Hi everyone,
I’m happy to announce that Mealstrom 1.1, our long-awaited first update, is now available! This update hugely improves the application, making it more table, less buggy, and better looking. While there’s not a lot by way of cool new features (boo), I’ve significantly firmed up the code to make a founation for future updates, the first of which is almost ready (yay). Think of the app as being like a mango. When you first brought it home with version 1.0, it was hard and unripe but promised better things to come. Now, with version 1.1, you’re holding a soft, ripe, and delicious fruit. (Yeah, that’s a terrible analogy, but I’ve been eating a lot of mangos recently.)
New UI
I wrote about this a month ago when it was first submitted, but I’ll recap the updates here in the format I’ll use going forward.
Significant updates:
- Picture uploads have been improved; images sent over 3G are less compressed and hence look better online, and images sent over wifi are not compressed at all.
- You can now sign up through the app via an iPhone specific webpage (something that should have been in v1).
- The UI has been updated, grouping different parts of the form in a more logical way, and generally improving the look and feel.
- The app acts appropriately when there’s no network connection, queuing your meals for later transmission with an appropriate message.
- Many stupid and annoying bugs were fixed.
Known bugs:
- When you add more than three pictures, enabling scrolling in the picture view, the application no longer allows you to magnify or delete any of the images. Fixed in 1.2.
- When you transmit images over a 3G connection, image orientation is lost — any vertical pictures will become horizontal. Fixed in 1.2.
- If you transmit more than one queued meal at a time, you’ll get a message at the end saying that a transmission error occurred, even though all meals were successfully sent.
That’s about it — time to get back to cooking, preparing for a wedding, and, of course, preparing the next Mealstrom update. I’ve been focusing a lot on the iPhone recently, but plan to get back to the website after two more updates (1.2 and then 1.3, which will incorporate Facebook Connect.)
Have a great night and happy eating,
Alex
iPhone Signup Page
Old UI
I had a rather nasty experience this morning; after Xcode froze when installing Mealstrom onto my iPhone, the device reset and then stopped booting up. When I tried to turn it on, the Apple logo would appear, then it would power off. Fixing this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my afternoon, but under these particular circumstances, involuntarily not having a phone wasn’t sitting well. If it had been totally busted or stolen, I would probably have made a phone holiday out of it, but since this was something caused by software and probably fixable, I was anxious to get it resolved.
My initial searches turned up nothing that worked on my phone, so we went to the Apple store. The staff were helpful, but I found out in no uncertain terms that they can’t support any iPhone 3.0 devices until it’s officially launched. The resident Genius suggested I call the Apple Developer Connection, once it opened on Monday. (A day and a half with this hanging over me?) As a last ditch effort, I threw a different set of search terms at one of the store Macs, and discovered a post about Device Firmware Update (DFU) mode. I gave it a go, and on the second attempt, sure enough, it worked.
In case this might help anyone, here are the steps I had to take to get my iPhone working again. I’m guessing it should work for any iPhone (at least any 3G model) on any version, though I’m not 100% sure; I was running 3.0 beta 5 on a 3G. I’ve adapted these from an article on Livecrunch — they have my deep gratitude.
- Connect your iPhone to your computer.
- Turn iPhone off (if it’s on).
- Hold the power and home buttons together for 10 seconds (exactly).
- Release power but keep holding home until the recognizes the iPhone (a beep, a message on iTunes, etc.)
- iTunes should acknowledge your iPhone shortly and tell you it needs to be restored. If you’re running 3.0 beta before the final version is released, don’t start with iTunes. It won’t do any harm, but it’ll fail.
- Open Xcode and choose Organizer from the Window menu. You should see “iPhone” among the iPhones listed. Select that, choose 3.0 as the software version, and hit restore.
- Livecrunch reports that you might encounter error messages such as 1601, 1602, 1600, etc.; if you do, they suggest putting the iPhone into DFU mode and trying again.
- Wait. It takes a while, but at least Xcode tells you what it’s doing. After about 5 minutes, the restore should be complete, and your iPhone will prompt you to connect it to iTunes.
I did all this in the Apple store, where I was surprisingly unbothered despite spending chunks of time coding and playing with the phone. I guess as long as you’re using Apple hardware, you can get away with pretty much anything there. In the end, my iPhone is happily working, and that’s what matters.
We’ve moved!
Hey everyone, all my tech blog posts are now at my personal blog at http://blog.twoalex.com. I’ll keep blogging about Mealstrom here, but you should hop on over there to check out the latest and greatest about technology (and food) in general.