Chasing bugs
It’s been over a week, so I thought I’d post a small update. The last few days have been blissfully without Objective-C, xcode and iKITT. I took a little break, as I’m dealing with a consistent crash in the settings screen, and chasing bugs is one of the most tedious things imaginable. I hammer in code at work all day (for things totally unrelated to iKITT) and there comes a time in your life when you’ve had quite enough of it all when you get home. That is the biggest reason everything is taking so long. That, and my unfamiliarity with Objective-C and the Cocoa Touch framework, with which iPhone applications are made.
For, see, I’ve tracked the bug to a problem in memory management, as the app is calling memory that has been de-allocated at some point. That is a lot of technical talk that I usually keep on Twitter. Basically it means that the app is trying to access a part of the program that is no longer there. I’m not used to dealing with problems like this, because these last few years I’ve worked in “garbage collected” languages, where this is not a problem. In garbage-collected languages. In garbage-collected environments, the run-time will automatically keep track of what is in use and “collect” the memory that is not.
So, I will be debugging the code in the coming days, trying to find out where and why things go bang! in the app. This is a good opportunity to get more intimate with xcode’s debugger, breakpoints and exception handling. I hope the next post will have more substance to it and contain the words: “I fixed the memory bug.”
Welcome to the new…
…not so much the same as the old. As you can see, I’ve put up a proper blog for Thanatist Software. Following up on my promise of keeping you more informed about iKITT, this step should make it a lot easier to write about where I’m standing. Furthermore, you can comment and let your voice be heard. I will listen. Now, I will tell you where things are at.
I’ve kept the last post from the old site online to illustrate how long it has been. It’s also there so that I can update you on the current situation. What development I had done on iKITT had to come to a halt, because the iMac I was using then broke down. I have since replaced it with an even older Mac Mini, but it works. It means that I can work on iKITT again–at least, as far as time will permit.
iKITT was free for a day on February 4th as part of a fun event, inspired by the recently finished Appvent Calendar event. It tries to promote Dutch and Belgian apps and offers a different app for free each day of January. Check it out at http://www.appevent.com (Dutch).
If anything, the results of that again showed me how many people really like having KITT on their iPhone. It is also crystal clear that you want to see an update. What features did I have listed on the big old TODO-list? Here they are again:
- A configuration screen
- More sample sets (KARR, translations)
- More voiceboxes (first season, KARR)
- Shuffle mode (random samples at timed intervals)
- KITT scanner (with the woosh sound!)
I will not promise you all of these features for the next update, because I may cut some to be able to get it out faster. There are many little tweaks and features that I think you will like, and more delays because a time-consuming feature hogs everything up is unacceptable.
So, after a long absence, this was a pretty long post. I hope I have not disappointed anyone too much by the radio silence, but I do have a job and something resembling a life, too. In any case, here’s to iKITT 1.2, to be released… somewhere in 2010? Narf!