blog.sallarp.com

This time it’s actually there! Lots of confusion about a week ago when Spotify announced that it was available for iPhone when it in fact was just accepted by Apple. Early this morning it appeared on AppStore! Here’s a video showing off the application.

And here’s the proof that that the app really exist. Taken on my iPhone.

After a quick run through of the app I must say it’s really awesome! Offline mode is great and it’s quite fast to download the songs. You can even listen to other music, create new playlists etc as the tracks are downloaded for offline use! The only thing I lack is the top-lists features from the PC/Mac client, hopefully they will add that later.

For those who wonder what Spotify is, their site is here: www.spotify.com. To use the iPhone app you must be a paying customer (have a premium account), which I find totally reasonable, it’s just 99 SEK / month (approx. 12-13 USD).

Svensk Fastighetsförmedling continue their strive together with Avantime to be not only the best on the web but also being the first to utilize new cool technology to attract customers and market real estate for their clients. Svenkfast.se has won the web service awards two years in a row, Svenskfast was the first real estate company in Sweden, and among the first in the world, to market their houses on the iPhone. This time they are the first real estate company in the world to join Philips‘ new NET TV initiate. Owners of a NET TV enabled Philips TV can now find their dream house, apartment or vacation house sitting comfortably in their sofa!

NET TV brings the best of web to your TV through an easy to use portal without needing a HTPC or other set-top boxes. Svenskfast, YouTube and SL are among the first applications available on the Swedish portal and part of Philips marketing of this new ground breaking feature. I’m very proud of our initial application which was designed by one of our newer Avantime Group family members, Mattias Olsson, at Dreamsville. Here’s what the application looks like on the TV (filmed at Avantime), unfortunately it’s not easy to film a TV screen.

So what is NET-TV, how does it work? Read on to find out »

iPhone apps come in all shapes and form. Some are really basic and doesn’t fill any other purpose than showing how much of a geek you are, others are just for laughs or passing time, some are really useful and practical. Personally I’m not much of geek app fan although you will find the Lightsaber app on my iPhone. Useful apps tend to have one thing in common: they depend on internet connections and communicate with a central server/back end. There are a few useful apps that don’t fall into this category, an example is the excellent FastContacts. From comments on this blog, emails and forums I get the impression that there are quite a few who struggle with their internet enabled apps. I want to share some ideas, tips and techniques that can simplify and improve your app. Keep reading, there’s more »

Get list items by lookup id, not value:

<Eq>
    <FieldRef Name="Category" LookupId="TRUE" />
    <Value Type="Integer">10</Value>
</Eq>

Notice that LookupId=”TRUE” is added to the FieldRef and that the value type is Integer, not Lookup.

Get list items that are assigned to the current user ([Me]).

<Eq>
    <FieldRef Name="AssignedTo" />
    <Value Type="Integer"><UserID Type="Integer"/></Value>
</Eq>

The UserID element in CAML is the same as [Me] in a list filter.

It’s a shame Apple hasn’t added HTTP proxy support in the Safari app! I just spent an hour or so investigating compression addons and ad-blockers for squid thinking it would greatly improve the browsing speed on my iPhone. I found most of what I was looking for too, using Squid 3.1 there are addons for gzip compression and ad-blocking. However, I couldn’t find an addon that will re-compress images into lower quality but maybe that can be done with ImageMagick somehow?

Then it hit me: the damn phone only support http proxies over WLAN, and that’s not really when I would want to use it! Now I wonder if Apple has intentionally ignored proxy support in the Safari app to please the service providers? A smart http proxy could reduce the transferred text for each page view from a non compressing site by somewhere around 70-80%, removing ads will also reduce a larg amount of data, effectively reducing the end users data transfer fees and at the same time speed up page loads. If images were removed altogether we’re talking huge data savings but that comes with a major experience reduction.

But is there really no way we can manipulate what’s being downloaded over sometimes expensive 3G networks? YES there is! The iPhone does support VPN over 3G, and what can be enabled for a VPN connection? A proxy of course! Setting all this up is a bit of a hastle but we already have a VPN at work so I installed Squid on my “server” (the mac mini PPC in my closet that previously hosted this blog) and it worked very well over the VPN. Unfortunately the gzip compression addon doesn’t work for some reason but the ad-block works like a charm.

If you don’t have a VPN server there are a few available for Linux: OpenVPN, FreeS/WAN, Poptop.

Now if there was only an image re-compression plug-in for Squid, that would be awesome!

iPhone OS 3.0 is out this week and while the new iPhone 3GS was pretty disappointing hardware wise, the new iPhone OS is really packed with new cool frameworks and APIs. I’m working on a lot of projects back and fourth depending on what I feel like working with at the moment. After we released the first app, Hitta Hem, I wrote a bunch of articles based on that work and got kind of tired of iPhone development. I’ve started working again on some new things around iPhone OS 3.0 features and I thought I’d share some Core Data stuff.

What is Core Data?

Core Data is new in iPhone OS 3.0, but has been around for OS X application developers for quite some time. Since I’m NOT an OS X application developer this framework was totally new to me and it’s a great addition to the iPhone SDK. So what exactly is the Core Data framework? If you are familiar with the entity framework in .NET, it’s something similar. Core Data is an abstraction layer on top of a sqlite database which enables developers to more easily implement data-centric applications. Personally I never got around to do much with sqlite but I touched it enough to appreciate what Core Data brings to the table. My main issues with sqlite are poor tooling support and a limited range of documentation and samples. I’m used to working with Microsoft products and even though I’m aware that MS has the best tooling support in the world, the tooling provided for sqlite sucks! Keep reading and download the code

EPiServer released EPiServer CMS 5 about 2 years ago but I was still surprised today when I noticed that it’s impossible to install EPiServer 4.x using the normal online installation with the installation manager provided by EPiServer.

Avantime has been working with EPiServer for over 6 years and some clients has been with us since then. Many clients has already upgraded their existing sites to CMS 5 but there are still quite a few on 4.x.

Today I helped my new colleague Erland setting up a new virtual machine for a customer on 4.61. When we got around to install EPiServer the provided manager from world.episerver.com for 4.61 first told us we should upgrade the installation manager. We ignored that but when we selected 4.61 and install the manager told us:

Selected version of EPiServer requires an updated EPiServer installer.

» Read on for the solution to this problem

This post has absolutely nothing to do with .NET, iPhones or programming in general, I apologize. However, I am a huge fan of the UFC and so is my girl friend Anna (fortunately). We enjoyed the UFC 99 show today on big screen in our living room and both reacted when Logan Stanton, one of the ring girls, was stepping down after the first round between Mike “Quick” Swick and Ben “Killa B” Saunders. Miss Stanton has a real freaky finger!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not posting this to be mean. Logan actually looks human (compared to some other ring girls). It’s just an observation.

The show itself (UFC 99) wasn’t too exciting, but then, UFC 100 is just around the corner! Go Lesnar and GSP!