More iPhone Development

Sorry it's been a few days - things have been insane in general. I've been completely jammed at work and out nearly every night this week for one reason or another. Exhaustion would be settling in if I didn't have bizarre compile errors to distract me.

First, the good news - the latest iPhone SDK and OS beta update includes a few interesting goodies, like OpenGL on the simulator and enhanced lookahead in XCode. The iTunes app has reappeared and there's more indications that the AppStore is getting ready.

In order to see all of this, I did end up bricking my phone for all of Thursday morning as apparently there's a bug with restoring your iPhone if you have weird things like another USB device plugged in ... go figure. After much, much panic - I managed to get it working again. Friday morning seemed to be make up for all this as I started getting my SOAP requests bringing back SOAP responses. I even went so far as to brag on this fact ... until I tried to compile for the actual device instead of the simulator. Then everything with XML in its name died a miserable death.

It seems the NSXML stuff hasn't been moved over yet. There's an ounce of common wisdom out there that its "too slow for the phone" - which I find fairly hard to believe after watching, you know, a Monkey Ball demo on the thing. I don't care how slow it is - it can't be more processor intensive than rendering a 3D world.

No, I'm guessing there's something more esoteric at hand. The working XML example off the Apple demos uses a kind of SAX design to pull items into an object. I'm hoping it will be an alternative, but it accomplishes less in three full classes over about twenty lines of code. With the NSXML, you've got XPATH and other handy tools. Some comments in the code make me thing the NSXML absence is a bug - but with our deadline I probably won't be able to assume it will be fixed.

The game I'm doing as a side project is working pretty well. I'm moving into the realm of interfaces with it now, something I'm hoping to keep as minimal as possible.