Once the AppStore opened on the Palm Pre I put my card in place so that I could order apps that I may want. In the past I have had no problems while purchasing apps. I have bought Tweed, Spot the missing pieces, JogStats, Air Hockey, Spot the Difference, and Conmigo. However while on the train this morning I decided to buy an app and as an end user it seemed like everything went smooth. It asked for my palm password, asked if I wanted to purchase the app and then it downloaded the app. Nothing out of the ordinary happened during the transaction, however when I got to the office this morning this is what I found in my in-box.

Transaction Failure Notice

Your previous transaction could not be processed. Please contact your financial institution should you have any questions.

You will still be able to purchase more applications in the Palm App Catalogue in the future. To do so, update the payment information in your account before placing a new order.

We appreciate your patience and hope you continue to enjoy using the Palm App Catalogue.

Best regards,
Palm App Catalogue Team

It seems like Palm is allowing all transactions failed or not to actually download the app as if it were paid for… Let’s hope they fix this problem real soon, I have already reported this to the palm app catalogue support team.

** UPDATE **
On a side note Palm, I suggest that you look into other live chat applications for your website. Using something that is Windows only is not very smart since there are a lot of Linux / Mac desktops out there now. I had to load up Vista in a Virtual Machine just to contact your support reps. At the very least provide an email address where your support staff can be contacted. I searched for support and all I came up with was the Live Chat with your reps.

Over the last few days I have been digging deep into the concepts of REST. I have been reading through my copy of RESTful Web Services. Out of curiosity I searched Google for a "php REST library" and it turned up the Official MySpace PHP REST Library.

I started to look through the code and noticed something really weird about how the code is structured. It looks like they are trying to use an Object Oriented approach however I think they are going about things improperly. The code looks a lot like the following.

Now the structure of these classes is fine, but it does bring out the question as to why they are using classes for this type of stuff. The classes have no methods, they have only provided public static properties. I am not sure why they took this approach. I am not sure if they are trying to remain backwards compatible with PHP 4 or not. If they are however I think they would be better off using constants for these values in the Common.php file, also I am pretty sure they are not trying to support PHP 4 because they are using the static keyword in the classes and I believe PHP 4 would FAIL with that being there. I am unsure why they are not using class constants. I would suggest a better way of doing things.

Even if they were to choose to go the PHP 5 way I would highly suggest that they do not use classes as containers for constants, there is no need to do this. It is not using proper OOP methodologies. Why create an object that just holds 2 - 4 constant variables, these would be better suited for define() calls in my opinion.

I am not trying to flame the work of others, I would just like an idea of why they are using these methods. Anyone reading this that knows the developers on the team feel free to have them explain what they were thinking when creating this code base.

One thing I have never understood is the fact that there is a huge lack of games out there for OS X. Even the small games like Tetris, Trism, Fastlane, are great games but where is the OS X version? I know that you will lose all of the accelerometer features but you could still have nice keyboard commands. I wonder just how hard it would be to port these games over to OS X. I wonder if this will ever happen? I know there are a handful of games and even less gamers on the mac but some of these nice small games would be good for me to put on the laptop for the kids to play.

I remember back in the day (4th – 5th grade) I would play “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” and “The Oregon Trail” and used to love these games. Trying to find something like that for kids today on OS X seems to be almost impossible. I did find one game that I know the kids will like and that is Wall-E. What happened to all the small games for kids though?

Until the other day the only iPod I had was the latest iPod Nano. It worked fine but when presented with the option of buying a 2G Touch pretty cheap I jumped on it. I connected it to my Mac Pro and it worked without an issue. I used it for a few days and everything was going fine. Last night my girl and I wanted to go running at the beach so I connected the iPod Nano to the Mac Pro just to charge it. As soon as I connected it I was presented with the good ol' Kernel Panic screen. I thought this was odd so I shut the system down and restarted. This time during the boot up process it gave yet another Kernel Panic. I disconnected the iPod Nano and restarted again. Everything went fine.

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The other day my friend Steven from Thoughtful Tree Software released a new version of his Inspector Framework. This new version includes both the framework and an Interface Builder Plug-in which makes it extremely easy for you to integrate this into your own projects.

After reading his blog post and watching the video that he has created it looks like a very nice addition to any application that would require an inspector style window. I might have to look at using this in my project the TomTom POI Manager. I am not yet sure what I would use this for but surely I can find a reason to use it.

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I ran into an issue with iTunes and purchased content a few months back. I had bought the Knight Rider season pass from the iTunes store. When ever I tried to play an episode I would be presented with a video window that was all gray and a nice little alert box telling me that my displays are not HDCP authorized. I got on the phone with Apple support and iTunes support and could not come to a conclusion as to why this was happening. I have a 24" Apple Display that is about 2 years old and a 30" Apple Display that is about a year old so everything should be golden. They are both HD displays so that is not an issue. Where the issue comes from is when Apple decided to make all of their iTMS content require HDCP displays. I guess this is some new standard although I am not quite sure why because I have never had a problem playing any of my content in HD format at all. After making an appointment at the Genius Bar and them telling me that there should not be a problem since my display is only a year old and suggesting that I contact Apple and get in touch with the Customer Care department I came home and did just that.

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As most of you know I have been getting more and more into mac development in what free time I have (which is not much). I have actually learned a lot about it with the help of some great guys in #macdev on irc.freenode.net

I have been trying to keep up with what is happening in the Cappuccino world as well because while that is not technically mac development they are making it so that you can develop interactive web apps in much the same way you do Cocoa Applications.

If you are not sure who 280 North is or what exactly Cappuccino is you can check them out at http://280north.com/.

When I first heard of Cappucino I was intrigued by the idea of creating a framework like Cocoa based on JavaScript. I really wanted to see what they could do with it. I was first amazed by the application that 280 North had written with it called 280Slides. This is a very impressive application to have been written completely with JavaScript.

Yesterday 280 North revealed an application called 280Atlas. I have to say this is another very well put together application and once again I cannot believe all of this can be done via JS. Building applications like this is going to be very nice considering you can store data on the server but have all of the code for the application run on the client side in their browser window. They are really making Cappuccino development very much like Mac Development using Interface Builder for the interface. This is going to save developers a lot of time in the code.

This really makes me want to learn JavaScript and front-end stuff has never intrigued me at all.

Over the last few weeks I have been using what spare time I have to learn Objective-C with Cocoa. While Objective-C has been easy coming from a PHP background the Cocoa frameworks have not. There are things in Cocoa Programming that I have to worry about that I did not have to even think about in PHP. Just a few of those things are Memory Management, The Main Run Loop, etc. I have never had to worry about any of that with PHP because the scripts are run and then destroyed. They do not take up memory and just hang around all day long. However if you are not careful with Objective-C you will have a lot of memory eaten up really quick.

Now I have been working on small apps mainly using NSBezierPath so that I can learn how to draw squiggles and straight lines by clicking the mouse just like you would with the pencil/brush or line tool in a paint application. While this really is boring to me I am being instructed to do this by a friend who is helping me along the Cocoa path.

So here's a plug for him.

Steven Degutis
http://thoughtfultree.com/

If you want to support me learning Cocoa I cannot say buy my products but you could go buy his. He is a great developer and has been very helpful along the journey. His apps are very nice and are rather inexpensive also. You can get all of his apps for around $30 (at the time of writing this) or buy them individually.

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I have been working on an OS X Application in my spare time. It is a TomTom POI Manager for OS X. I have a lot of features planned for the application so far however currently I am seeking to find someone who can design me some icons for the application. This application will be freeware in the beginning, if I can find a mapping solution that would allow me to use it in commercial software sometime it may go commercial but if it did it would be a long time from now. I will need the following icons and maybe will need more as time goes on.

New File
Save File
Send File to Device
Add POI
Delete POI
Image for Items on Computer
Image for Items on Device
Saved and Unsaved file state
I will probably also need some low res bmp images for use with the POI files on the device

You can see the UI if you click this link. Since this is going to be a freeware application I am looking for someone to either team up with me on this application or have cheap rates that I could afford.

I figured since I run my own blog (and it seems like they did some work on their editor) I would give Flock another try.  They seem to have incorporated more services and also their website seems to be redone.  I am not sure exactly what has changed with the release of 2.0 but I am going to check it out.

Have you been using Flock?  Can you tell me and my readers the biggest changes in 2.0?  Please leave some comments on this if you can.