As usual, there isn’t much on the web about this, but I eventually tracked down a couple of useful articles to get me started:

• keremk’s iphone-static-library-project-template
• Building static libraries with the iPhone SDK

The first article shows you how to add your own custom project type template to XCode so you can easily create shared iPhone libraries. The second one shows you how to reference your new library from your application. With a little trial-and-error I now have a nice shared lib of iPhone classes. Pretty soon, who knows, maybe Apple will allow dynamic linking and we can move iPhone development into the 80s!

<Error>: CGBitmapContextCreate: unsupported parameter combination:
8 integer bits/component; 16 bits/pixel; 1-component colorspace;
kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast; 1472 bytes/row.

So the combination of parameters was incorrect. But which one was at fault? Thankfully, I found a helpful post on the web that led me to this article:

CGBitmapContextCreate Supported Color Spaces

Very handy. Wish that this table were actually included in the documentation for the CGBitmapContextCreate method. Imagine how useful that would be! So, for your convenience, here is a function to create a grayscale copy of a UIImage:

UIImage *createGrayCopy(UIImage *source)
{
	int width = source.size.width;
	int height = source.size.height;

	CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceGray();

	CGContextRef context = CGBitmapContextCreate (nil,
						 width,
						 height,
						 8,      // bits per component
						 0,
						 colorSpace,
						 kCGImageAlphaNone);

	CGColorSpaceRelease(colorSpace);

	if (context == NULL) {
		return nil;
	}

	CGContextDrawImage(context,
		CGRectMake(0, 0, width, height), source.CGImage);

	UIImage *grayImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:CGBitmapContextCreateImage(context)];
	CGContextRelease(context);

	return grayImage;
}

Never one to pass up a challenge, I told him to come on down. I was careful to set his expectations as low as possible, because one day really isn’t enough time to do a meaningful application. All I could promise was that at the end we would have something to submit to the iTunes App Store, and he was OK with that.

So at approximately 3:00 PM on Monday (Memorial Day), JD pulled up to my house in Columbia, SC. The trip took him 5 hours, instead of the 3 that he had originally thought. After a brief meet & greet (plus various social networking connections, which I guess are the modern equivalent of calling cards), we sat down to do a quick mockup of his site.

We used a new tool that I really, really like: Balsamique Markups. It’s a very nice WYSIWYG tool for laying out web pages, applications, and iPhone apps. For OCD perfectionists (which many developers are), I find the cartoony graphics strangely freeing. It really lets me lay out the gist of something without getting sucked into the minutiae of a full design.

We agreed on a basic application that would:

• display his blog in a browser control
• let the user forward a link to a friend
• take the user to a newsletter signup
• take the user to feedburner

The one rule of iPhone development is that the things you think will be simple will be hard, and the things you think will be hard will be easy. We had a browser window up and running with his blog in it within 30 minutes. But producing a decent-looking home button image took almost an hour.

Possibly the most interesting part of the project was having someone I’d never met come and crash at my house while developing an application. My mother (who lives with me) was a little leery of the idea at first. “What if he’s an axe murderer?”

After JD and I had been working for a while and I mentioned this to him, he assured her that he was not an axe murderer, which I’m not sure had the desired effect. I put it to her like this “It’s like we’re running a bed & breakfast, with iPhone development on the side.” Hmmmm….

In any case, working with JD was a real pleasure, and we had some interesting conversations over cigars at the end of the day. Now, let’s all keep our fingers crossed that Apple will be kind and merciful and approve the app!

This proc is designed for when you have a dynamic set of row-oriented data you want to pivot and show column-wise. It takes four parameters:

@tableName – Name of the source table (or view) that will be queried by the new crosstab view.
@excludeCols – A comma separated list of columns to exclude from the crosstab. In most cases, will be the ID column of the table.
@valueColName – Name of the column in the @tableName table that contains the value in a given row.
@targetViewName – Name of the view that the stored procedure will create. It will *automatically* drop this column before re-creating it, so be warned.

This proc also assumes that the @tableName table (or view) has a column called [colName]. It uses this value to create the corresponding columns across the top of the output view.

Good luck!

ALTER PROCEDURE BuildCrosstabView(
@tableName VARCHAR(100),
@excludeCols VARCHAR(1000),
@valueColName VARCHAR(1000),
@targetViewName VARCHAR(100)
)
AS
BEGIN
-- SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from
-- interfering with SELECT statements.
SET NOCOUNT ON;

DECLARE @sql VARCHAR(3000)
SET @sql = 'SELECT DISTINCT ' + @excludeCols + ', ' + @cols + ' FROM ' + @tableName + ' GROUP BY ' + @excludeCols
PRINT @sql
EXECUTE (@sql)
IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.views WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[' + @targetViewName + ']'))
EXECUTE ('DROP VIEW ' + @targetViewName)
EXECUTE ('CREATE VIEW ' + @targetViewName + ' AS ' + @sql)
END
GO

So I decided, like any good programmer, to roll my own solution. I created a tool for bulk uploading SQL over the Internet that I call mysqlxfer. Not wanting to hoard it, I submitted it to SourceForge.net as an open source project. If you need to upload a bunch of data over an unreliable and slow connection, give it a shot. It does a couple of cool things, like automatically detecting your field separator character and logging the failed inserts in SQL format to a .err file. Check it out!

http://smeans.com/truveo

It’s basically a video search tool that takes the results of one search, finds “interesting” words in the descriptions of the matching videos and searches some more. Check it out!

As part of this process I’ve had to populate a bunch of tables with application-specific values. After wrestling with the crappy CSV import function that GoDaddy gave me I decided to write my own little tool to generate SQL INSERT statements for the data in my tables. Since WordPress won’t let me upload it, here’s the code:

/*
 * Created by SharpDevelop.
 * User: smeans
 * Date: 5/6/2008
 * Time: 11:58 AM
 *
 * To change this template use Tools | Options | Coding | Edit Standard Headers.
 */
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.IO;

namespace sql2insert
{
  class sql2insert
  {
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      foreach (string dsn in args) {
        Console.WriteLine("writing files to " + System.Environment.CurrentDirectory);

        using (SqlConnection cn = new SqlConnection(args[0])) {
          cn.Open();

          DataTable dt = cn.GetSchema("Tables");

          foreach (DataRow row in dt.Rows) {
            for (int i = 0; i < dt.Columns.Count; i++) {
              if (((string)row[3]).Equals("BASE TABLE")) {
                dumpTable(cn, (string)row[2]);
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }

   static void dumpTable(SqlConnection cn, string tableName) {
     SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(String.Format("SELECT * FROM [{0}]", tableName), cn);

     SqlDataReader sdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();

     if (sdr.HasRows) {
       Console.WriteLine("writing data for table " + tableName);

       using (TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(String.Format("{0}.sql", tableName))) {
         tw.WriteLine(String.Format("SET IDENTITY_INSERT [{0}] ON", tableName));
         tw.WriteLine("GO\\r\\n");

         StringBuilder sbCols = new StringBuilder();

         for (int i = 0; i < sdr.FieldCount; i++) {
          switch (sdr.GetFieldType(i).ToString()) {
             case "System.Byte[]": {
             } break;
             default: {
              if (sbCols.Length > 0) {
                sbCols.Append(", ");
              }

              sbCols.Append(String.Format("[{0}]", sdr.GetName(i)));
             } break;
          }
         }

         tw.WriteLine();

         while (sdr.Read()) {
           tw.Write(String.Format("INSERT INTO [{0}] ({1}) VALUES (", tableName, sbCols.ToString()));

           for (int i = 0; i < sdr.FieldCount; i++) {
            if (sdr.IsDBNull(i)) {
               if (i > 0) {
                tw.Write(',');
               }

               tw.Write("null");
            } else {
             switch (sdr.GetFieldType(i).ToString()) {
             case "System.Int32": {
               if (i > 0) {
                tw.Write(',');
               }

               tw.Write(sdr[i].ToString());
             } break;

             case "System.Decimal": {
               if (i > 0) {
                tw.Write(',');
               }

               tw.Write(sdr[i].ToString());
             } break;

             case "System.Byte[]": {
             } break;

             case "System.DateTime": {
               if (i > 0) {
                tw.Write(',');
               }

               tw.Write(String.Format("'{0}'", ((DateTime)sdr[i]).ToString("M/d/yyyy h:m:s tt")));
             } break;

             default: {
               if (i > 0) {
                tw.Write(',');
               }

              tw.Write(String.Format("'{0}'", sdr[i].ToString().Replace("\\'", "\\'\\'")));
             } break;
             }
           }
           }

           tw.WriteLine(")\\r\\nGO");
         }

         tw.WriteLine(String.Format("SET IDENTITY_INSERT [{0}] OFF", tableName));
         tw.WriteLine("GO\\r\\n");

         tw.Close();
       }
     }

     sdr.Close();
   }
}
}