Shark Browser iPhone App Submitted

Today I have submitted my first iPhone app, Shark Browser, to the App Store. With any luck it'll hit the store by the end of the month. Shark Browser is an alternative browser to Safari, with quick access to searches for many popular sites such as Amazon, IMDB, Flickr, Google and more. Plus it has full-screen features to take advantage of the full real estate of the iPhone. Here's the description from the App Store: SHARK is a full screen Web browser with a twist. Focus your keyword searches by tapping your favorite Web site including Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, ESPN, Amazon.com, IMDB and more! SHARK has many of the features you’ve come to expect from alternative iPhone browsers and some you haven’t seen before: - Show and Save Images: Tap to show all the images on the current Web page. Then tap any individual image to save it to your photo library. You can easily save any size image this way (this is difficult to do in Safari). - Find Text in Page: After you search a site, use this option to find and highlight the keyword for you. - Full screen mode: Hides the status bar and toolbars to use the full screen real estate of the iPhone. Jump automatically to full screen when you hit “GO.” - Privacy Browsing: When you close the application, your session is erased and there is no trace of your personal information or what you were searching for. - Shrinkster.com users will appreciate the shrinkster code search mode. Great for listeners of Mondays and other pwop.com podcasts.

iPhone SDK: Device is case-sensitive, Simulator is not.

I've started developing for the iPhone this past month and ran into an issue that only appears on the device and worked fine in the simulator. It boiled down to case sensitivity for image filenames. The simulator doesn't care about case, but the iPhone itself does.

I called [UIImage imageNamed:@"myfilename.png"] and my images appeared fine in the simulator. When I tested my app on the device, it didn't crash, but the images never showed up. I fixed it by making sure all of my image files were named in lowercase, and then I used the lowercaseString method of NSString when calling the imageNamed method.

SQL Debugging within Visual Studio

Today's revelation: You can debug SQL stored procedures and functions. OMG. I just saved a half hour of digging through code by stepping through the debugger to see where my code went wrong.

It is simple to do and described well here. I just fired up Visual Studio 2008, opened Server Explorer, and opened a Data Connection. I had to make sure the connection was using Windows authentication, and that my AD account was registered as a user with the sysadmin role on the server. That was true, so I then right-clicked and chose "Step Into Function". Voila! The debugger console came up, asked me for parameters, and showed my function. This is extremely useful.

Apparently I'm late to the game since I've read this has been around since SQL Server 2000!