Sam Soffes

I'm moving to Dallas. For real. I know I've said I'm moving here and there over the past few months, but I already have a place to live and such in Dallas so it's official this time.

I started working for Tasteful Works a few weeks ago. Tasteful Works develops iPhone, Android, Rails, and Mac apps (I only work on iPhone, Mac, and Rails there). It's good times. I am running all of my freelance through there now, so if you want to hire me, contact Tasteful Works. It's all the same rates as when I was doing it on my own just faster because we have more people.

I'm moving to Dallas because that is where all of the Tasteful Works guys are. I'm pretty excited about it, but sad about leaving all of my friends, my band, and my house.

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I spoke at the Awesome Inc. Mobile miniConference in Lexington, KY over the weekend with Jake Behrens. About 100 people showed up for the event. I think its awesome that that many people have an interest in iPhone development in Lexington, KY. I did three sessions. My my two technical ones ("Scrolling Like Butter" and "Web Services with Cocoa") didn't have too many attenders, but "How I Made an App that Has Over a Million Users" seemed to be a hit.

This session was a non-technical overview of how to make a successful app. Download slides PDF.

This session was a technical discussion of how to make table views scroll well. See Atebit's blog post for sample code and further reading. Download slides PDF.

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So today I was wondering how to get the user's time zone on the iPhone. So I googled it up. I found a forum thread that said look at NSTimeZone. Easy enough.

All I had to do was [NSTimeZone localTimeZone]. Awesome. I love Cocoa.

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Update: This no longer works on 3.1.

Update: There are simpler instructions at http://9to5mac.com/iPhone-3G-tethering. I have heard rumors that this no longer works with iTunes 8.2. I personally haven't tried it in awhile.

So with iPhone 3.0 you can tether you computer to your iPhone, but not yet for some carriers. It's pretty dang sweet and works really well so let's do it early. It's actually pretty easy to get setup. I would write an app to automate it, but I'm sure Apple will release an update and break all of this soon, so follow my steps to get going.

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This week I have a talk at the first Oklahoma City CocoaHeads meeting. I was going to talk about transferring data from web services with plists. I spend most of the day working on SSConnection, my simple Foundation class for easily transferring plist data from a web service to a Cocoa application.

I was so into plists because at the Austin iPhone Tech talk I attended, they encouraged you to transfer data in plists because it had native parsing. I have to admit the native parsing is quite awesome. One method and everything is all parsed and ready.

I was using JSON (javascript object notation) to transfer everything with the JSON Framework. I had started switching everything to use plists. I spend a ton of time writing a PHP class to convert arrays to and from plist strings.

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