http://www.meetbarb.com/2009/10/guest-blogger-scott-means.html

You can also visit the Coolibah blog for the latest updates. We’re also on Twitter (@coolibahme).

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!

After googling around a little, I found out about the Login Window menu item (accessed through your user name in the menu bar), which is nice. But I was poking around with System Preferences (under the apple menu) yesterday and I came across the Exposé feature. It lets you assign actions (like run the screensaver) to “hot corners” of your display. Now, all I have to do is drag my mouse to the lower-right corner of my screen and the screensaver pops up. Almost as good as the old hotkey!

1) Buy a Starbucks gift card. The minimum amount is $5, so guess how much I paid.
2) Fire up your laptop and look for a link on the free WiFi greeting page about “Complimentary Wifi”.
3) You’ll need to create a free Starbucks.com account using the new gift card # and the secret PIN (which you have to scratch-off).
4) Enjoy the yummy free WiFi!

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

Yesterday at lunch, New Mike and I were watching O.J. get sentenced and it occurred to us that it would be great if there were a news site that turned everyone with an iPhone into a reporter. We would be seeing news as it actually happened, with millions of eyes out there to catch it on camera. After spending three or four hours going through various names, BlinkStory

I found a troubleshooting guide on Dave’s site, and even though I initially mis-diagnosed the problem as a bad heating element, Dave’s prompt email diagnosis got me back on track. One $20 part later and I’m back in business. Thanks Dave!

Without a pending election, who is going to buy hundreds of those little wire-frame signs? Will there be enough cheap mortgages and weight loss schemes to make up the deficit? I think not.