A couple of new betas are available from the beta software page.

Neu 1.2b7 includes a couple of minor tweaks to the UI, and a revised manual. I know that there are a few typos to fix in the manual, but I’d definitely appreciate any other feedback on it, or the changes in Neu 1.2. I’m hoping to submit this version to the App store soon.

Ambientweet 1.0.2b1 fixes a stall that has been reportedly happening in Ambientweet - where it simply stops working after an hour or two. Again, all feedback greatly appreciated.

I’m pleased to announce that over this weekend, we’re running a 50% off offer on Neu. For this period it will be available for the bargain price of $5!

We’re also holding Ambientweet at it’s current price (free!) over this period - after which it will actually cost something!

Go get em whilst they’re hot…

Ambientweet 1.0.1 is out!

This version has a whole raft of improvements, including:

• Reduced the frequency of refreshes, to avoid running over the Twitter call limit.
• Post windows now use the same style as the main tweet window.
• The length of posts is now calculated intelligently to account for link shortening. So if you paste in a long link, it won’t use up all of your character count, as the link will be shortened in the actual post.
• Auto-completion list for @users in post window now includes all users that the app has encountered.
• Now correctly restores cached tweets and users when loading.
• Added subtle gradient to window backgrounds.
• Fixed beta Sparkle feed URL (the app was looking at the non-beta feed instead).
• Updated the manual with screenshots of new posting UI.
• Fixed window resizing.
• Improved sorting, refreshing with new items.
• Changed user guide code to be sandbox-friendly (copies guide into the Caches folder and opens it from there).

There are lots more improvements and new features on the way in a future version, please give 1.0.1 a try!

During a recent submission I came across a problem.

I got an automatically generated email back from Apple with this sort of thing in it:

Invalid Signature - the nested app bundle ECFoundation 
(Ambientweet.app/Contents/Frameworks/ECFoundation.framework)
is not signed, the signature is invalid, or it is not signed with an Apple submission certificate. 
Refer to the Code Signing and Application Sandboxing Guide for more information.

It’s a bit annoying that the email is capable of spotting that I have one of three possible problems, but not narrowing the actual cause down for me. It’s also a bit annoying that this only runs when you’ve submitted, and not when you verify an application with Xcode.

Be that as it may…

A while ago I blogged about how I’d really like Objective-C to have built in support for lazy properties.

My ideal solution would be something like this:

@property (nonatomic, retain, lazy) NSString* name;

The synthesized getter for this property would automatically call a method

 - (NSString*)nameInit 

when the property was first accessed, and would use the resultant value to initialise the property.

This has some advantages over any hand-rolled solution:

• it can remain efficient
• it can support the retain/copy semantics and atomicity of the property
• it avoids the need for boiler-plate code for every property to test if it needs to be initialised

In the absence of this solution in the language, I offered a rather complicated set of macros to attempt to implement something similar.

Since then I’ve thought about it a bit more, and come up with another couple of ways of tackling the same task…