Douglas Purdy

I am declaring the iPhone application that I am writing “done”.

It has actually been done for about a week, but I have been waiting on licensing/legal issue to clear before I post the application to Apple to see if they will approved it.

I hope to clear that hurdle this weekend or early next week.

I have no idea how long it is going to take for Apple to review and approved it, but I am excited to see how people like it.

I will be perfectly happy if just my friends and family enjoy the application, but who knows, there could be a hit here.

I did learn a couple of things in the “beta” period:

• As far as I can tell, the iPhone has no mechanism to tell you if you can connect to the network (is a 3G or Wifi connection available?).  There are ways to determine if you can connect to a given address if you are already connected to the network.  I mistakingly thought these APIs would “do the right thing”, but I was getting the wrong result when the application was run on an iPhone without push email turned on or just after airplane mode was turned off.  The workaround is simple, see if you can connect to a well-known address and catch the exception.  I would love to learn of a cleaner way to do this, so if you know, please share.
• The Settings.bundle is a wonderful feature to declaratively build a “control” that integrates with the Settings application in a first class way.  I used this feature to create the equivalent of the Calculator Construction Set for SNinja to help me tune the application.