Sunday, February 19, 2012

Blog hits 10,000 visitors

Stats for the last few days :


courtesy : http://www.w3counter.com/

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Destination Goa

Mummy and Papa were going to see off Chhotu at Delhi airport on Jan 17th. Hence it was unanimously decided that they would fly to Goa from Delhi for a 4 day vacation. I too joined them in Goa. It was an amazing trip. Goa lived upto its expectation - picturesque and serene. 18th and 19th we hired a cab to take us around the place. The beaches were undoubtedly one of the best I have ever seen. Coconut trees hanging on the roads and foreigners strolling in every corner, it is a wonderful location to spend a peaceful vacation.
















19th evening we left for Mumbai. It was a bit uncomfortable night journey on the ever-swaying bus. On 20th, we went for Mumbai darshan bus tour which was fun. The guide showed us all the major beaches, film stars' bungalows including Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Rajesh Khanna and Amitab Bachchan.







On 22nd we reached Shirdi. This is small town in Maharashtra which has witnessed incredible growth rate in the past couple of years. The Sai temple, market and food places were very clean and well kept. 

Buffer Labs becomes iOS developer

February 10th, I got a mail saying "Thank You for Joining an Apple Developer Program". Through a simple and sweet application process, Buffer Labs got enrolled into Apple developer program for an year.  It required us to send two faxes to Apple office in California, which were easily done through a free fax site. With this done, we got access to iOS 5.1 beta which I immediately installed on my iPhone 4s. This moment marked the iPhone4S become fully functional/ carrier compliant etc.

Since the day I bought it (by exchanging my old iPhone4), there has been serious issues with the carrier settings. Apple had decided to do away with the turn off 3G button. The phone used to stay on the 3G network for calls as well, which was not compatible with Airtel and Idea (It somehow worked on BSNL though) and hence whenever you tried to call someone, it would take 1 minute before you connect. Receiving calls and message was not possible at all. After this update, the phone can actually make calls. The phone is actually glistening white and beautiful and as remarked by Shubham "almost like a jewel". Slightly washed out theme of the OS adds to the beauty. Siri is a disappointment though as it doesn't understand half the time in Indian context. The speed however is amazing fast and 8 MP camera with face recognition and video stabilization is amazing. See the picture below :



Now it's time for some app development. Since the license allows to test the app on the phone, I was excited again to work on my JoPlanner app. Within two days, and with help from Stackoverflow, the app is almost near completion. I never expected iOS programming to be so fast and simple. I had always looked at ObjectiveC as unusually complex language but iOS api adds unprecedented power to it. The only place where I had to really read long documentation and take Shubham's help was when I got stuck not knowing how to pass data from a child class to parent class. Finally, I used custom Delegates and Protocols as described in following links :

http://tiptopcode.blogspot.in/

http://www.theappcodeblog.com/2011/04/15/passing-data-between-views-tutorial-using-a-protocol-delegate-in-your-iphone-app/

I have also been quite excited about designing some icons for supplementary apps :