Renaming an Xcode project

If you're anything like me, you always start off your lovely new iPhone project in Xcode by giving it a cool name with a space in it somewhere - quite why I don't know, but I always do.

That's fine for when you're working in your development environment, but before you submit your App to Apple you have to ensure there is no space in the executable name. One way of doing this (that I've used many times in the past) is to create a new project and then drag all your code and resources back in.

This got a bit tiresome, so I thought I'd write a little script to automate it - but before doing so had a quick Google.... and Monte Ohrt has the ideal solution, a bash shell script to rename Xcode projects.


usage:
renameXcodeProject.sh <OldProjectName> <NewProjectName>


You can find it here. Perfect.

What's going on with Twitter and is it good for business?

A little history on Twitter

Twitter seems to be exponentially growing at the moment. From what started as a 'what am I doing' type messaging service, Twitter has crept into some really diverse areas.

Incase you have been hiding under a rock, let me explain a little bit about Twitter:

"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as Tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive Tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications." - source wikipedia

Essentially, think of Twitter as an SMS message but over the internet.

Twitter started life around 2006, but popularity really took off in 2007 - yes it has been around for some time (in internet time scales), and yet it's only in the last year that it appears to have been pushed by all.

If you use any social sites like Digg, Stumbleupon or del.icio.us then you will be aware that during any given day several posts seem to be Twitter related.

We're now seeing (in the UK), our local government business advisors (business link) running courses showing people all about Twitter and how it is the 'thing to get into' with various expos around the country running Twitter keynotes.

I can sit down with Sky News on and throughout the day they will refer to their 'Twitter correspondent' - a Twitter corespondent! Now that's a new job title. Little did the Twitter creators know just where their simple message service would infiltrate.

For my business?

With Twitter reaching so many then it makes sense to explore its usage for your business. However, like all good things Twitter gets spoilt by SPAM. Getting the balance for your business is key to it being useful, but one important must do step is to at least sign-up and protect your brand. If you are called utopia 365 then you want to try and get utopia365 as your user name on Twitter (no spaces allowed). To explain, Twitter accounts have a simple webpage on the Twitter.com website which displays your Tweets (Statuses). This page is called whatever your account name is, so if I sign-up to Twitter as utopia365 then my Twitter page would be found by going to http://www.Twitter.com/utopia365.

I now have the choice to Tweet (and view Tweets) on my webpage, or I can use a Twitter client on my PC,Mac or mobile. A Twitter client is just a piece of software to view and post updates to my Twitter page.

When you sign-up to Twitter you can (and should) fill in your profile. Here you can tell people a little bit about yourself (which is useful for people searching for you or your services/products).

You can also customise your Twitter page by changing your background, font and colours to reflect your brand and identity.

If we look at http://www.utopia365.com and http://www.Twitter.com/utopia365 we know we are talking about the same company.

   

Contact us if you need help with this.

So with our Twitter account we can now post messages and hopefully people will be interested.

What to write?

This really depends on what your business is. To some just letting people know what you are up to (perhaps what project you are working on or if you are at an expo) will do. An online shopping site might want to let you know about special offers etc. that you may have. This was bordering on the SPAM lines several months ago but it is generally accepted now that if people are following you it's because they want to know whether you have a good deal or not. It's nice to offer vouchers or discount codes to your followers.

Others who offer a service such as IT Support might want to talk about recent IT related news, quick fixes for common problems or perhaps some performance tips. This tells people you know what you are talking about and are willing to help/approachable. Whilst it might not directly result in a sale, it will enhance your reputation and that's something worth achieving.

Perhaps you have job vacancies in your business? Tweet it and you will find a cheap, but popular way to recruit.

There is a great article in the New York Times talking about how Twitter may start allowing easy purchasing, shopping reviews and more.

Is it working?

If you are going to 'Tweet' then you'll want to measure if it's helping. There are a couple of ways to help achieve this:

1) When posting links, here use a URL shortening service which logs clicks such as U2W3.

2) Ensure your analytics can track and filter traffic sources (i.e. your Twitter page).

Applying the above when I post a link on Twitter, before shorten it using a service like U2W3. Lets say I want to post about "http://utopia365.blogspot.com/2009/06/internet-in-your-pocket.html" - using U2W3 I generate a URL which points to the above but gives me a shorter URL "http://www.u2w3.com/182b5".

That's not the most useful part though. When someone clicks this link it gets logged, tracked and I can see people are actually looking at what I have posted:

Looking in Google I can see that Twitter is also one of my traffic sources, so my Twitter account is indeed drawing new visitors.

Steps

1) Sign up to Twitter and configure/customise your account

2) Signup to a URL shortening service such as U2W3

3) Ensure you have some analytics such as Google

4) Ideally use a Twitter client such as TweetDeck, Nambu or Twitteriffic. There are lots of advantages to using these but that's another article

5) Tweet (ensuring links are produced from a service like U2W3)

6) Monitor your followers and follow others with relevance.

7) Use a service like http://monitter.com/ or http://Twittermass.com to help with step 6.


A miracle answer?

Don't believe the hype. It's very rare to have an overnight success using Twitter. Building a solid marketing campaign through Twitter with useful information and worthy followers will take time. Stick with it, nurture it and watch it develop. You will make mistakes. We're first to admit that our own Twittering needs to be cleaned up and brought back on track.

Need help?

Contact us

It's taken a while! We've been ever so busy with the paint, the magic wand and the odd sprinkling of clever dust.

And, finally - today we are very happy to cry out to the world with a single, and very simple statement...

"The new utopia 365 website is live!"

You can see it at www.utopia365.com, but in the meantime, here are a couple of tasters for you.....

Going with a very utopian design (naturally), the site is packed full of lovely content, jQuery effects, AJAX and other goodies - but fully W3C compliant (and friendly on the iPhone).

We went with a fixed background (something we would normally avoid) because it works really well for the design and content. We must admit a little inspiration comes from the look and feel of Twitter.

We've had a couple of designs and several 'holding/information pages' over the last year, but this is here to stay and it's a keeper.

Take a look through, find out what we do and let us know what you think.

'The internet in your pocket'?

Taking the web by storm

There is no doubt that the iPhone has decimated the mobile internet with around 80% of web traffic on mobile devices coming from the iPhone. That is an impressive feat to achieve in such short time.

How did this happen? Well, the iphone has an amazing interface which when added to their wonderful safari browser finally made browsing websites on an phone a joy rather than a headache. Being able to render a page quickly, pan around, zoom in etc. on a normal page "just worked".

When you read Apples own website we see that they state:

"And like the original iPhone, it combines three products in one — a revolutionary phone, a widescreen iPod, and a breakthrough Internet device with rich HTML email and a desktop-class web browser. iPhone 3G. It redefines what a mobile phone can do — again."

That is some statement to make for a mobile, but mostly I agree with it - having been a user of nokia, samsung and sony smart-phones I can safely say the iPhone finally made browsing the internet easy, and more to the point I could see what I would see on my desktop or laptop. The internet was in my pocket.

Telling us how to browse (we're trying to be helpful)

When the stats started rolling in on the iPhone web usage people suddenly took it seriously. Wow they said "we're getting loads of traffic from a new device"! It was then that they (the people who know best) decided to 'help' our browsing by the introduction of 'iphone mobile optimized web-pages'.

Surely this is a good move though? We get the content all formatted in a nice way that suits our device. Mostly I will agree, but I have some issues with it.

Lets look at the BBC website on my mobile:

That looks ok, I don't mind it and I get access to the information I want. However, there might be times that I want the 'proper' website, after all I am using a mobile browser with a desktop-class web browser. When I visit the bbc on my phone they automatically take me to the mobile-optimized site. Thankfully if I scroll to the bottom of the mobile site I see I can have a choice by clicking on the desktop site.

There is still a slight issue; with the ease of implementation surely would it not be wise for the site to store which version I want as my default instead of forcing me to the mobile version? I know they are trying to help, but give me the choice.

So what do CNN do?

Well we get the same auto-detect telling me that I want to see their content in an optimized fashion, but from what I can see they do not give me the choice to access their content other than the 'mobile optimized' version.

    

To me, this is poor design - here I am on my desktop-class web browser and they are forcing me to view their site in what I consider a poorly designed layout. At-least the BBC gave me the option.

What are we asking for? Choice, simply the choice. It's sometimes very appropriate, and very nice to 'auto-detect' the browser being used and set the content appropriately, but please let there be a way to get to the standard desktop content (and ideally let me store my choice with a cookie).

On my experimenting I came across a site that I really did not think would block me on my iPhone....MobileMe.

Right, so I am on Apples iPhone which they claim is a 'desktop-class web browser', using a service that is aimed at mobility and they auto-detect and block access to me! Surely this cannot be right? According to the web-page I can access all of the features on my iPhone or iPod Touch? Firstly that's incorrect and secondly so what? Let me access the content from my web-browser! I cannot access 'my account' on the iPhone unless Apple have secretly rolled out a 'my account' iPhone App? Did I miss that? I can't use 'locate my phone'? Ok, so you might say if you are on your phone why would you want to locate it? Well, if you have a couple of phones under the same mobileme account then it shows them all, handy.

Perhaps it's because mobileme is put together in Flash? Nope, it's solidly built web/javascript and CSS wizardry. It should and would work on my iPhone. I am not given the choice though and I for one think that's a poor show Apple.

Views?

U2W3 | A URL shortening and redirection service

Hot on the heals of usherto, we announce U2W3 (beta) - a URL shortening and redirection service.

U2W3 is available at http://u2w3.com

* Create public/shared U2W3 URL redirections
* Sign-up and create your own U2W3 URL redirections
* View the number of hits (redirection requests) your URL's receive, the top referral HREF's and the top user agents (browsers) used to acces your URL's
* Manage your U2W3 URL's and hide or remove them when required

Announcing usherto

Today we announce the release of usherto - email marketing minus the muddle.



* Create and send your own email campaigns
* Manage subscriptions, un-subscriptions and email bounces automatically
* View reports and stats on just about every aspect of your campaign
* Only pay when you send
* Just a flat delivery fee of £5, plus 3 pence for each recipient

Visit usherto.com for further information and to request a free sign-up.

iChart2000 Released

We're happy to announce that iChart2000, an iPhone App we undertook on behalf of Thomson Software Solutions has finally been released.

Submitted a couple of weeks ago it's now been approved and available for download in the App Store.

iChart2000 is a new software application designed to run on the iPhone or iPod Touch. The superb graphics capabilities and user interface of the iPhone make it ideal for near vision testing. iChart 2000 includes a huge range of near vision tests (acuity, reading, fixation disparity, stereopsis, Amsler etc.), a range of charts scaled for 3 metres for domiciliary visits and a toolbox for those tricky optics-related calculations.

Media Training 101

We're pleased to announce the launch of Media Training 101

for jackAnaCommunications.



We were commissioned by them to produce an iPhone App which would be effective at delivering their content.

Media Training 101 provides the user with invaluable information when dealing with the Media. This can be TV, radio, newspapers etc. In-fact, we think it provides great information for anyone that does any speaking - be that public or presentations.

Powered by UTBookReader the App has the ability to deliver interactive content whilst allowing the user to choose their own reading styles and themes. The addition of multiple bookmarks and notes allow you to study and assimilate the information.

Moving on from IE6 (forcing the issue)

I'm not a developer (Andy does all the clever stuff), I dable.

What strikes me though when developing sites and apps for the internet is the amount of 'voice' regarding how horrible developing for IE6 is.

You spend all this time putting together a nice site or app which sits nicely in Firefox, Safari and Chrome - then load it in IE and despair....sigh, you then move through the site hacking it to play nicely with IE6. This can be a tremendous amount of work depending on what features you implement into a site.

We then despair that things are not moving on and we have to keep doing this extra work for our clients.

We've recently introduced a simple policy - if you want IE6 support then you have to pay extra.

And any personal work (for instance my own site), I have simply dropped support for anything below IE7.

What strikes me is unless the web-developers stop supporting IE 6 then the problem will never go-away. We're the guys that drive it, so if we make the point that the site wont work in IE6 then people will have to move on and upgrade their browsers.

People don't like change, so if a site sits pretty and functional in IE6 then why should they upgrade?

Naturally there is a slim possibility you might loose some work by not actively supporting IE6, but if most clients understand that for the web to evolve they need to help evolve it by NOT supporting a dated engine, then I think you'll find many will support it (and for those that don't they simply pay extra).

There are many ways to let users know they really should be moving on. I use a very simple method (which is probably not the most efficient):

<!--[if IE 6]>
		< meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=ie6.html" />
		< script type="text/javascript">
		/* <![CDATA[ */
		window.top.location = './ie6.html';
		/* ]]> */
		</script>
<![endif]-->

I then display a simple page telling the user to go upgrade, and give them some links to the latest browsers. One day I will make a pretty version of this, but for now it gets the point across.

If enough developers make the stand then in the long-run the web will be a happier place....

Announcing Masterspares update

Almost one year on and Mastersparesonline.com has had a slight update.

We've introduced an advert/promo column to the site along with popular 'tags' and extra information into the home-page.



You may have noticed that Masterspares also switched to using Google Checkout several months ago which has been very successful.

However, like many on-line traders, Masterspares is considering moving to a direct-bank merchant system due to the controversial new charging system that Google is implementing, which starts in May.

For those that are unaware, Google are increasing their fees bringing them in-line with other online payment systems like paypal. Many have complained at this sudden price hike (where google actually become more expensive if you accept payments from overseas customers). The real 'sting in the tale' though is that they will no longer offer a credit in fees for traders using their popular Adwords system. This had made Google Checkout an exceptionally tempting option for traders.

Thankfully our checkout design means switching would be painless, but we are waiting to see if Google back-tracks on the Adwords credit removal. Time will tell....

Masterspares supply domestic appliance spares, accessories and sales for hundreds of manufacturers. They are celebrating trading for 10 years and have become one of the south-coasts premier suppliers for Dualit, Miele, Kenwood and Sebo amongst other makes.