As an iPhone developer it’s crucial to be able to make sense of those pesky crash logs you get back from your testers. Unfortunately Apple’s tools offerings in in this area aren’t much to write home about — they appear to require a few specific pre-conditions to be met.

Make sure you have the necessary intermediary build files to hand:

1. Create the symbol files — *.dSYM — as part of your build process.
2. Keep a copy of your symbol files and your Application Bundle for any builds you wish to debug.

When setting up your environment, experimentation shows that the following is required:

• Snow Leopard — while I have seen nothing official, I have been unable to get the scripts to work on a Leopard machine.
• The Application Bundle and symbol file should be placed in the same directory as your crash log.
• There should be no other copies of the symbol file on your Mac — Symbol files are located by the script using Spotlight and it gets confused if there are multiple copies.

Symbolising a crash should then simply be a matter of running something like the following command:

/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DTDeviceKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/symbolicatecrash -A -v crash.log  > decoded.log

Being that I am quite useless in updating my blog, I can only imagine that my readership (small though it might be) are quite unaware of my recent travel arrangements. That is, with the exception of those 79-or-thereabouts who follow me on Twitter.

Representing a relative departure from my usual travels, I am currently aboard flight KQ0117. This will take me into Nairobi from where I shall onwards to Uganda and Entebbe. Usually attracted by the bright lights and expensive restaurants of the West and, more recently, the East, I have never found much appeal in Africa, venturing only once to Egypt with my parents a number of years previous. Now, with a friend (as all newly trained doctors seem to) serving out his medical elective in the town of Kiwoko, I find I have cause and my recent departure from my job gives me oportunity.

I shall endeavour to catalog the events of the next few weeks in coming posts which, I expect, will reflect the usual mélange of emotions with no shortage of culture shock as oft experienced during travel.

Returning to the UK, one inevitably flys into Heathrow and then takes the Heathrow Express onwards into Paddington. Despite the all-too-common feeling of sadness brought about by the conclusion of a journey, I still find the fantastic Victorian architecture at Paddington a reminder that there is something special about Britain.

On Friday last week, I tried to capture just a little of that grandeur:

Flutter is a light-weight iGoogle Twitter client and is the first of a number of small personal development projects I intend to release in the coming weeks and months.

It is offered as an alternative to the fairly heavy-weight user experiences offered by many of the existing iGoogle-based solutions. All tweets, including replies and direct messages are re-threaded into a single feed to avoid switching between multiple tabs:

As the post title suggests, Flutter is currently in beta and, while I encourage everyone to give it a try, do expect to find a few pesky little bugs. I look forward to hearing about all such occurrences and will endeavour to fix them as soon as humanly possible. (Contact details can be found on the about page.)

Give it a shot: Add Flutter to iGoogle

Not an iGoogle user? Check out the standalone version.

On Authentication

Currently authentication is performed by passing users’ credentials directly through a POST request to Twitter via the server hosting jbmorley.co.uk. I am well aware this is exceptionally in-elegant; it merely serves as an interim solution until OAuth support has been implemented so please bear with me.

The Future

Suggestions and recommendations are always gratefully received. I am personally considering providing TweetDeck-like behaviour in the Canvas view, but this will require some internal rearchitecting so it’s some ways off right now…

It never ceases to amaze me what is created on the internet. Wordle is a case in point, offering a rather interesting alternative way to view text and websites.

This site looks quite different — already Twitter represents a large portion of my content.