A few days ago however I discovered Viscosity developed by the Australian company Spark Labs, which is a remarkably good front end to OpenVPN. Viscosity can even import Tunnelblick or Windows OpenVPN configurations so you will get up and running in no time. To top it all, it also has a good looking and useful traffic graph!

And the price? Free! Can’t beat that.

I have used it for a few days now and it has worked flawlessly with Subversion and SMB requests over the network connection. Highly recommended! I would have bought it if they had charged for it.

Viscosity homepage

The article is written by well respected author Richard S. Wright Jr. but the code has numerous issues and also some things that are very wrong. One example is putting shutdown code into Dealloc. The following text is from the Apple guide Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa:

Note that when an application terminates, objects may not be sent a dealloc message since the process’s memory is automatically cleared on exit—it is more efficient simply to allow the operating system to clean up resources than to invoke all the memory management methods. For more details about object creation and deallocation, see Object Creation.

From Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa

In my tests, dealloc is never called on the iPhone. The iPhone instead just cleans up the pool of allocated objects which of course is much faster. The problem is if you have some C++ cleanup you need to do, or if you need to write things to disk or do some Open GL cleanup. The solution? Use applicationWillTerminate instead in your application delegate to manage cleanup, from the documentation:

applicationWillTerminate. This method is the ideal place for the delegate to perform clean-up tasks, such as freeing allocated memory, invalidating timers, and storing application state.

This is what we are using and it works great. We are using our own shell in our game, and are using the Power VR Toolkit for objects and textures. We use a mixture of C++ and Objective C in our game - basically all new stuff we write ourselves is C++ where we freely call Objective C for the rich framework functions. My first advice regarding iPhone development would be to base your code around Apple’s base Open GL skeleton application, and not look so much on the web for shortcuts. The usual stuff in other words.

To clear my head a bit from Windows Mobile I am right now working full time with an iPhone game that will be released just in time for Christmas. I’m doing this work as a consultant together with a very talented team at HiQ, a Swedish IT consultancy company.

Having worked with Windows Mobile development for almost ten years now (I begun in early 1999 on the Cassiopeia E-115), developing for the iPhone has so far been a fresh experience. So this blog will as of now be a bit focused around iPhone development and tips and hints I come across in my journey to create the bestselling hit title this Christmas! So keep checking the blog, I have many interesting things coming!

The complete list of new features is shown below. If you are interested in Windows Mobile development you should really go and check it out!

New Features in GapiDraw 4.0

DirectDraw support. GapiDraw will now use DirectDraw instead of GAPI or GETRAWFRAMEBUFFER to access the display on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later. Switching to DirectDraw means that GapiDraw applications can take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics and run in windowed mode, at the cost of slightly lower performance on devices without hardware acceleration.

Hardware-accelerated graphics. GapiDraw will now detect and use DirectDraw hardware acceleration on Windows Mobile devices if available. Functions supporting hardware accelerated graphics are marked in the documentation.

Windowed mode support. You can now run GapiDraw applications at high performance in windowed mode using DirectDraw on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later. In windowed mode you can take advantage of the SIP input panel to allow the user to enter text data.

Fullscreen toggle. You can now seamlessly switch between windowed mode and fullscreen mode on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later.

QuarterSize display. If you use the new display flag GDDISPLAY_QUARTERSIZE, GapiDraw will use a backbuffer that is half the width and half the height of the display, if either the width or the height of the display is greater than 320 pixels. This is a great option for developing and running mobile games on newer mobile devices with display resolutions of 800×480 pixels and more (in this particular example the backbuffer would be sized to 400×240 or 240×400 depending on display orientation).

GradientRect. GapiDraw 4.0 introduces an optimized gradient fill operation with support for opacity. GradientRect can draw top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, and right-to-left, and prerenders the entire gradient in two directions for very fast performance.

Performance improvements. GapiDraw 4.0 adds StrongARM and XScale precaching (pre-reading four cache lines simultaneously) to BltFast and AlphaBltFast for important performance improvements. GapiDraw 4.0 also has improved performance on stationary PCs in windowed mode and much faster GDI surface locking.

Documentation improvements. All documentation was reviewed and much of it was rewritten. A new and easy to follow “Getting Started with GapiDraw”tutorial was added.

New advanced tutorial: Breakout. Learn how to use GapiDraw to create a complete mobile game using the easy to follow tutorial “Breakout”. You will find Breakout in the samples folder.

Improved Visual Studio 2008 support. All samples now include ready to run projects for Visual Studio 2008 mobile and stationary environments.

Details about the upcoming 2.2 upgrade has now leaked on the web, and one of it’s prime features (for me at least) is that the auto correction finally can be switched off once and for all. Thank you!

The Nokia 5800 runs Series 60 5th edition (known as “S60 Touch”), and is priced at less than $400! And for that you’ll get a touch sensitive 3.2 inch high-resolution display (640×360 pixels at 32-bit true color), 1320 mAh battery, a microSD slot with support for up to 16gb memory cards, and a 3.2 megapixel camera.

The device looks indeed very promising, and at a very low price point! Should be out before Christmas!

Check it out in more detail at Engadget or BGR

Also, you can find some videos of the device at ovi.com

Some links:

Cocoa Touch Tutorial: iPhone Application Example

A touch of Cocoa: inside the iPhone SDK

Glassy Scrolling with UITableView

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

From developer.apple.com

Yes! Today Apple removed their Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) for the iPhone, which means that we can finally begin to discuss development techniques for the iPhone! And it also means that Erica Sadun finally can begin to ship The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook!

Answerkeys Disabler solves the problem of accepting or rejecting calls before you got your phone out of your pants.

From xda-developers.com

If you are the proud owner of an HTC Touch Diamond or the HTC Touch Pro, you have most probably also experienced the annoyance of having the display switched on each time a phone call is received. It doesn’t matter if you lock the unit or not, the incoming phone call window will be shown anyway.

I have been using slide2unlock the past weeks and like it a lot. However if you want a more light solution then the application Answerkeys Disabler will prevent the display from switching on if the display is off when the phone call is received. Very handy.

You will find Answerkeys Disabler at xda-developers.com