Wow that Promotion Video for the Demon Cam is just awesome! I wonder if they will be able to actually make money with the app.
The app is iPhone-only right now, available at $0.99. A HD or Pro version for the iPad will probably follow at some point.
Next monthly meeting of the CocoaHeads Siegen scheduled for September, 13th 2011 at 19:00, feat: “iOS 5 - New and Noteworthy” (Benjamin Mies). Third meeting already and this time we also have a nice flyer!
On a related note: The server running the CocoaHeads Siegen website will be down on August, 27th 2011 due to some power supply related maintenance work at the Universität Siegen.
I received several complaints about random crashes lately. The complaints of course did not mention any specific version of iOS nor any other useful details. So I had to digg into it myself. As it turned out the crashes were due to the use of DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_BACKGROUND, which is not only unavailable with iOS 4.2.1 (and earlier), but also causes dispatch_async to crash - which is rather bad IMHO, a fallback to DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_LOW would be better from both the user’s and the developer’s POV.
Yesterday I held a talk about Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch at the second monthly CocoaHeads Siegen meeting. My slides are available for download from the CocoaHeads Siegen website. The presentation gave rise to some interesting discussion about networking performance with and without GCD, so today I’m digging into that GCDAsyncSocket thing again.
I recently had to restore some PNG files from an iOS App Bundle, which apparently did not work very well, since they have been compressed automatically using Apple’s version of pngcrush when they were copied to the App Bundle folder during archiving. Fortunately it’s quite easy to revert the optimizations using the following command (assuming you have installed the Apple Developer Tools and the iOS SDK):
$ mkdir ~/reverted
$ /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/bin/pngcrush -dir ~/reverted -revert-iphone-optimizations -q *.pngThis will create a folder reverted in your home directory with the uncrushed PNG files.