it a lot harder to inject.

I know there’s been some work to use Cucumber with the Simulator, but that requires you to drop out of Xcode. I’ve gone down this path before, I don’t want to switch between editors and shells for my development environment. I want to see Cucumber and RSpec equivalents that can be run from within XCode. For me, it was running those two in combination while going through The RSpec Book that was my aha moment for BDD and I think it would be the same for the entire Cocoa community.

While tracking down a memory leak in my latest app, which looks to be a known problem with the simulator, I ran into someone suggestion to run the “Build and Analyze” (B&A) command from the Build menu in Xcode. Being an Xcode novice, I had never tried this before. Well, I would just like to thank Apple for including this feature because it helped me to fix an intermittent crashing problem, better understand Objective-C reference counting, clean up my code, and just have a better sense of satisfaction about my code.

Coming from the Java world, B&A seems to be a lot like Coverity which can do static analysis on your code except B&A is a lot faster. I’m not sure how often I’ll run B&A, but it seems like a good idea to clean the project and run B&A after every feature and/or major code restructuring. If you’re not already using B&A regularly I highly recommend you do so.

If your a tech person, you probably have and buy lots of books. Since getting the iPad, I’ve been buying more eBooks if they are priced reasonably. Reasonably to me means they are less expensive than their paper counterparts as I can sell the paper version if it isn’t up to snuff or I no longer need it. I subscribe to O’Reilly’s eBook of the day feed to get a daily $9.99 special.  These are typically good books, but not in an area in which I’m interested (Windows, Apache, Mathematica, etc). But today’s deal is $9.99 for any eBook. I had a little trouble finding a title that I really wanted, but decided on Version Control with Git. So if you’re into eBooks or want to try one out at a reasonable price, head on over to O’Reilly’s website.

I saw that Google annouced Google TV. The idea of searching my recorded shows and other sources to find programs to watch is kind of interesting except I have enough trouble keeping track of the 2 remotes and now I have to keep a keyboard laying around to watch TV? The final pitch was an integrated full browser where you could check the web and update your status. So this was the kiss of death in my mind. TV is a common experience and the web is an individual one. If I try to update my status on the TV while my wife is watching American Idol I’m a deadman. That’s how TV works at our house. We have one TV and we watch it as a family.

But I’m starting to wonder if we are an outlier. I mean I’ve heard of people that have no TV’s and they certainly are unusual, but could the 1 TV family be almost as rare? If the TV is a personal device, then Google TV has a shot. If TV is still a shared experience, then it’ll suffer the same fate as WebTV and similar attempts at combining the TV and the Internet.

My second iPhone app is available on the App Store. “Triglotta – The Book of Concord” is a version of The Book of Concord that is designed for the iPhone and is also optimized to work with the iPad. The idea was suggested by Frank Gillespie on Twitter and I picked it up and built the app. There were a couple of delays due to naming issues and iPad approval delays but if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad (as of tomorrow) go download it, it’s free!

I just got an email announcing “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks” from the Pragmatic Programmers. This is exactly the kind of book that calls to me. Man, it would be so cool to learn 7 languages at a more than superficial level. My problem is that I have ideas for 7 projects that would actually be more productive than learning 7 languages. I might buy the book and not read it or buy it and read part of it before realizing I should be working on finishing one of my projects or buy it read all of it and go back to the projects I should have been working on… See that’s why I hate these kind of books, I want them and I can justify them, but I don’t know if they are really valuable for me.

On a secondary note, this book highlights a new problem for me now that I will soon have an iPad. The electronic version of the book is $22 and the print version at Amazon is $23. I want the electronic version for its convenience, but this is also the type of book which I would likely sell and that just can’t be done with an electronic version. If the electronic version were around $15, it’d be easy. At nearly identical price points it’s a tough call.

What follows are the download statistics for the first full week that “Cwirla” was available. I have no idea what they mean. I’m just surprised that France and China were 2nd and 3rd in downloads.

I received approval last Friday evening for my first two iPhone Applications (they work on the iPod Touch and should work on the iPad when it is released). The inspiration for the Apps came from Pastor Todd Wilken when, after discussing the video I made “There’s a Pastor for That“, wished for a “Cwirla App” for his iPod Touch. Well, I couldn’t resist the inspiration and put together the Cwirla app which is available in two versions. The free version is a collection of wisdom from Pastor Cwirla excerpted from episodes of The God Whisperers. The $0.99 “blue” version includes the same excerpts, plus it includes the story about Pastor Cwirla’s confirmation class which includes some “home schooler alert” language. It also includes some risque quotes if you “shake” Pastor Cwirla. All proceeds will go to the God Whisperers coffers.

My urge to try a new kind of development got to me again and I’ve jumped on the iPhone development bandwagon. The nice thing about iPhone development is that the definition of a proper application is a lot more basic than a web or desktop application. I started my dive into iPhone development last week with Beginning iPhone 3 Development. I put together my first app and submitted it for app store approval yesterday. I’ll put together a proper announcement after it has been approved and I’ll also do a series on the development and submission process.