If you are a member of M*, click here.

Notified-Notifications the way Apple should have made them.

This is what the update includes:

• Greatly improved theming system: Themes are now stored in a different folder and you can preview and apply them on the app itself. For more about themes, go here.
• Bug report mail form inside the app.
• Some extra settings.
• Bugfixes

What was left out:

• Podcasts, Audiobooks and Genres were left out until the next version. The reason: adding them with the current system would be painful, and so the menu system  is going through a rewrite to be a lot more flexible and faster.

Enjoy!

With this team I’ll be working on MS Extensions, mainly, right now I’m working on SnowCover 1.2, and another couple of interesting projects.

Our website is currently in the works, but you can follow us on twitter.

The members of the EyeDevs are:

• GiLo – Dev.
• Me – Dev.
• Elias – Graphics
• Dew – Graphics

A big thank you to all of you who did buy the app, and for those who didn’t, consider doing it if you like it! We’re not a big company (we’re not a company at all!), and it would encourage us to bring you updates and more cool apps (Our apps are only getting better!).

Either way, enjoy it!

If you don’t know what iClassic is, you can look here.

Now, a little something you should know: to avoid any legal action against us, we had to make some changes on how iClassic looks. However, we made sure it was easily themeable (the images you need to theme are 5), so users can submit their themes to Cydia to customize the look of the app (There might be a couple, already).

Eventually, the support for themes will be a lot better, and I’ll add a guide on how to make them.

So, head to Cydia with your Pay Pal account and get it, it’s only 2 bucks!

Some cool stats:

• Since we made it public, the iClassic page of this website has gotten 2600+ visits.
• The average visits to this blog was multiplied by 20.
• My twitter follower count went from 33 to 102.
• The app has been featured in more than 15+ different sites (it’s not easy to count because not all of them are linking to us)
• Our thread in iPodTouchFans.com has more than 16 000 visits and over 200 replies.

The app is going into the Cydia Store, which is run by Saurik. To have the package on the Cydia Store, we need to give our payment details to Saurik, and I’m guessing he has to do stuff on his server, before we send the package for hosting (it will be on BigBoss’ repo, btw).

And that’s the problem. Saurik is unreachable. We’re assuming, from his last tweet, more than a week ago, that he’s still on Germany, but it’s just a guess, the fact is that he’s not answering. (I read somewhere that we were waiting for Saurik’s approval. That’s not the case).

Please understand, however, that it’s not Saurik’s fault, he probably has important things to do, and  we can’t blame him for that, so I’ll ask anybody who ever thought of trying to contact him to complain, DON’T. If you e-mail him, you’ll only bury our e-mails even more, and a lot of people tweet to him already, don’t spam him more for no reason.

Finally, the app is working, and we’ve sent review versions to some people (3, as of right now), and until Saurik answers, I won’t have any updates. When he does, I’ll announce it, and it shouldn’t take longer than a day for the app to be available.

PS. I know there are other stores (like the Rock app), but we’re gonna stick with Cydia Store. If anybody deserves a share of our profit, that’s Saurik, also, the Rock app requires you to install a bunch of stuff and we don’t want to force you to have on your device.

It’d be a lot of help if you helped me spread the word for this, by clicking in one of the “Share and Enjoy” buttons below!

EDIT: The app is available on Cydia now. (Yay!)

Compared to the hype iClassic has generated, this app probably doesn’t mean a lot, but it’s my very first public app, so I do care for it .

Anyway, I updated it a little bit, adding an “interface”.

About a week ago, I bought a car stand for my iPhone, and an iTrip that does charge it, and I started using it a lot, but using the iPod.app, then I realized that it would be cool if I could keep the interface (big artwork, mostly) but use swipes instead of buttons, and I also realized it’d be REALLY easy.

So I opened Interface Builder and I started to “drag n’ drop” (I’m still not a fan of IB). Made the connections (almost too easy), and done, it now has some basic track info.

I also added a volume bar, and a button to select the music you want to hear.

Here’s a screenshot:

nil is ObjC’s null, which means that the pointer to the object doesn’t really point to anything. This is usually when you haven’t created the object.

However, in ObjC, nil is much more useful than in other languages. In languages like Java, if an object is null and you try to do pretty much anything with it, it will fail at runtime. nil is a lot more flexible.

In ObjC, you can send nil as a parameter for a selector(that’s how methods are called on ObjC, will use that from now on), receive nil from one, and even call  a selector on nil.

Why is this useful?

This is useful mostly to avoid checking if the object you got is nil every time you get an object, or before you call a selector on an object you are not sure. If you have some complex code which doesn’t always initialize objects before sending messages to them, you don’t have to worry on checking if the object is nil or not.

(You can even call something directly on “nil”, like this [nil setText:aText];, though it will give you a warning, and it isn’t useful at all )

Sometimes you’ll receive nil, and you don’t have to check that object before sending it to another object. For example, if you want to get a song lyrics and then send it to an UILabel, you can just send it without checking it, and it won’t crash.

Another cool thing you can do with nil, and objects in general, is using them as BOOLs. If you need to know if an object is nil (for example, before initializing it (under some circumstances)), you can do if(anObject){}, and if anObject is different from nil, it will happen, if the object is nil, it won’t.

What do I get when the selector I call should return something, but I call it on a nil object?

When the selector you call is supposed to return something, and the object you call it on is nil, it will return some defaults:

• nil if the return type is an object.
• 0/0.0 if the return type is an integer/float/double.
• NO if the return type is BOOL.
• If the return type is a struct, it will fill it’s fields with the above rules.

Things you should look for

Releasing an object will not set it to nil. If you release an object that might get called in the future, and you are not gonna initialize it right away, you can do anObject = nil; to make sure that if you send a message to it, it doesn’t fail.

You shouldn’t take your nil habits to other languages, because chances are that the language won’t support it and it will fail .

First, create a folder called data, then make a folder inside called DEBIAN.

Insided DEBIAN you’ll have to make a text file called control, no extension, which will hold the info of your package. Here’s a small template for an iPhone OS package:

The only field you should not change is Architecture.

Now, inside data, put the files to be installed in an absolute path.

For example, if your files go inside /Applications/YourApp.app, create a folder called Applications, inside it create a folder called YourApp.app and inside it put the files.

Another example, if your files go into /var/mobile/Library/App, create a folder called var, inside that one a folder called mobile, inside that one a folder called Library, inside that one called App and inside that one put your files.

Easy enough I think.

Now, open a terminal and point it to where your data folder is.

Then execute this command, replacing PackageName.deb with the name you want the package to have:

The result will be a deb file in the same folder you are standing in.

That’s for a simple package. Another thing you can do is add bash scripts to be executed before/after the package is installed/removed.

This is as simple as adding a plain text file called preinst/postinst for pre and post install scripts and prerm/postrm for pre and post removal to the DEBIAN folder.

This can be used, for example to remove any settings saved by your app.

Another interesting field you can add to your control file is Depends: anotherPackage (>= 1.0), this tells dpkg that your package depends on anotherPackage, and that it should be at least version 1.0. If you are installing it via terminal, it will fail to install if the needed package is not installed. If you are using apt, like Cydia, it will try to install the required package.

If you are making a theme, for example, you might want your package to depend on Winterboard.

For more info about the control files: LINK.