Plus/Minus

Doing a complete review of the iPad-specific application screens this morning only added three items to my bug list. Two of those were obvious enough that I did the fixes first and then created the Bugzilla entries.

This is actually difficult for me...remembering that having entries in the list has value in itself. It serves as a reminder of what problems occur and, therefore, may occur again. It also is a guide for estimating amounts of work for future projects.

Also fixed was a potential problem of attempting to save search terms for a post that had none. This brings the current score of bugs to: Open 28, Resolved 3.

Programming 101 -- Refuted

While working on customization of the application's general appearance today I discovered some very annoying behavior in Apple's "Cocoa Touch" software development kit. A couple of commonly-accepted programming guidelines are: 1) in OOP, a subclass extends the behavior of its parent class; it doesn't restrict it, and 2) side-effects are bad; a routine should do what it claims and little else.

In this library, the class UIToolbar is a subclass of UIView, which leads to the expectation that a toolbar should do anything a view can plus whatever extra its designer thought necessary. Nope. For example, a view allows you to set its background color but a toolbar quietly ignores such a request. A Google search reveals a great number of people questioning their own code because of this breaking of a basic assumption.

While experimenting with this, I discovered the second problem: that of unexpected results having nothing to do with the documented purpose of various routines.
- Toolbars exist as a way of letting a user select actions relevant to some other information on a screen. Changing the translucency of one changes the *size* of the related content.
- Toolbars contain optional buttons as trigger points for these actions. Changing the alpha (transparency) of the toolbar changes it for all the embedded buttons.
- Setting a toolbar translucent and then changing its "tintColor" -- or vice versa -- cancels the translucency.

Some operating systems are designed to give access to computer features in a useful way. iOS, on the other hand, was designed to prevent access except in Apple-approved ways. Some days the difference really shows.

Bug Hunting

I spent the evening at a local Cocoa developers' meeting in downtown Toronto. Since I got there by public transit I had time to spend and put most of it into exercising the application on my iPad while taking notes. This was the first version of it that I built to run on a device instead of a simulator and it behaved reasonably well -- only one crash in about 45 minutes of testing.

It got me nine more functional/appearance bugs as well to add to my project list, however, so that's good. :-)