It may just be that before my days of programming I solved all of my problems using a spreadsheet, but my most used and favorite app on the iPad is Numbers from Apple.

Since 1990 I have been tracking my finances using a spreadsheet.  To be fair there were a few years in there where i tried Microsoft Money and when I switched to Apple I tried Quicken.  But my fallback has always been a simple spreadsheet.  If your like me you pay your bills when you have the money, and in most cases for working folk that falls on a biweekly basis.

My spreadsheet is pretty basic. In the first column I list any income sources I have and all of the bills that i expect to pay.  The second column is the amount I expect it to be and the third column is the frequency(or in the case of monthly bills the due date).  At the top of each of the next columns I put the day I get paid (in my case a friday), and I usually make this calculated.  Each column represents a week, with the oldest week to the right and the upcoming weeks to the left. When I want to add new weeks to the spreadsheet I simple insert a column between the third and fourth columns and I have a new week.

Using this method its easy to determine which bill should be paid out of what funding source.  When I receive a paycheck or pay a bill, I change the background color of the cell.  A simple sum in the last row will let you know when your going to have a shortfall, and you can even add rows for budgeted items like food and entertainment if you like.  I use one last row called additional spending which I use for any money I spend that is not a bill and then I carry over my balance from the previous week to let me know if I am making a profit over time.

A quick search of google will find you thousands of spreadsheet templates you can use to do almost anything.  For this reason I have found Numbers to be the one application I open the most on my iPad.

Over the last year I have been working on a project for the Army.  Not wanting to give away trade secrets, I decided it was best not to blog anything rather then filter myself or risk damaging my company in some way.  Now that that project has been released to the public, I feel like its time to start giving back to the iphone community.  I intend to expand my subject matter to include the iPad, and continue the educational series of posts which were so popular.

You can download the project I have been working on for free from the app store.

I have always looked at my brother in law, John, and been jealous, he has the kind of right brain creativity I always wished I had.  He can listen to a song on the radio and sit down and play it on the keyboard.  He can envision a graphic in his head and lay it down into photoshop in only a few minutes, having it look as good as it did in his head.  I on the other hand I am a left brain, I can look at a problem and find a logical solution that is not obvious to most,  I can read and understand the logic behind the most jumbled of code.  Give me a problem and I’ll find the solution in a book or a web page, understand it and adapt it as necessary for my purpose.

I always feel as though I can come up with clean designs, but there is always a logic or underlying pattern.  John’s designs are clearly superior and have that artistic feel.  That is why I am happy to announce that John and I are teaming up to produce the next great iPhone app.  I can’t give you any details yet, but the development is well underway and I expect to submit it to the App Store later this week.

My dad was always trying to make money on the side when I was a kid.  He would buy stuff in bulk and sell it individually to make a little extra money for the houshold.  I can still remember not being able to walk through our living room because it was filled with “Moon Boots” (for you young-ins these were boots that looked like the boots worn by astronaut on the moon, they were a big fad back in the 80’s).  One of his acquisitions brought home a crate of the then popular Rubik’s Cube.  Ok, so in all fairness they weren’t really Rubik’s brand but some off brand competitor.  The major difference was the corners were angled and the cube was somewhat smaller.  But they played exactly the same as a Rubik’s.

I was in fifth grade, and I would play with this thing non-stop eventually I learned how to solve one color.  One day I realized I could solve two colors by solving opposite sides, it was easy to tell which sides were opposite based on the middle color, and if I limited my moves I could solve the corners of opposite sides.  Eventually I figured out that I could then solve  the middles of these opposite sides without affecting the corners.  For a long time this gave me a way to solve all but four pieces of the cube (the middle row between the two solved sides), and the cool thing was that one in four times it would just work out that the cube was solved.  So if the cube didn’t “solve itself” I would just mess it up again and start over until it did.  As you can imagine this floored the adults in the room, here i was age 11 solving a cube that was considered impossible by all of them.  Initially I think they even thought I took it apart and put it back together, but I was able to show them my technique to their bewilderment.  Still unsatisfied with the one in four chances of solving the cube, I came up with a 32 turn move that would swap two of the pieces, this meant worst case scenario I could solve the cube from this state in only 64 turns.  Through sixth grade I honed my craft, taking apart my cubes and loading them with vaseline so they would turn quicker.  Practice makes perfect, and I would notice shorter combinations of moves that would accomplish the same thing.  Eventually I was solving the cube in under a minute and even faster when I got lucky.  

Several years later I was still using my cube solving ability to impress people in college.  I took a class in Artificial Intelligence from Janus Searlman at Clarkson University and as my class project I decided to build a rubiks cube solver.  I developed several algorithms in C at the time but never actually finished the project, I ended up dropping the course due to a nasty strep throat infection (or maybe it was too many parties) that threw me off by several weeks.

Every time I learn a new programming language or platform, I think I want to finally develop that Rubik’s cube solver but I usually defer to something business based to make money.  That being said, I am so envious of Eric Faller, the developer of Cube Cheater.  Not only did he implement a solver on the iPhone but he did it with great graphics and a handful of features that make this thing very impressive indeed.  The cube entry feature is done very nicely, it’s intuitive and easy to use.  It even checks to make sure the colors you enter could actually be a state of the cube.  Then I was blown away, you can actually take several pictures of your cube and the program will scan them and fill in the colors for you.  I have had a few small problems on my cubes with the difference between orange and red, but overall it works as promised.  After your cube has been entered, the program finds an optimized solution and then walks you through the solution graphically as you follow along.  Well worth the 99 cents for any cube enthusiast, or any person that just want to finally see those six colors back in place.

Congratulations Eric, I hope you are rewarded well by the App store.

This is my first post in what I hope to be a series of educational posts explaining concepts you must understand in order to write an iPhone app.  If there is a topic you would like to see covered leave a comment and I will do my best.

A Delegate is an object that handles tasks for another object.  A delegate is required to handle certain tasks defined by the protocol for the delegate.  If you look at the protocol definition for a delegate in the Apple documentation you will see that some tasks are marked as optional, you may handle as many or as few of these tasks as you wish. You must handle all tasks that are not denoted as optional in order to conform to the protocol.

By way of metaphor imagine an assistant (the delegate) and a manager (the object).  When the manager needs to fax a document he is in great shape because he has a delegate to do this.  The assistant must know how to handle faxing a document given the document and a phone number.  So the manager provides the assistant with this information and the assistant handles the rest.  The manager knows that because the assistant conforms to the protocol for assistant it will be done.  The manager does not know how the assistant will get this done (local fax machine, go to a kinkos) that is up to the assistant.

To make an object a delegate you simply put the protocol name between these symbols <> in the @interface definition, after the parent class definition and before the opening bracket.  If a class conforms to multiple protocols they are seperated by commas.  For example:

@interface DetailViewController : UIViewController <UITableViewDelegate, UITableViewDataSource> {

says the Class DetailViewController is a type of UIViewController that conforms to the protocols UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource.  An object of this class would be able to be a delegate and a data source for a UITableView.   

To set a delegate for an object you simply call the setDelegate: method for the object with the object you want to be the delegate.  For example:

[myTableView setDelegate: myDetailViewController];

where myTableView is an object of type UITableView and myDetailViewController is an object that conforms to the protocol UITableViewDelegate.

A Datasource is another type of protocol that is very similar to a delegate, but affects the data used by an object.

You could write, and many have, an entire iPhone app using just one UITableView with a delegate and a data source.

It’s no secret, I eat too much.  This has affected my health and for 2009 I have decided to start eating like a normal person in an attempt to lose some weight and get healthy.  I have searched for many programs to help me do this.  I have even used several online service that ran $9.99 per month to track my calorie intake.  Finally an app has come along that does everything I need, and best of all it’s free!  

Lose It! tracks all my food calories and exercise, and even graphs my weight results.  The program has a large database of common foods as well as restaurant and brand name products.  It has cute little icons that represent the foods you eat, you can even add your own foods and recipes.  I can’t quite figure out there business model, as the program is free and i can’t find any advertising in it.  

I have been using it for two weeks now, and I have lost 10 pounds.  This has allowed me to eliminate two pills I was taking for my diabetes and my blood sugars are averaging 106.  I’ve got a long way to go but I’ll get back to you on how well it works over the long haul. 

Ok, so there is one thing Mint doesn’t track, cash. So unless I use no cash I can’t really trust their budgets. Pennies gives me the ability to track all of my spending to make sure I stay within budget.  Ok, i’ll admit it, let me know when I go over budget.  

This apps interface is incredibly simple to use and pretty to look at.  As a developer I am jealous that my Poker Notes app doesn’t have such a simple interface.  It’s so easy t enter expenses that you can do it quicken than you can get the money out of your wallet.  

With this and Mint, I get an overall picture of where my money is going.  Now if I can jut find an application to print money i’ll be set.

My new favorite App is Mint! I have completely replaced my addiction to Quicken. There free web service is compatible with all of my banks, even paypal. And their iPhone app gives me quick look at my finances. If they add the ability to change transaction catagories without going online it’ll be perfect.

Poker Notes is my second attempt at an iPhone App Store app.  This is a much more complex application, it took me several weeks to develop all of the underlying algorithms.  I have been working on an update, but due to the lack of response to this application it has been a sideline.  

This app uses Sqllite, a UITableView and a custom UIPickerView to select cards.  This was the app I was developing as I learned the iPhone SDK.  I hope to have the update done soon.  

Preflop Odds, my first app hit the app store last august. Programming was the easy part. Getting it submitted was a complex tedious process.

First, being Ron Miller is not quite Joe Smith but as far as Apple was concerned it was. There software could not differentiate me from another Ron Miller who was an Apple developer but not an iPhone developer. Then it was very confusing getting my code signed correctly. Not to mention coming up with the graphic design for the icon.

The first day sales were very encourageing, I sold over 50 copies, and I thought I had my new career outlined. It has since dropped off considerably.