Installer.app on iPhone 1.1.1, Finally
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After many hours of work with the new jailbreak, I have successfully installed Installer.app on my iPhone. It is awesome to have my apps back.
DO NOT INSTALL SUMMERBOARD!!!! This totally screwed my iPhone up. It put the dock at the top and freaked it out. I tried deleting the plist file that contains the list order and stuff. It completely broke my SpringBoard (the application that shows all of the icons and such on the home screen).
An interesting thing happened after I deleted it though. My background changed to look like the iPod Touch. It had the same dock too. Even the AT&T icon in the bar at the top said iPod. It appears that that is the default configuration for the SpringBoard. Unfortunately, I didn't back that plist up before SummerBoard screwed it up. I had to start the entire process over. Darn.
iPhone Update 1.1.1 and Installer.app
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I, like many others I waited in line on June 29, 2007 for the Apple iPhone. As you all know, I'm a coder. I like like to tinker with stuff and see how it works. I had apps on my phone long before Null River released their installer.app. I was using jailbreak, iphoneinterface, and other random tools from the iphone-dev-team.
After hearing Kevin Rose speak so highly of installer.app, I decided to give it a try. I love installer.app. It makes doing stuff so easy. For someone that isn't that code savvy, it is perfect.
When I saw the iPhone 1.1.1 update today, I got scared. After reading this AppleInsider story, I was even more scared. This is at the top of the EULA of the update:
Internet Explorer is Stupid
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This is retarded. I’m going to complain for a minute here. To be valid XHTML1.1, you need to make your content type application/xhtml+xml. By default the content type is text/html which isn’t valid XHTML1.1. In Internet Explorer, it doesn't know what to do with the application/xhtml+xml content type and asks the user to download it. WHY!? That is so dumb. Why does Microsoft refuse to listen to web standards? I do not understand. There is an easy work around for this, but that is dumb that this has to be done.
While we’re complaining, why doesn’t IE6 not display PNGs when it can? You can hack it to display them (with this clever script). It's so annoying. This is why samsoffes.com will not be supporting IE6. I give up.
Update: I can’t get it to validate now. I need to do some work on that little piece of code.
Sidebar Widgets
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Today I've been messing with my sidebar a little more. I really like the new Digg Widgets, but I was having trouble styling them the way I wanted.
Solution: write my own. I figured why not. I've been messing with PHP5's xml classes and thought it would be fun. (Notice http://samsoffes.com/rss written entirely in PHP5's SimpleXML class.) After struggling to open an external file with file_get_contents(), I resorted to using cURL...
It works well. I had some problems grabbing the digg count and had to use xpath(). The xpath() method of the SimpleXML class always returns an array. This is very annoying when you would expect it not to return an array if you only get one result.
The OO Page
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I love objects. Programming in Cocoa has really made me understand the power of OO (object oriented) programming. I‘ll take a minute to explain objects and MVC for a minute. (If you are familiar with objects, move to the next paragraph.) An object is a variable that has multiple variables and functions (called methods when inside an object) inside it and is an instance of a class. A class is some code that tell the object what it can do. One very popular approach to using objects (or just programming in general) is the MVC method (model, view, controller). Each of the elements of a MVC are usually objects too.
In my simple web site, I use CodeIgniter, which is an open-source PHP framework that makes OO PHP easier and quicker, to run things. I have created several libraries (or classes) to take more work from me and moving it to my libraries. The ones I use the most are Page, Sidebar, and Widget. For the first time in PHP, I have used multiple instances of the same class on the same page. In CodeIgniter, this isn't done that often because you rarely have to, but I decided it would be fun, so I am.
My Page object is my page. It creates my <head> tag, page template, and assembles the rest of my views. One of it‘s views is the sidebar of course. The sidebar is also an object that contains an array (think of it as a list if you don‘ know what it is) of widgets which are also objects. After adding all of my widgets to my sidebar, the page objects asks for the final HTML version of it when it‘s ready to display the page. Inside each sidebar widget, there are several methods for manipulating how it looks and acts too.