03/09/2010

No Repository Type Git in Xcode 4 Developer Preview? Here is the solution!

29/06/2010 By Ralf 1 Comment

Besides all the iOS 4.0 hype and the fantastic new iPhone, what really made my day is the forthcoming new version of Apple’s IDE: Xcode 4.

After all, WWDC is a Developer Conference. Innovating the essentials tools we all work with daily, is as big a part of what we should have come to expect, as new SDKs and updated operating systems. Unfortunately, I cannot post any details about Xcode 4, nor any screenshots, as the current preview is still under NDA.

A key feature, that has been leaked elsewhere, is Git (and GitHub) support. I heavily use Git as a Source Code Management solution, both in my company and for my private projects.

I was literally blown away by the level of support for Git, that Apple demoed during WWDC.

No wonder, that huge disappointment hit me, when I tried to clone my first Git repo with the Xcode 4 Developer Preview and did not find the “Git” repository type in the UI. The only type offered was Subversion.

Turns out, there’s a simple solution: Xcode 4 expects the git command line tool to be available in /usr/bin. A quick which git on my console revealed, that my git binary instead resided in /usr/local/git/bin/git.

After creating a symlink in /usr/bin pointing to /usr/local/git/bin/git and restarting Xcode 4, everythink worked perfect!

The full command: sudo ln -s /usr/local/git/bin/git /usr/bin/git

A couple of observations: Connecting to GitHub did not work via the native git protocol, so I had to paste in the https URI to the repo. Same with ssh key based authentication, which did not work. I had to use my GitHub registered email address (username did not work) and password.

Besides this, working with a GitHub hosted git repository from within Xcode 4 just got really fantastic!

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Filed Under: All Things Apple, Development Tagged With: git, github, xcode 4

MLOVE 2010: It’s all about the people

25/06/2010 By Ralf 5 Comments

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been extremely lucky to attend the MLOVE ConFestival.

There’s much one can say about this outstanding, extraordinary event and I likely will. Later, once I had a chance to digest all the good stuff.

For now, there’s one common theme, that crosses my mind again and again, when thinking about MLOVE: It’s all about the people.

When Peter Giblin and Harald Neidhardt set out on their journey to create the MLOVE concept, there was one key driving factor: Putting the people back into the center of everything. Many, if not all, business events and conferences are grouped around the central concept of an audience and speakers. Two distinct roles. Some who listen. Some who talk.

While “a great chance to network” is on every agenda these days, I never quite experienced it as intense, as enriching as during the MLOVE days. Both, for work and for my personal life.

MLOVE has been truly interdisciplinary, crazy, funny, encouraging, motivating, eye-opening and passionate for me.

With the youngest participant aged 15 (Jerome Nadel’s son) up to the 31.5 years old :-) UNICEF Chairman Oliver Rothschild the diversity and genuinely multi-cultural view points couldn’t get any better for, I’d say, any discussion.

Yes, we discussed mobility. After all, that’s why it’s called MLOVE. But mobility in a much broader sense than on any other industry event I’ve yet been attending. How can we bring power and education to the developing countries? Is education the key to most privacy concerns? Can noise be valuable? What’s the overall role and responsibility of the geeks?

The way the event has been structured and executed put the participants in the center of it all.

The notion of audience vs. speaker has only been there during a few (outstanding) keynotes – thanks Shaherose, Nicholas, Jonathan, Aape, Jerome and everybody else. But most of the interaction happened between us. The first day’s Open Space was just fabulous. And Jonathan MacDonald’s moderation unparalleled.

What’s the most important learning from MLOVE for me? It’s to do everything, to surround yourself with great people.

Whether it’s your private life or professionally. Try to incorporate different perspectives into everything you do. Seek for masters in their respective disciplines. Hire the ones, who are even better than you and greatly stimulate thinking out-of-the-box.

Do not accept the status quo. Never.

I’ve started to create the ultimate MLOVE 2010 attendees twitter list. You can follow the MLOVE attendees here. If you’ve been there and are not yet on the list, do let me know, please.

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Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: mlove

One of my favorite games for the iPhone, now available for free!

17/06/2010 By Ralf 1 Comment

Just a heads up that The App Dojo, an iPhone developer buddy of mine, will reduce the price for one of my favorite iPhone games to exactly zero very soon.

If you’re like me an like the puzzle genre mixed with some action, go checkout SIZZ (iTunes Link). It should be free by the time this post sees the light.

Here’s a quick how-to-play/making off:


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Filed Under: Apps, Featured Tagged With: App Store, sizz

The Bees Awards: First International Social Media Award Show, San Francisco November 9th, 2010

02/06/2010 By Ralf 3 Comments

I’m proud to serve as a Jury member for the initial iteration of The Bees Awards, the first International Social Media Award Show.

One-fifth of the planet’s population is active on social media platforms. The Bees Awards will showcase how companies make the best use of new communication tools. This prestigious event will be held in San Francisco on November 9th, 2010.

“Social media is a growing phenomenon that calls for new communication and marketing expertise,” said Bastien Beauchamp, Founder of The Bees Awards. “Contrary to advertising, social media is “real” – it involves real people, real conversations, real products, real companies and real brands. Marketing legends David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach advocated the necessity of being in constant contact with the consumer’s reality. The Bees Awards will recognize those who have most expertly married this original spirit with today’s technology to create social media that transcends all marketing that’s come before it.”

The Deadline for Entry Submissions is October 1st, 2010.

1st International Social Media Award Show for Communication and Marketing Professionals – The Bees Awards from BeesAwards on Vimeo.

Nominees will be announced October 21st, 2010 at 7pm PST on the Bees Awards website at http://www.beesawards.com and via Twitter (@beesawards #beesawards). The Awards Gala will take place in San Francisco on November 9th, 2010. It will be streamed live at http://www.beesawards.com and via Twitter (@beesawards #beesawards).

The Bees Awards seek to  fill the gap in current marketing awards competitions by focusing solely on recognizing excellence in social media across multiple platforms. The Bees Awards team has established three key criteria:

  1. The Bees Awards are for communications and marketing professionals including: public relations and advertising agencies, advertisers, consultants, freelancers, students, business managers, and entrepreneurs.  People who pay or are paid to leverage social media tools to accomplish a corporate purpose may enter. No other social media awards exist for social media marketing practitioners.
  2. The Bees Awards are  the first social media award show with representation from an international jury panel. Social media has no boundaries, but every country has its own expertise and practices.  The Bees Awards goal is to incorporate this ever-changing global knowledge base in its selection/judging process.
  3. The Bees Awards will be awarded for delivering excellence in the various categories as judged by a jury of expert practitioners. It is not about being famous; it’s about executing impressive communications that are recognized by the jury to stimulate and challenge the industry. The jury has the responsibility to be the guardians of emerging media brilliance  and to help give  direction to the industry.

Looking very much forward to fantastic submissions and a great event in November!

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Filed Under: News, Personal

Dropbox introduces Selective Sync!

28/05/2010 By Ralf 2 Comments

Probably the most anticipated enhancement to Dropbox, my most favorite cross-platform / cross-device file syncing service, is now available in a new experimental build for all major operating systems: Selective Sync!

In a nutshell, Dropbox has been the best performing, most streamlined files/folders syncing and backup service available in the cloud for quite a while. Users have praised it time and again for its simplicity and seamless integration on many platforms, including the iPhone, iPad and Android.

The simplicity, however, came at a price: The service was operating on an all-or-nothing paradigm.

Once you joined a Dropbox (think shared folders), your machine received every single file and folder inside the hierarchy. No chance for you to opt out of single folders and choose what you want to sync to individual machines. While admittedly this made things easy, it became a problem more often than not when you were running a setup including machines with hard disks of largely different sizes. At least until today.

The way selective sync in build 0.8.64 works is pretty straight forward: You click the Selective Sync… button on the newly introduced Advanced tab in the Dropbox preferences dialog and uncheck the folders you don’t want to sync. Done.

A note to early adopters: When I first tried the new release, Selective Sync was grayed out. This is expected behavior. According to the FAQs for the new feature:

If you are running the Dropbox desktop application for the first time, you may have to wait until Dropbox has finished indexing the files in your Dropbox folder before you can access Selective Sync settings. If you see a message that says “Performing initial sync with server. Please wait…,” it means the Dropbox desktop application is in the process of indexing the files in your Dropbox or you have paused syncing from the Dropbox menu. You can choose to wait until indexing is complete to access your Selective Sync settings. Otherwise, select Cancel to dismiss the message and return to your preferences window. If you have paused syncing, you can resume syncing via the Dropbox menu.

One other aspect did not change, though: Everything you want so sync still needs to sit inside your main Dropbox folder. So, including folders outside your Dropbox continues to require the symbolic link workaround for a while.

More screenshots as my Dropbox moves forward:


(I originally published this article at The Next Web Apps.)

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Filed Under: Apps, News Tagged With: dropbox, selective sync, updates

Manually update your Nexus One to Android 2.2 Froyo

24/05/2010 By Ralf 4 Comments

According to last week’s Google I/O we have expected the much acclaimed Android 2.2 update, neatly codenamed “Froyo”, to roll-out to our devices in late June.

While Google has now confirmed that the launch phase already started, chances are, you are not one of the lucky ones serviced first.

Originally discovered by phandroid there is, however, a way to manually upgrade your Nexus One to the latest and greatest Android release.

Make sure you read to the end of this article, before following these steps:

  1. Download the Android 2.2 firmware for the Nexus One. The original link provided by phandroid was down for us. Here is a Dropbox mirror.
  2. Copy the downloaded update.zip it to your microSD card via USB.
  3. Switch your Nexus One off.
  4. Hold down the Volume down button as you power the device back on.
  5. A screen should appear showing your phone’s system searching for various files. Scroll down to recovery and press the Power button.
  6. When you see the triangle with an exclamation point symbol, press the Power and Volume up buttons at the same time.
  7. From the menu that appears, select Apply sdcard:update.zip and press the trackball.
  8. When the screen displays Install from sdcard complete select reboot system now and wait for the phone to power back up.

A few remarks:

  • I can personally confirm the above is working. My Nexus One is running perfectly fine on Android 2.2 after the update. However, you do this at your own risk.
  • We provide the mirror to the firmware as long, as we can. Should it go down, feel free to post more mirrors in the comments.

In case you’ve been living behind a rock, here’s everything you need to know about Android 2.2 in one neat list.

(This article originally appeared at The Next Web Mobile.)

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Filed Under: Mobile World, News, We love Google Tagged With: Android, froyo, nexus one

iPhone Entwicklung made in Germany

21/04/2010 By Ralf 1 Comment

Heute ist sie live gegangen, die neue Homepage der GrandCentrix GmbH.

Alles rund ums Thema Mobile Solutions, Smartphone Entwicklung, iPhone und iPad Entwicklung findet sich jetzt unter einem Dach.

Neuigkeiten aus der Smartphone Szene in Deutscher Sprache werde ich zukünftig im eigens dafür vorgesehenen Bereich unserer Unternehmenspräsenz bloggen.

Im Mai geht die internationale Version live. Wir freuen uns über Ihren Besuch und spannende, gemeinsame Mobile Solutions!

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Filed Under: News

How to reset the iPhone OS 4.0 (beta) home screen wallpaper

09/04/2010 By Ralf 5 Comments

Those of you who installed the first iPhone OS 4.0 beta released just yesterday, might have changed the home screen wallpaper.

One can do so via Settings > Wallpaper.

Unfortunately, the nice silver metal rain drops sprinkled default wallpaper that comes with iPhone OS 4.0 beta is not yet available as a photo in the 4.0′s library.

As a result, you cannot revert back to it if you changed the wallpaper just once.

At first, I did not find the original version in the wild but stumbled upon a really beautiful replacement. Download it from deviantART.

The original Apple wallpaper is available, too. Grab it.

Note: Do not sync wallpapers via iTunes!

iTunes tends to “optimize” images before sync, which makes them appear distorted when used as a wallpaper.

Instead email the image to yourself, open the email on your device, long press the image and save it to your camera roll.

Set it as your new home screen wallpaper and you’re done.

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Filed Under: All Things Apple, News Tagged With: iPhone, iphone os 4.0, wallpaper

www.chatroulette.pro: Visit our Chatroulette Script Labs!

22/03/2010 By Ralf Leave a Comment

A quick one: We are pretty happy that as the providers of the original, first and genuine Chatroulette Script/Chatroulette Clone in the market, we got the official chatroulette.pro domain.

With our store available at www.chatroulette-clone.net, we’ve decided to put our labs to chatroulette.pro. Starting today, the pro site will always showcase the latest development version, even if it’s in early alpha.

We hope you enjoy it!

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Filed Under: Development, News Tagged With: camcarousel, chatroulette, chatroulette clone, chatroulette script

Red5 support for Chatroulette Clone

19/03/2010 By Ralf 2 Comments

It’s been little more than ten days, since we’ve release the very first Chatroulette Clone (aka Chatroulette Script) version.

Since the initial release, we’ve shipped six minor updates, addressing many optimizations opportunities and selected feature requests handed in by customers.

Our Chatroulette Clone now supports automatic reconnects (“auto next”), multiple languages including runtime-customization options and a unique-in-the-market way of handling high-load situations.

Today, our development team has started to work on Red5 support.

Red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java. It’s freely available and supported by an energetic crowd of Flash/Flex addicts and RIA professionals.

So why is Red5 support important?

The current version of Chatroulette Clone leverages Adobe’s free Stratus service. This service aids in establishing the peer-to-peer connection, a straight, direct binary data stream between two Adobe Flash Player instances. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: News Tagged With: chatroulette, chatroulette clone, chatroulette script, red5
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