I’d like to setup my own wave server long term and just federate over to Google’s (and other people’s systems).

At the time Firefox was a breath of fresh air. It was just a browser without all the mail, IRC client, web page designer that came with Netscape. It was very fast. It had cool features like tabs. Linux was well supported.

Over time this has changed and I find Firefox getting slower and less relevant. The developers seem to be under the impression that Firefox users are their personal army to push web standards. I only used Firefox because it’s a tool not because of any social movement.

Things like how Firefox handles SSL, specifically self-signed certificates are a pain compared to other browsers. I hate it when my browser crashes and I lose all open tabs/windows. Things seem to get worse every new Firefox release.

In the past I didn’t have much of a choice, I had to put up with this as under Linux there wasn’t anything else available. That however has changed with Google Chrome. It’s much better than Firefox ever was and I’m now using it full time.

The GNOME developers have also dropped Firefox/Gecko and are moving to WebKit. This is the same engine Google Chrome uses as well. In the very near future, I except Firefox will no longer be the default browser in most Linux distributions.

On Windows, I also expect Firefox usage will drop. Microsoft has made Internet Explorer v8 much better and somewhere in Redmond they are working on v9, v10, etc. As people upgrade to Windows 7, willl they keep using Firefox? I suspect IE will start be “good enough” for most people.

On the Mac, most people are going to use the default and that is Safari.

When you look at the mobile scene it’s much the same. Microsoft is going to use IE in Windows Mobile devices. Google has another WebKit based browser for Android. Apple has Safari on the iPhone. Nokia will use WebKit as they now own QT.

Notice how the industry seems to be standardizing on WebKit? The odd man out there is Firefox. Who is going to use Fennec on their phone?

Another thing to consider is that the Mozilla Corporation gets most of their funding from Google. It’s not very hard to see that coming to an end too as Chrome becomes more important.

I defintely noticed the speed increase on the 3GS compared to my old 3G. New camera is nicer. Haven’t tried the video out yet or the compass.

It’s a decent upgrade for sure.

Note there is an iPhone SDK available for Snow Leopard now (400MB download) at the iPhone Dev Center

Too bad Apple insists on phyical CDs. Would be nicer to just buy an ISO and I could burn my own DVD to upgrade.

Hopefully this upgrade won’t cause any issues with XCode/iPhone development.

• Fixed problems with MMAJunkie news feed
• Show title/description for news articles
• Replace WAMMA with Strikeforce in Champions view
• Remove deprecated APIs

Note that MMATracker now requires OS 3.x so if you are still using 2.x now would be a good time to upgrade.

Screenshot of news view in portrait:

In landscape:

The code that I was using:

NSURL *xmlURL = [NSURL URLWithString:URL];
NSError *err = nil;
NSString *xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:xmlURL encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&err];
if (err) {
	// handle error
}

After some trial/error, I determined the problem was the encoding. It was ASCII instead of UTF8. The feed is coming from Feedburner which is owned by Google. Seems odd they would stop using UTF8.

To fix this, I used the following code:

NSURL *xmlURL = [NSURL URLWithString:URL];

NSError *err = nil;
NSString *agentString = @"MMATracker";

NSMutableURLRequest *req = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:xmlURL];
[req setValue:agentString forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];

NSData *data = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:req returningResponse:nil error:&err];
NSString *xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[data bytes] length:[data length] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
if (xmlFeed == nil) {
	xmlFeed = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[data bytes] length:[data length] encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
}

if (err) {
	// handle error
}

I’ve talked to other developers and they have noticed the same thing. Perhaps Apple is having trouble keeping up with demand.

Local scores though are limited in use. They are good if you want track your personal best effort in a given game. How many other people use your iPhone/iPod and would play a given game? Probably not many; maybe none.

Global/Internet based scores are more interesting. I think it encourages people to play games more due to competition with other players. That can help word of mouth sales, if someone likes your game(s) and they get their friends to buy it and see who is the best.

The more people playing your games can create more opportunities to sell in app purchases. You can obtain better metrics of who is playing your games and how they are doing (Is it too easy? Too hard? etc.),

Long term it’s not hard to see Apple putting something together like XBox Live that developers could plug into for these purposes.

Today you are on your own. I did see one open source system called iGetScores. The server side is written in PHP with a MySQL backend. It uses OAuth. The client code is not small and you’d be adding around 40 files to your project. It seemed to be more complicated that it should be.

I wanted something simple and am looking to writing my own.The basic requirements would be to accept new high scores and to be able to get a list of them for a given game. From a security point of view, accepting data from random users into your database can be an issue. You need to consider people trying to use SQL Injections or denial of service attacks. You have to deal with people who might try to cheat and put in false scores.

I was thinking about having a shared secret where by the iPhone/iPod that wants to submit a score, encrypts the data with a shared secret and sends to server. The server then decrypts the data and inserts into the database after some validation. Depending on encryption used that might cause export issues for some countries.

You could use the UUID of the iPhone/iPod to keep track of submissions from people and use the date/time of the request to see if that person has submitted anything before. If someone tries to post multiple scores within a few minutes and you know your game would take at least X number of minutes to complete, you could throw that out as a fake.

I’m still thinking it through and I don’t have a full design yet. I’m still flushing things out. I’ll have more to say about this later and maybe some code too.

To be continued…