Frivolog

AOL Instant Messenger .... What's going on?

josh stephenson — 2010 Jan 22 14:56:01

I tried signing up for an AOL IM using an email address today. It would be my 5th or something ridiculous. I like to keep my life separated like tupperware.

Anyway, when I tried to do so, I got the following error with no explanation (How "Aol" of them:

VoiceBook iPhone App

josh stephenson — 2010 Jan 18 09:45:43

I ripped the facebook audio status functionality out of Murmur today and threw it into it's own application and named it "VoiceBook".

It's here. Download it from iTunes

Murmur iPhone Launching...

josh stephenson — 2009 Dec 06 23:07:48

Any day now...

UPDATE: Here at last! Get it here.

Excerpt from Simon Van Booy's "Love Begins in Winter"

josh stephenson — 2009 Dec 02 01:06:57

This makes me swoon:

“The most important notes in music are the ones that wait until sound has entered the ear before revealing their true nature. They are the spaces between the sounds that blow through the heart, knocking things over.”

Sketches: New York >> Dublin >> London

josh stephenson — 2009 Nov 29 02:41:00

Sartorialist iPhone Now Available!

josh stephenson — 2009 Nov 11 23:37:11

It's finally here!

I recently created an application for the Sartorialist that ports his blog to the iPhone as a slideshow of his beautiful images. You can save them to your photo roll and then set them as wallpaper, or share them via facebook.

Check it out here: iTunes Link

Murmur is coming

josh stephenson — 2009 Oct 27 01:24:45

It's here!

Murmur is finally available in the app store. Thanks go out to Rick Hou for design and Husein Choroomi for backend help.

You can download it here: In the iTunes AppStore

NSOperation and NSURLConnection conflicts

josh stephenson — 2009 Oct 10 19:43:33

The right way to use NSOperation, NSOperationQueue and NSURLConnection

I stumbled across a problem today when trying to make an asynchronous POST request to a server.

I created a request class by subclassing NSOperation and was calling it by adding it to an NSOperationQueue (more here) and within this class's (void)main method, I was creating an NSURLConnection like this:

NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self]

The problem I was experiencing was none of the NSURLConnection delegate callbacks were being fired.

After a little research I realized that when you create an NSURLConnection using the initWithRequest initialization method, you are creating an asynchronous request. Since I was already in one asynchronous request (the NSOperation), I had created another request that got lost, black-hole like.

To fix it, I simply told NSURLConnection to send the request synchronously:

NSError *error = [[NSError alloc] init];
NSURLResponse *response = [[NSURLResponse alloc] init];
NSData *newData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&response error:&error];

After this, everything worked as expected and my operation was still performing everything, including the NSURLConnection asynchronously.

Mocking paperclip with rspec

josh stephenson — 2009 Oct 10 06:22:34

When using the S3 method of storage for paperclip, the last thing you want is to incur extra charges just for running your tests.

If you want to simply mock the storage aspect completely, and I'm not saying you do, but *if* you do, just do this:

@your_model.should_receive(:save_attached_files).and_return(true)

NSXMLParser doesn't fire - (void)parserDidEndDocument:(NSXMLParser *)parser

josh stephenson — 2009 Aug 26 16:09:19

Today I ran into an issue where an NSXMLParser would not fire the parserDidEndDocument delegate method. I was parsing XML stored locally and it turned out to be an issue with a trailing newline at the end of the document.

To fix it, I made sure there was no newline at the end of the final closing XML tag. This seems lame of NSXMLParser or is there a convention I am just not aware of?

Nevertheless, I hope this helps someone.