The iPhone app is an early version with a cut down feature set designed to enable users to check up on their portfolio, view their watchlist and browse the available cases of wine for purchase.

In addition to development of the iPhone app, as CTO of the company I was responsible for prototyping early versions of the rails based website, in particular designing a solid object model to allow the high value transactions to take place, manage portfolios of wine and developing an API to interface with the iPhone app and future additional platforms.

More recently we’ve been able to hire a more experienced (and awesome!) rails dev to take over the development of the rails site and API, allowing me to concentrate on the iPhone client, product planning and strategy along with the CEO, James Maskell.

Things are still very early for the company. We have a long way to go to achieve our goal of truly disrupting the fine wine industry around the world. The product is being updated with new features and better design on a daily basis, and we expect it will look very different in a couple of months.

Check Marono out on the app store

Working closely with the amazing guys at graniph to produce the app, my main tasks included:

• General UX (User eXperience) design and development including app structure, view layout, UI animations, usability testing and use case studies
• Downloading and caching the JSON datasource from the graniph webserver for product details, news items and store information
• Downloading and caching the image data for the products at high speed while maintaining responsiveness.
• Design and creation of PHP code necessary to serve the JSON data from graniph’s existing web server/CMS.
• Google Maps integration including displaying distances/walking times from the user’s location to the nearest store.

Check out the app here!

Today I realised, who cares if it’s not a lot of money?!? Something is better than nothing, right? Perhaps there are westerners out there seeing these crazy Japanese characters and want to know what they mean? Or people in Tokyo who are seeing some new kanji due to the specific vocabulary going around on the TV and in the media.

So from now and for the foreseeable future I’ve decided to donate all the proceeds from my humble Quick Kanji Dictionary (iPhone) and Quick Kanji Dictionary HD (iPad) apps to the quake victims. It won’t be much, and I’m not under the illusion it’s gonna make a big difference by itself, but every little helps.

Grab them here:

I’m also in discussions with the outstanding Chris Berthelsen (@a_small_lab) and Luis Mendo (@luismendo) about making something more special, specifically for the victims. We’re looking for contributions for content, please check out http://a-small-lab.com

Will update when we have more to say.

All you need to do is detect the retina display, then set the contentScaleFactor for the FlowCoverView to 2. Simply edit the internalInit method to look like this:

- (id)internalInit
{
	//
	// FIX FOR RETINA DISPLAY
	//
	if ([[UIScreen mainScreen] respondsToSelector:@selector(scale)] && [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale] == 2){
		self.contentScaleFactor = 2;
	}
	// END FIX FOR RETINA DISPLAY

	CAEAGLLayer *eaglLayer;

	eaglLayer = (CAEAGLLayer *)self.layer;
	eaglLayer.opaque = YES;

	context = [[EAGLContext alloc] initWithAPI:kEAGLRenderingAPIOpenGLES1];
	if (!context || ![EAGLContext setCurrentContext:context] || ![self createFrameBuffer]) {
		[self release];
		return nil;
	}
	self.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithWhite:0 alpha:0];

	cache = [[DataCache alloc] initWithCapacity:MAXTILES];
	offset = 0;

	return self;
}

I hope this is useful to someone, as I couldn’t find anything on Google about this yet.

I had a kind of custom tab bar controller setup running using a paged scrollview that held the views of a number of other view controllers , but when running I started getting the following error:

[__NSCFData numberOfSectionsInTableView:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance

After a quick bit of fiddling I found out that releasing the view controller in the following block of code meant that while the controller’s view was retained by being added as a subview, the actual controller was being released with a retain count of 0, throwing the above error.

AnalyticsViewController *analytics = [[AnalyticsViewController alloc] init];

[analytics.view setFrame:CGRectMake(scrollView.frame.size.width *4, 0, scrollView.frame.size.width, scrollView.frame.size.height)];

[scrollView addSubview:analytics.view];

[analytics release];

By commenting out the [analytics release]; line and adding it to the controller’s dealloc method, the crash went away. Some more info about this problem can be found here: http://imlocation.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/strange-objects-nscftype-indicate-memory-management-bugs/

After playing around for a while I discovered the best way to fix this is to sign into any Game Center enabled game with your test sandbox account, then sign out from within the Game Center app. Signing into the Game Center app using your standard account should then work!

P.S. Feel free to add me as a Game Center friend and see if you can beat my high scores! My username is marky_mc.

• General UX (User eXperience) design including UI animations, usability testing and use case studies
• Downloading and caching an XML datasource from a webserver using a secure HTTPS authenticated connection
• Drawing and dynamically updating complex charts and tables of information
• iOS In App Purchase support for subscriptions
• AirPrint support for in-app wireless printing

Shots from the new 68 & Brothers Spring 2011 catalog.

It was a crazy day! Met the crew at Hachiko in Shibuya at 1.15am! Drove through Tokyo to the east coast of Chiba to do some 5am sunrise shooting on the beach. Then onto a horse ranch to do some location shooting. Luckily the crew were super efficient, and finished around 1pm. 5 hours ahead of schedule!

The clothes were really cool. Similar in some ways to the Autumn,Winter collection, but with a little more light colours.

My task was to add in-app advertising functionality to the app. This meant designing a system that could detect whether iAd is available on a user’s device (currently only in the US) and display an ad banner. If iAd isn’t available to the user, the plugin detects this, and switches to a custom ad banner from a third party advertiser. If no internet connection is available at all to load an advert, no banner is shown.

I was asked to make this code act as a plugin so that it could be reused easily in other apps and ensure that it was fully documented for implementation by anyone.

The first app to use this system, My Announcer, is available for free on the app store now:

My Announcer for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store