iPhone

Pi Cubed Lite, the free version of Pi Cubed, has been updated to version 2.0. This new version is now available for download from the App Store. The new version brings many of the enhancements from Pi Cubed 2.0, such as a undo / redo support, unlimited saved calculations, a cleaner interface, and Retina display and iOS 4.0 support. This new version of Pi Cubed Lite does not have the iPad interface that the full version does, nor the built-in and custom equation library capabilities. Additionally, Pi Cubed Lite now serves iAds within the application and requires iOS 4.0 to run.

Version 2.01 of Pi Cubed is now on the App Store. The newly released version 2.0 had a bug where a specific type of equation was not being migrated properly to the new data model, leading to crashes on startup for some users when they upgraded. Thanks to David Kinney and the App Store review team's prioritizing of the bugfix review, I was able to push out this version fairly rapidly to deal with this issue. I apologize for the problems it caused and for somehow missing this during my extensive testing.

After an embarrassingly long time in development, version 2.0 of Pi Cubed is now on the App Store. The big new addition in this version is an iPad interface (free for paid users as part of a universal iPhone / iPad application), but this release also brings undo / redo throughout the application, a revamped user interface, and other tweaks.

Read on for more about this new version.

The videos of the Advanced iPhone Development class I taught this past semester at the Madison Area Technical College are now available for free on iTunes U.  These videos amount to over 35 hours of HD content, covering more advanced iPhone development topics such as Core Animation, multithreading, Quartz 2-D drawing, and OpenGL ES.  The course notes that accompany the class are available for download here in VoodooPad format, or for viewing here in HTML.  Links to all sample applications used for the class are present in the notes.

Read on for more about the structure and presentation of the course.

A new version of Molecules is now available on the App Store, and the available source code has also been updated.  The new version fixes a potential crash in iPhone OS 4.0 and adds a new means of directly installing molecular structures in the application.

On the iPad (and soon the iPhone), you can now drag and drop molecular structures into (and out of) Molecules using iTunes.  When your device is connected, you can go to the Apps tab and scroll down until the File Sharing section is visible.  Within that section, click on Molecules to display all currently loaded molecular structure files.  To add a new structure, simply drag it into the list of files.  On the next startup of Molecules, it will be parsed and added to the application's internal database.

Chicago hosted a satellite location for iPadDevCamp this weekend, and I had just as much fun as the iPhoneDevCamp I attended there two years ago. I had the privilege of speaking about Core Animation there, a talk where I crammed too much information into a one-hour space. My Keynote presentation is available for download here. The source code for the sample applications I showed off, NanoSpores for iPad and ReplicatorDemo for iPad, is also available for download.

I had also referenced my Advanced iPhone Application Development class for MATC. The final course notes for that are available for download here in VoodooPad format. UPDATE (6/29/2010): The final video for my class on Core Animation can now be found as part of my class on iTunes U.

Thanks for organizing the event go to David Kinney, who pulled the entire thing together despite having a busted MacBook Pro. He proved that the iPad really can be a work device. It was also extremely generous of TechNexus to allow us to use their very nice facilities for the weekend.

You might have noticed that I updated Molecules to make it version 1.4, which adds some rendering enhancements and bug fixes for PDB searches. However, the highlight of this release is the addition of an iPad-specific interface. Additionally, now that iPhone OS 3.2 is publicly available, I have released the source code to the universal iPhone / iPad version of Molecules.

Read on for more about this version.

For those of you in the Madison, WI area, I thought I'd let you know about a course that I will be teaching next semester called Advanced iPhone Applications Development. The course will take place Wednesday nights at the Madison Area Technical College (MATC).

Read on for more about the course.

After a long hiatus, I've finally updated Molecules. Version 1.3.2 is an update focused on performance, with few new features (much like a certain OS version). Rendering speed has been nearly doubled, larger structures can be displayed due to memory optimizations, and a faster search interface is used when communicating with the Protein Data Bank. As usual, the source code for this version is available.

Read on for more about what's new in this version.

TheAppPodcast.com has posted a video review of Pi Cubed, which explores the features of the application from a layman's perspective. As a disclaimer, I commissioned the review, but the reviewer has been honest about other applications that he's looked at. It's worth viewing if you would like another perspective on the application.