You loved the iPhone wireframe template, but now you want to design layouts for the iPad? No problem. Here’s an iPad wireframe template for you.

If you’ve ever needed to create an iPhone wireframe of your app, but coudldn’t find a Photoshop template that didn’t suit your needs, then this could be just the thing for you.

Most other templates are too bogged down in the aesthetics of the iPhone. My template just provides a bare-bones outline of the iPhone, full size. Over on the right is a preview of what the template looks like. You can click it to view the large preview.

[UIApplication sharedApplication].idleTimerDisabled = YES;

From the selection of applications I regularly use, one scenario is poorly catered: using the iPhone as an auxiliary display. Not necessary to display information directly from a connected Mac (i.e. an auxiliary external display), but a way of display information streams from news sites, social networks, and such like.

For example, wouldn’t it be great if you could use your iPhone as the primary display for your Twitter stream while it is plugged in? Let’s take Twitterrific 2.0 as an example. It has an option that will automatically refresh the active timeline at predefined interval (I’m not sure about the other Twitter clients available for the iPhone, but I know Tweetie does not have this option). However, even if you have your iPhone is plugged in, the auto-lock will still kick in after a couple of minutes. Frustrating, right? Let’s see how we can improve the user experience in our apps when the iPhone is plugged in.

This scenario can broken down into two parts: determining whether the device is connected or not to a power source; and detecting when this changes. As of iPhone OS 3.0, both of these tasks are straight-forward to implement.

Determining whether the iPhone (or indeed, the iPod Touch), is connected to a power source can be done by using the new-to-3.0 battery monitoring properties of the UIDevice class. First, you have to enable battery monitoring by setting the batteryMonitoringEnabled property to YES and then you can query the batteryState property. If it is either UIDeviceBatteryStateCharging or UIDeviceBatteryStateFull, you know the device is plugged in. For example:

UIDevice *device = [UIDevice currentDevice];
device.batteryMonitoringEnabled = YES;
if (device.batteryState == UIDeviceBatteryStateCharging ||
	device.batteryState == UIDeviceBatteryStateFull) {
	// The device is plugged in
}
device.batteryMonitoringEnabled = NO;

Detecting when the power state changes involves registering a selector for the UIDeviceBatteryStateDidChangeNotification:

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
                                         selector:@selector(batteryStateDidChange:)
                                             name:UIDeviceBatteryStateDidChangeNotification
                                           object:nil];

I’ve uploaded a sample application that demonstrates these three techniques to GitHub.

<link rev="canonical" type="text/html" href="http://flic.kr/p/6jZucD" >

As I write this, there doesn’t seem to be a way to retrieve this URL through the page itself, so I wrote a bookmarklet that would pull the canonical short URL from DOM tree. I’ve tested the bookmarklet in Firefox and Safari.

Drag this to your bookmark toolbar: 

public static string GetMD5(string text)
{
    System.Security.Cryptography.MD5 md5 = System.Security.Cryptography.MD5.Create();
    byte[] inputBytes = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(text);
    byte[] hash = md5.ComputeHash(inputBytes);
    return Convert.ToBase64String(hash);
}

It’s worth noting that Unicode encoded strings in .NET are actually Little Endian UTF-16 encoded. PHP 5 provides native support for UTF-8 strings (via utf8_decode and utf8_encode), but not UTF-16. Luckily, PHP contains a Swiss Army knife of a function for all multi-byte string conversions, mb_convert_encoding. We can use this function with the UTF-16LE encoding to convert ASCII strings to Unicode strings. The PHP documentation has a full list of supported encodings. Re-writing the above C# in PHP, we get the following:

public static function GetMD5($password) {
  $pwdUtf16 = mb_convert_encoding($password,'utf-16le');
  $hash = md5($pwdUtf16,true); // 'true' tells md5 to use the raw string bytes
  return base64_encode($hash);
}

One of the contenders, James Bowthorpe, is already 5,000 miles into his journey and is making his way through Thailand as I write this. The second contender, Julian Sayarer, starts his adventure on Friday, June 5th. Each rider has their own crystal-clear agenda. For James, this is to raise awareness and £1.8 million for a Parkinson’s Disease research charity. Julian, on the other hand, has grander intentions. His website carries a simple, yet strong message: this is not for charity.

Faced with a world where corporate greed and misguided politics are the mainstay, and the sense of community, which once drove this fine nation, is in rapid decline (no thanks to the greedy corporations and floundering politicians), Julian wants to remind us all what society is really all about: the simple things in life. Such as the bicycle. A truly momentous invention for all mankind.

For me, one of the interesting aspects of these adventurers is the way in which they are adopting social media to further their message. Both James and Julian have blogs, use Twitter, and either are using, or intend to use, flickr and YouTube to share photos and videos with their supporters. As a fervent users of these social networks themselves, I can certainly see the attraction in using such a simple medium to reach out to hundreds of people when everything around you — the sights, the sounds, the people, the language — is alien. More importantly, social media allows these guys get to control their own message without it being muddy by the traditional media institutions. This I like a lot.

Mark Beaumont, meanwhile, is about to head to Anchorage, Alaska to start a journey covering some 15,000 miles. He plans to cycle from Alaska to Argentina, and climb the two highest peaks on the continent: McKinley and Aconcagua. Like his previous adventure, his endeavour will be filmed for a BBC documentary, The Man Who Cycled The Americas. If you can’t wait, you can follow¹ him² online³ just about everywhere.

External sites: ¹ BBC; ² Twitter; ³ flickr

A couple of weeks ago, I sowed some Peach Habanero chilli seeds and I needed a seed propagator to nurture their germination. I could have gone to any of my local garden centres and bought one for a few quid, but I decided to see if I could make my own.

You’ve probably heard about the little moneysaving tip of using toilet paper rolls as seed pots. I wanted to do something along same lies (that is, taking essentially household rubbish and giving it a purpose). I found that the shallow plastic trays that you get tomatoes in was just the right size to hold 6 toilet roll seed pots. The cloche is fashioned from a clear plastic punnet. The type used for plums, peaches, etc. provide the best headroom as the grape punnets are a lot less deep. It also turns out that the length of the punnet is roughly the same as the tomato tray, giving a neater finish to the ensemble.

As you can see from the photo above on the far right, the propagator worked a treat and the first seedlings are just starting to push through.

My mind keeps going back to the Open C2C. I’ve dreamed of making the journey from west coast to east, either by foot or by bike, ever since my university days, but have ever got around to doing it. The plan was always to take a couple of weeks to gently saunter across the country. The idea of making the journey in 4 days is something I find incredibly exciting and tempting.

Of course, the usual thoughts flow through my mind: do I have the mental fortitude to endure 4 straight days of, let’s face it, physical self-torture, will I complete it, just how tough is it really.

The deadline for registration isn’t until July so there is plenty of time to mull it over yet.

For the last week, I’ve had a text file on my desktop and whenever I thought of something I would like to do, I jotted it down in the file. So here is the list:

• Lower my body mass to 65 kg
• Run 8 km in 40 minutes
• Cycle 100 km per week
• Complete the orienteering course at the Padarn Country Park
• Boulder at V5 (for non-boulderers, that’s F6c, 6a, 5.11, etc.)
• Take up sport climbing
• Complete in at least one adventure race
• Learn the basics of Welsh
• Take more time off from work
• Take a real holiday at least once

Some of the goals are pretty easy (a map of the course can be purchased from the gift shop in the slate museum car park!) while others require a lot more commitment. I would go so far as saying that 7 out of 10 are challenging. However, I’m not one to back away from a challenge.

The adventure racing goal involves some sports I already enjoy doing (running, mountain biking, etc.) and will give me a chance to try out some new sports, such as kayaking. The trouble is selecting which event to enter! I’ve already identified several, one of which is a fairly epic 4-day event. I have a feeling I’ll be entering more than one.