2 star review for NextBuses for not working on iOS5

1 star review for Agant's UK Train Times not working in iOS5

I’m not out to demonise individuals, which is why I have blanked out the user names. However, I do want to highlight why leaving reviews like this is utterly misguided and what it means to install beta releases of iOS.

Firstly. The review system is not for leaving bug or support related questions, for example, ‘How do I add a favourite?’ or ‘Your app just crashes’. Users are much better off emailing the developer in question so they can help resolve the problem. By all means if they don’t respond, tell people in reviews. All too often I see support issues in the review system. Developers have no way whatsoever to respond to these, both sides loose out when support problems end up as 1 star reviews. Dev’s get a bad rep & have no idea how to reproduce the problem and the user still has no way to resolve the issue.

Secondly. I can understand users are very eager to get their hands on the latest & greatest iOS shown off at WWDC. So they sign up for developer accounts for £59…with a few clicks, an alternative restore through iTunes, voilà, latest iOS is installed on your shinny iPhone. Problem is, this is beta software and there’s a very good reason it’s called beta software. It’s not finished.

Downloading & installing beta versions of iOS is akin to moving into a near-new house with missing windows, no carpet & some furnishing. In other words, it’s a building site. If you don’t understand this distinction, then you have no business installing it. You may not even be able to roll back to a prior iOS because of the firmware (software written directly to internal chip-sets) updates that will occur. You could brick your phone.

Right now…iOS5 eats battery life, transition animations need optimisation and many applications (including Apple ones) will crash. Through no fault of the developer, some third party apps will not work at all, we are not clairvoyant. There is no point in dev’s releasing fixes for these issues yet because this is just beta 1, there could be 6 or more beta rounds to go. All the while these problems will be ironed out (by Apple, dev’s or both), altered or maybe even others introduced. The end goal of this process is to release a stable iOS, along with working & performant applications that we are all happy with.

Update: Gary from A4cwsn does a through & impartial review of Red The Robot (video)

I very rarely accept joint venture proposals; but sometimes the people you meet, the idea & content is just so compelling, it far outweighs the mine field of JV’s.

Red helps out with some programming.

Red The Robot® from IGS is a character that motivates and encourages children (3+) on every level to get involved with phonics, sounds & reading through simple cards & stories. It’s a reasonably straight forward application focused squarely on the task at hand; having fun & learning. Definitely a case of less is more.

The app plays sounds and asks questions, “Can you find a picture that fits this sound” (Fire engine sound plays) is just one of the many examples & learning aspects in the product. It lends itself particularly well to the iPad.

This is just the beginning for Red The Robot on iOS, more cards, stories, apps & updates are planned.

You didn't heed the deprecation warning correctly did you?

My recent update of Tube Status unleashed some savage reviews & angry users and I was at a loss to explain why it had all gone horribly wrong for some but not others. Turns out I’d been tripped up by the simple deprecation of static property in the iAds framework…I am now in deprecation purgatory whilst the fixed version is in approval again (update: Apple turned the approval around in less than 24 hours, very impressive!).

iAds was introduced in iOS4 and later updated in iOS4.2, probably for iPad. The property

ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier320x50

was introduced in iOS4 then quickly deprecated in 4.2, being replaced by

ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait

All very pedestrian and makes perfect sense. I had decided that Tube Status would move to iOS4 for a number of reasons, but because I am not completely evil I also decided the minimum iOS version you could run Tube Status 3.0 on would be iOS4.0. I set the Base SDK = iOS4.2 and the iOS Deployment Target = 4.0.

At some point during development, playing around with the deployment target I discovered ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier320x50 was now a deprecated property.

No worries, quick read of the docs confirmed this and in my case the property to use now is ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait, find, replace move on to something more interesting. Spot the problem? For users on iOS4.0 & 4.1 I have just introduced a property for them that literally doesn’t exist in the iAds framework they have installed, result is an ugly crash. I must be stupid yes? Maybe, but stupidity aside one is not warned of this potential problem in Xcode, remember my build settings:

Base SDK = iOS4.2

iOS Deployment Target = 4.0

iOS4 & 4.1 users were angry

And I have used ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait (a version 4.2 property). As far as Xcode is concerned it doesn’t seem to evaluate starting properties against your minimum deployment target (irrespective of whether the framework is weak linked or not). No warning is given.

The moral of the story is that had I tested on any 4.0 or 4.1 device I would have discovered the problem well before shipping. 20 other people also tested before release and it flew through Apples approval process as well. Which goes to show how easy something like this can slip through and why testing on the minimum & latest deployment target is a must.

1. On the device
2. In iTunes

ON THE DEVICE

Go to “Settings > General > About > Version“. This is the main “Settings” (grey icon with cogs) app on your home screen.

IN ITUNES
Plug the device into iTunes. Select it and from the “Summary” screen you will see the current ‘Software Version’ installed. Click ‘Check for Update‘ to upgrade your device to the next available software version (iOS).

Tube Status now includes the latest real-time departure boards that TfL recently made available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. In fact all of my other apps showing departure boards (Tube Deluxe & Tube Boards) have been moved across to this web service, they have been happily hammering the service with 100′s of thousands of requests a day. More departures are also available, I now show departures into the next 30 minutes for tube stations.

Some screenshots…

Although the TrackerNet feed came online about 6 months ago and had to be promptly shut down due to load. These problems have been well & truly solved now; Microsoft have dropped in an industrial strength cache in front of the operational systems and you can now easily access all this data for free.

I am told this is just the beginning. The system is modular, TfL plan to bring a full blown Journey Planning API online next year as well. Who know’s maybe iBus will follow on from this too? But no firm announcements on that yet.

This is ground breaking for open data & public transport in the UK & very forward thinking of TfL. Now that the data will be easy to access, we can expect to see some creative & useful applications across many devices & the web.

I think there’s a lot the dev community can contribute back too, for example interesting data sets & other services.

(P.S You need to to sign up as a developer to get access to the feeds)

There have been a number of UI enhancements. Namely the ability to toggle the main screen on the iPhone between full map, split & list views of your nearest stops. Price of the App will remain the same at 59p and the update is free for all existing users. Here’s some screen shots…

It has been quite a journey, I am not quite there yet, but I am close. Maybe some of this will be of use to you in your own quest to an astral plain of digital enlightenment & I am keen to hear others suggestions, tips & tricks. Before we begin, here’s an overview of the network & hardware.

I wanted an easy to use and as much as possible unobtrusive configuration. Sadly no racks or network housing cabinet in the basement, I have no basement. A key component is storage; regardless of what ever you do, you’re going to need lots of storage.

STORAGE
I had a plethora of external drives, USB, Firewire and even a TimeCapsule (Airport Extreme) in the mix. It was a nightmare. Never enough room on one, never the files on the drive I need at the time because it’s hooked to something else & not currently shared. Besides all the other problems with my TimeCapsule (they over heat & die, I am on to my second) it was so damn slow. I bit the bullet and went for Network Accessible Storage (NAS). Why didn’t I do this years ago! That was my first reaction after dropping in a QNAP TS-459 Pro with nearly 5.5TB usable. It’s brilliant. I can also testify the RAID 5 works, after one week a drive failed and it all kept on running whilst I feverishly rushed out to get a replacement. I now have a standby hot swap.

Why QNAP? I considered Drobo and I know others are very happy with theirs. But the problem I had with the Drobo units is that it uses a software based JBOD solution, it’s slow to rebuild & access. QNAP can also do JBOD, and with this configuration you can lose 2 drives at the time; the trade off being less usable storage.  I have decided on RAID 5 configuration, very common. QNAP uses a hardware based RAID controller and that makes all the difference.

I didn’t find the ability to mix & match various drive capacities in Drobo that much of a benefit for me. However if you have odds & ends drives lying around a Drobo solution is probably cheaper than a comparative QNAP one. I can’t comment on the web management of Drobo, but the QNAP one is outstanding! Far too much to list here, IMHO QNAP even undersell this on their own website. Everything from iTunes music sharing to TimeCapsule backup, email/sms alerts, one touch copy USB drives and a complete file manager to move stuff around on the device in seconds. I went for 5400rpm Samsung green drives, quieter and less heat.

With the storage problem solved, another problem became quickly evident…

NETWORK
A 10/100 network switch just doesn’t cut it when you adopt a NAS into your life. I was getting 8MB maybe 10MB a second transfer rates, but with many devices potentially hitting the NAS (TimeCapsule backups really hammer the network) and shifting 7-8GB files at a time whilst also trying to play something, this becomes tedious. With a Netgear GS116 16-Port gigabit Unmanaged Switch running the wired network I get 18MB a sec and can move 1GB a minute.

It just didn’t make sense to strangle the network when nearly all my Ethernet devices are gigabit capbable. A key part of this solution is that everything is stored on the NAS.

WIRELESS
If had a quid for every cheap ADSL router I have been through in my life, I’d have…maybe £12 :-] I have been through Netgear, Linksys, ISP supplied to insert something here you’ve never heard of. You get what you pay for, devices with minimal on-board specifications that over heat, persistantly drop connections, limited configurations (some ISP’s won’t even support something they haven’t supplied) and are far slower than they should be.

I got the Draytek Vigor 2820VN over 9 months ago and never looked back. Probably an overkill to be honest, there are cheaper Draytek models with the same guts (hardware) that would have been a more economical & workable option. Out of the box, the Draytek is straight forward to setup, all the defaults are common ISP configurations, but that said it’s not a unit for the non-technical. The engineers at Draytek give you all the options that the unit is capable of in the web interface…wireless network segregation, Dual WAN (1 DSL, 1 Ethernet), VPN, VoIP, NAT, X509 certificate & bandwidth management. It also has a gigabit port so this is a perfect uplink for the network switch.

Before I got the Draytek, wireless signal would never quite reach the other end of the apartment, on the laptops it’s now usable, but not quite on the iOS devices.

I have found a really easy way to extend the wireless network is to use Ethernet Over Power with an Airport Express attached to the other end in the bedroom. If you have an Airport Extreme you can seamlessly extend its wireless network (same name) to the Airport. However, because I have dropped the Airport Extreme I now have 2 separate wireless networks. Most of the time devices naturally switch, sometimes I need to change manually, but the whole house is covered with max signal.

Based on Andy’s suggestions I have now named both wireless points with the same SSID & password. Devices now switch to the strongest signal at the time.

MAC MINI
At the hub of the system is the HDMI Mac mini, always on & ready to serve up whatever is requested by the AppleTV & iOS devices. Although one could argue the NAS is the real star the show. Having had the previous mini, I wondered if getting the latest version was really a worthwhile upgrade. Totally is, very snappy & I wouldn’t give it up for anything else. I use JollysFastVNC to connect to the mini.

With all my networking & hardware issues resolved the next decision took sometime to arrive at with conviction, Plex or iTunes.

PLEX vs ITUNES
This is quite a personal decision; what works for me could be useless for another. When it comes to managing all my media, I have decided to pitch my tent firmly in the iTunes camp for a number reasons. I have tried several times to move my life to Plex, but it just hasn’t worked for me. The deal breakers in the end were the existing DRM files I have in iTunes, the more I buy each month and being able to easily transfer to various iOS devices. I had to move one way or the other because switching between iTunes & Plex on the Mac mini was just giving me the same problems I had with all my drives, no single view of everything from one interface.

Plex is the business if you have a whole lot of media of varying formats and can benefit from all the plug-ins etc. I decided to take the time to convert what I already had into iTunes.

CONVERTING MEDIA
Using MacTheRipper, Handbrake & Elgato Turbo.264 HD just about anything is fair game for conversion into mp4 or m4v. Installing ffmpegX is also a must.

Extract the Main Feature in MacTheRipper

MacTheRipper deals with most DVD extractions, even if they are deliberately mastered with bad sectors. There are some DVD’s in my collection that remain elusive. This is where it takes time, but once it’s all in iTunes you are golden. Everything is stored on the NAS and can be easily sync’d to the iOS devices via MacBook Pro’s or paired with the Mac mini.

Movies in iTunes, covers & summaries painstakingly found & added in iTunes.

EYETV & TURBO.264 HD
I love EyeTV! I have had a 250 Plus for over 2 years now; for recording of live TV it’s fantastic. EyeTV works seamlessly with the Turbo.264 HD to encode & stream on the fly. Because I’ve put some thought & configuration into the household network streaming to the iPad is sharp, a stable maximum stream of 2000kbps has been achieved.

EyeTV has some handy exporting features (iPhone, iPad & AppleTV) but you really need a Turbo.264 HD to take advantage of this. I have owned previous versions of the Turbo.264, the latest HD version is sensational. Of course you can do all this using Handbrake, ffmpegX & others, but with a hardware-based solution your Macs processor is freed up to do other stuff and you’ll be encoding video at 2x to 4x speed. It’s worth it. You can also watch recordings directly out of your EyeTV library using the iOS app. Annoyingly this requires them to be ‘prepared’ for iOS access because EyeTV encodes using the loss-less MPEG-2 format. You can automate this, but by default I turn this off as it greatly increases the archive size of the recording. I then export as needed for AppleTV  or iOS devices.

The Gadget Show getting streamed to the iPad via EyeTV

I often search the guides, set shows to record and then slice the ads out once recorded. As I have mentioned the recordings are loss-less, so you’ll never see any difference between an EyeTV recording & watching it live on your TV.

Slicing out ads in EyeTV

APPLETV
Finally getting to AppleTV…I was never interested in the first incarnation of AppleTV, effectively an overpriced hard disk drive. Removing it was the best thing Apple did for the product. Blu Ray is dead on arrival as far as I am concerned, the last thing I want are more disks at a higher price taking up cabinet space, sitting through endless menu locked intros & ads for a movie I have just paid for (DVD’s are bad enough) and the last straw; having to muck around breaking copy protection to put onto my iPad to take on a flight. Is it any wonder people torrent?

Movies from iTunes Library in AppleTV

I find myself buying more & more through iTunes because it’s just so convenient, HD TV series also come with SD versions too, so transferring to the iPhone or iPad is a breeze.

I am yet to rent a movie on AppleTV, I’m still exploring YouTube and using it as front end for everything in iTunes (home sharing enabled). Of course, rentals aside, a fair criticism is that I’ve paid £99 for something I could get for nothing using Plex. But as a sit here writing this, the wife is watching a movie through AppleTV and I messing with the Mac mini encoding and shifting files around.

Another benefit of running through AppleTV is that it has a 8GB SSD, most movies are cached on it before you get past the title sequence. Again down to the network, but any network benefits from this. I really like the interface and the remote is gorgeous. The all important ‘P.A.R’ (Partner Approval Rating) is very high, others don’t have to understand the details or any technical aspects of the systems in place; just surrender the remote, switch the source on the TV & they are away, simple. Yes, I have given up a lot of customisation & features you get with Plex, but this requires everyone to know how to use, well, Plex. And get it running if it’s not currently the forground application.

The latest AppleTV update & iOS 4.2.1 now supports AirPlay. This is incredibly useful, you can now stream video, music or photos directly from your iPad, iPhone or iPod to your TV.

Controlling AppleTV from the iPad, streaming music to the TV

I have set iTunes to always start up at login on the Mac mini along with other drive mounts on the NAS. I decided to connect the AppleTV unit to the network by Ethernet rather than the wireless. I had some issues with disappearing iTunes library connections when on the wireless, it’s a bit faster & more stable using wired network. Other problems I had were related to the TV itself, I had a very popular 720p Panasonic, via the HDMI cable AppleTV would sometimes stretch widescreen movies as it tried to determine the correct scaling. My newer 1080p TV doesn’t have this problem.

I enjoy the simplicity & immediacy of AppleTV. It’s taken a lot of time & effort to get everything in order (hours of encoding, organising & some networking that goes a bit beyond your standard home setup), but for me I am closer than ever to achieving that goal of digital media nirvana.

Q&A

What do you use to convert DVD’s?
I use MacTheRipper. Set it for ‘Main Feature’ extraction. I then convert this to H.264 HD format (iTunes compatible) using Turbo.264 HD USB dongle & it’s software component. The resulting .mp4 or .m4v file is stored on the NAS & the movie added to the iTunes library on the Mac mini (copy to iTunes library is turned off).

What about TV series DVD’s? How do you convert these?
Use Handbrake, this can extract title by title directly to mp4 format.

How do you integrate AppleTV into your existing setup?
I have setup iTunes home sharing on the Mac mini & AppleTV connects to this. Everything in the library is then accessible from AppleTV. I have connected the AppleTV unit directly to the network rather using Wi-Fi.

How do you watch live TV on the iOS devices?
Using EyeTV, EyeTV for iOS, 250 plus & Turbo.264 HD I can stream live TV to iPad or iPhone at near HD quality. Unfortunately EyeTV cannot play live TV & record at the same time. There are services like TVCatchup (UK) and Hulu (US); but the quality just doesn’t compare to a local EyeTV stream.

How do you watch movies & TV shows in your iTunes library on the iOS devices?
On the Mac mini I have installed ServeToMe, on the iOS devices StreamToMe. I can then browse everything in my Mac mini iTunes library, or folders and play it on the iPad or iPhone across the network.

Is the NAS quiet?
Quiet enough. You can sometimes hear it ticking away in the lounge, particularly when the laptop is doing a TimeCapsule back up.  There is no drive whirring or spinning fan sound.

What about VLC?
Before all of this, I used VLC a lot. I still have some series DVD’s that have been ripped but not encoded & organised into iTunes, so VLC still gets the odd use. My goal is to actually get away from having use VLC at all, opening directories and using remote desktop or keyboard & mouse to locate VIDEO_TS folders or other recordings etc. Bury the file system, users in the Plex camp probably feel the same way.

To developers out there, DO NOT expect this to remain exactly as it is! I can assure you the way this is accessed is going to change. From the top down TfL are 100% committed to open data (this saga could not have gone any higher). After concerns have been addressed & resolved we are all working out how best to make these services available long term for everyone. TfL wants your involvement in this process.

When it comes to the journey planner, TfL’s primary objective is always ensure the website planner is online (some peoples jobs depend on it). If the API has to be pulled for load reasons or some idiot does something stupid; I’ll be the first one to support such a decision. So a word of warning, don’t screw this up for everyone. If you don’t know what a session key is, the difference between a HTTP POST & GET request or how to XML parse you have no business using the API. During severe load times (i.e during a strike period) the journey planner can be serving 1.5 million journey solutions an hour. Server infrastructure, security, technical & management expertise needed to ensure this remains running is not cheap. Respect it.