codza

The iPhone SDK provides a high level movie player, but so far there is no way to decode movies or extract frames. In this post I will show you how to do that using FFmpeg.

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For some strange reason there is no way to specify a company name in XCode.

Most source code templates include __MyCompanyName__ in the comments. To change it, open terminal and type this command replacing __MyCompanyName__ with whatever you want:

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EXC_BAD_ACCESS. Debugging this one is on par with figuring out why the wife says “not tonight, honey.” And they are equally unfortunate situations.

Let’s see what we can do about EXC_BAD_ACCESS.

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I came across this issue when I received a UTF-8 encoded string from a URL. I was expecting the UTF-8 string to be automatically decoded, but then I realized that it’s probably not trivial to identify a UTF-8 string, so NSString doesn’t automatically do this for a reason. (Unfortunately, this realization came only after I’d been banging my head against the screen for an hour. Hence this post

There’s no method in the NSString API to decode a UTF-8 NSString directly, so first it has to be converted to a C string (gotta love those C strings.)

NSString *encodedString;
NSString *decodedString = [NSString stringWithUTF8String:[encodedString cStringUsingEncoding:[NSString defaultCStringEncoding]]];

I needed a quick way to encode an NSString to be used in a JSON object in an iPhone project. There are libraries to do this like TouchJSON, but I didn’t want to link a whole library to insert a string into a Facebook query.

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The OS X registration process can come up with some pretty stupid computer names like chuck johnson’s macbook. This will show up in the Terminal, on the network and it has a freaking single quote and spaces in it ?!

Here’s how to rename it to something that makes sense, like pink.

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Microsoft offers a tool to create a bootable USB stick (thumb drive? flash drive? floppy disk?) using a Windows7 ISO image, but if you purchased an educational/student copy of Windows7, it won’t work for you.

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Adobe Photoshop CS4 comes with a script that exports layers to files, but it adds layer numbers to the file names by default. After lots of manual renaming I decided to add an option to suppress the layer numbers.

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I’ve recently replaced the network card in my Acer Aspire One 250 netbook with a Dell DW1510.I had some trouble finding the drivers on Dell’s site, so I’m posting the info here.

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I’ve recently worked on an update to MeanPhoto. The project was originally done using the iPhone SDK 2.1. I made the new distribution build with the 3.1.2 SDK without any issues, but when I uploaded the binary on iTunesConnect, I got an error saying that the app was not signed with an Apple provisioning profile.

I was surprised because I did not change any build settings. When I looked at the code signing key, I didn’t see any of the installed provisioning profiles:

The provisioning profiles should show up like this:

I checked a bunch of things from my old post about code signing, but I could not fix the issue.

I opened the project.pbxproj file (located in the .xcodeproj folder) and saw that while the CODE_SIGNING_IDENTITY was set, the PROVISIONING_PROFILE key was missing in the Distribution build settings section:

I created a temp project and selected the correct provisioning profile (in the new project I could select it with no problem). I opened the .pbxproj file from the temp project in a text editor (I use Smultron which is awesome) and copied the PROVISIONING_PROFILE setting to MeanPhoto’s .pbxproj:

The provisioning profiles still don’t show up in XCode, but the new build uploaded to iTunes without a problem.