Probably Interactive

Film fans everywhere will be sitting before their TVs on March 7th to catch the Academy Awards. Now, as with so many other things, there's an app for that. Vanity Fair Magazine has produced the free Oscars app called Vanity Fair Hollywood. Users can submit their predictions for winners, browse photo galleries, share comments and prediction results via Facebook and more. Of course, you can chat in real time during the show itself from within the app and watch trailers of the nominated films. I'm not an Oscars fan, but I often fire up Twitter when watching my beloved Red Sox because the accompanying chat makes the experience more fun. For more iPhone fun on Oscar night, check out these apps: [Via TechCrunch] Read More

...you get to do the daily training that gives you five different mini-games to complete. After you complete them you get evaluated, and hopefully you get a better rating than the day before. The rating is the percentage of your brain that you use. The first time I tried it I got 8% and felt like a complete jackass. Each time I tried it after that I have bettered my brain usage, even though I thi... Read More

by on 30. Sep, 2009 in Early this summer I started playing around with MacRuby, which lets Rubyists create native OS-X applications. While I love Objective-C, scripting languages have speed-of-development, memory management simplicity, and other advantages. Getting Ruby running on the iPhone is challenging; while I’m sure it’ll get there, I wanted something sooner. I started investigating how I might wire up — and then write native iPhone apps from — a scripting language. Lua was on my radar already. It’s compact, expressive, fast enough, and was designed to be embedded. Took only about 20 minutes to get the Lua interpreter running on the iPhone. The real work was to bridge Lua and all the Objective-C/CocoaTouch classes. The bridge had to work in two directions: it would need to be able to create CocoaTouch objects and also be able to respond to callbacks as part of the familiar delegate/protocol model. I tweeted about my intentions. Corey Johnson responded that he’d been working along the same lines and, dang-it, his implementation was exactly what I had in mind. It’s called iPhone Wax, it’s brilliant, and Apple has already approved one app using it. In the remainder of this post, I’ll walk you through getting it set up, show you how to creating a project featuring a UITableView, and close with a section on its roadmap and tools support. iPhone Wax is available on GitHub. You can either clone its repo or download a zip of the latest code. Once you’ve got the source, change to its directory, and type rake install — this will install an iPhone Wax project template in Xcode. Let’s create a simple project: The iPhone Wax Xcode template does the heavy lifting, creates a project with a UIWindow and an embedded, bridged, ready to use Lua interpreter. The iPhone Wax project template is a ready-made “Hello World” application. Build and Run the application to see it in action. While still in the app from the previous step, take a look at the Lua source that drives the application: open init.lua in Xcode’s editor — you’ll find it under the scripts folder under in the Groups & Files panel. The Lua-to-CocoaTouch/UIKit bridging syntax is easy to pick out from the example. After requiring the wax library, the code contains this instruction: window = UI.Application:sharedApplication():keyWindow() The Lua window variable will be assigned keyWindow property of the sharedApplication singleton/class-member of the Read More