For any of you in Las Vegas this weekend too… drop me a line; would be great to have a drink or play some blackjack.

Validating Apple App Store receipts for In App Purchase can be a pain, so I wanted an easy way to throw a receipt in and figure out if it was a valid or not.

So, I threw together a quick PHP script to figure this out quickly and easily; it takes a base64 encoded receipt as the input and will tell you if it is valid or not.

Give it a try:

The script is hosted at http://www.chrismaddern.com/validate-itunes-receipt/ and you’re free to use it – it will also take the url arguments receipt and sandbox to run without requiring input. If you would like to script it automatically as part of a deployment etc… I would ask that you host your own version, the code is available to download below:

Get the code

I hope it helps!

This post was originally created for the iPhone App Cafe article: 10 Essential iPad Apps That Let You Leave Your Laptop At Home

I recently had the experience of being away in New York and decided to leave my Laptop at home. Instead, by my side would be my trusty iPad. Great in theory; lighter, longer battery life, great web and email experience but can you really do everything you need on just an iPad? I think you can…with these 11 apps (that’s right, 11, one is a game!)

To give some perspective… I have a couple roles in the world right now. I’m CTO of Corkbin; a wine memory and sharing platform, CoFounder of Launch Team; an alternative incubation concept in London and consult on various technological areas in-between. My days are spent mixed between endless emails, development, basic design, release management, concept planning etc…

So the Apps that have made me reach for the iPad and not the MacBook air are:

1. Pages, Numbers and Keynote 

Notes will often do the job, but leave you having to copy and paste content out with no formatting etc… These three apps let you have an office suite on your iPad to get the job done and ticked off – not 70% done with some finishing off to be done when you can get to a computer. Technically 3 Apps but it’s one suite so I’ll let it go!

2. FTPOnTheGo Pro 

This may or may not be necessary for you, but for anyone working on a web project, direct access to your FTP Server with a built in (basic) editor is invaluable. This lets you make quick edits to your web content wherever you are or share things to the web.

3. Team Viewer 

There are times when you just really do need a computer. And for those times, Team Viewer can let you connect to your computer at home and achieve that task. A file you need to add to the Dropbox, a quick iOS recompile etc…

Read the full review of Team Viewer.

4. Drop Box 

Are all of your files in Drop Box? No…? Well they should be! Drop Box lets you access and keep up to date, your files on all your devices. You Can even open the file in the appropriate editor and save it back! Genius! Works great with Pages, Numbers and Keynote!

Read 10 Best iPad Apps for Business.

5. WordPress 

If you blog then you need this App.

6. Things (or Producteev) 

Task management is super-important and both Things (flat cost) and Producteev (subscription) do a great job of tracking your tasks, projects etc… And most importantly, keeping those tasks in-sync with the mother ship and between devices!

7. Skype  

Conference calling with video on your iPad. Enough said.

8. AppCooker 

Another one which may be quite specific to my role, but if you prototype iOS Apps then this is a no-brainer… Just as good as mocking them up in XCode!

Read the full review of AppCooker.

9. Twitter 

If you use twitter, then this is the best iPad experience going. Manage your companies twitter account – the push notifications make it easy to know when people are mentioning your brand and manage your reputation online! 

Read 5 Really Cool iPad Apps For Free.

10. Photoshop 

Its relatively basic, but most image manipulation tasks are catered for; resizing images, altering colours, cropping, adding text and more… Great for when you need to quickly edit an image for an Article, presentation or document.

Read 5 Really Cool iPad Apps For Free.

11. Angry Birds HD 

Because… All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy!

Read 10 Most Addictive iPad Game Apps Ever Made.

So these are mine. What tools let you leave the laptop at home and lean on the iPad alone…?

Apps which have been pulled can be downloaded by going to your purchased history and finding the app in question – you can even go in to view the description and screen shots which is an interesting insight to how Apple keep the App listings. You can also share the app but attempting to access it from anywhere other than the Purchased screen will result in a cannot connect to app store.

Note: the iCarCheck app was deleted from one account and remade on another for legal reasons. Both are now available.

Only the new iCarCheck is available in the store:

Past (pulled) version appears in the ‘Purchased’ list:

We can view the description:

Installing….

Installed!!

Shared….

Fortunately… still not available through the standard path!

So – there you have it, get any old pulled Apps that you’d like quickly as they are going to HAVE to fix this!

See – no dev account necessary.

For screenshots of iOS 5 in all it’s glory see iOS 5 First Look Screenshots!

First impressions – the new functionality is awesome, but this beta is not for everyone, I’ve come across a couple bugs already.

Setup

There is a new Setup Wizard for Post-PC setup. I lost most of the images from this during the sync, but here are the few left!!

Notifications

iMessage

This post in Safari Reader – meta!

some more screenshots:

I’ve made a few attempts at this before (that have lasted less than a day each!), but for the past week I’ve begun teaching myself Objective-C and working on an App for submission to the App Store.

Objective C isn’t the easiest language to move to, despite what Apple seems to have droves of developers willing to testify – infact, it’s probably the most difficult language to ‘penetrate’ of all the high level languages. That said, the potential benefits and uses of being able to create applications to work on what will likely become one of the most ubiquitous platforms about are enormous.

So, I’ve now gotten to the stage of having a working Application on my iPhone (having payed for the Developer account) with it’s icon etc… It can run a sockets server, and connect to a sockets server. Hurrah.

Over the next 3 weeks (my aim for this app being to a stage where work will be polish and not interesting to write about), I will be posting most days about my progress  and letting you in on how the process of getting an App in to the App Store goes.

Wish me luck!
Chris

I love my iPhone. It took a while to ween me away from wanting to actually be able to store and organise my files, control directories, copy files on and off my 16GB £400 memory card, install applications that haven’t been through your ridiculous process, copy and paste (until very recently) data etc.. etc…

None of that really matters though, because the processes that you have put in place to achieve the functionality (for the most part – still annoyed I can’t put files on my 16GB £400 memory card) is sufficiently slick that I forget that I ever had a pictures directory where I could organise my images, or a documents file where I may store items that I consider to be ‘documents’. As did I forget that I liked to be able to copy and paste data because whenever a piece of data was somewhere, and you wanted it to be somewhere else, there was a nice little button that said ‘move this data in some useful way to this other application’. Great.

The problem with this system, is that when you don’t get it right, it’s annoying. It’s very annoying. I was stuck for a year with 16GB £400 memory card / phone that I couldn’t use to ever share contact details with anyone else by any means other than email. ‘I’ll just text you their num….’, oh wait… there is absolutely no way to achieve this without a pen and paper. Really!?

The latest – navigating to an event with the location stored in the extensively marked-up ‘Location’ field in the event. There is no way to request that the iPhone show you how to get there from your current position (which it also knows). So.. in order to get to the ‘Location’ of an event, you have to edit the event, copy and paste the location. Close the event. Open Google Maps. Paste the location. Request that it kindly show you how to get there. This seems like a perfect place for another one of those context-driven buttons. ‘Directions to Event from here’. Yay!

Somebody replied to my tweet on this subject by saying ‘Location!=Address’ – and yes, congratulations, semantics have not defeated you on this occasion. I remember however, when I purchased Office 2000 (9 years ago!) and it began to underline text in emails that represent addresses. Moving closer to home, Mail in OS X does this very thing – they have the code!

Apple, I love my iPhone, but just because we have Copy and Paste now (finally) doesn’t mean that I want to start feeling like I’m using a WinMo device; I still want an intuitive experience, an Apple experience.

Can we please have directions to an event location?

Thanks,

Chris

Most of the bugs listed in my original post are fixed :D.

Also, the folks over at the iPhone Dev Team have released a Jailbreak. This means that we can finally use unofficial tether applications (PDANet being my preferred) on the 3.0 OS.

In order to Jailbreak.. head on over to http://www.quickpwn.com/downloads and download the latest version. If you have an ‘activated’ contract iPhone, do not select ‘Activate’ in quickpwn or it will kill your baseband (you will get no signal).

Hope you guys enjoy as much as I am!

Chris

3.0 is great. It’s a considerable step forward, there are lots of wonderful new features (I’m not going to document them; google iPhone 3.0 beta walkthrough ), instead I’m going to focus on the issues in these features, what I think they’re going to fix, and what they’re in danger of leaving in place!

Copy and Paste: Wonderful feature that’s been missing for a *very* long time. The implimentation is excellent, except that it activates far too often. For example single clicking almost anywhere in the SMS text box will invoke the Select, Select All, Paste bar. It’s often broken in safari and seems to cause you to loose the ability to move the cursor using the single finger hold in multi-line text boxes.

iPod: In podcasting, I am incapable of selecting the top item in any ‘listview’. This is rediculous and actually makes it impossible to listen to my most recent podcasts without going through other ones and track skipping. The alphabetically first podcast is inaccessible. Full Stop.

iPod: iPod will often freeze the playing progress bar while listening to music. It can also get stuck on play while not playing when using the controls on the ‘locked’ screen.

Send Contact Details: I’m happy to see the inclusion of sending contact details via MMS and Email. There is no reason that you can’t SMS someone somebody else’s phone number. Default layout being First Name Last Name Phone Number Email (if available). You can then ofcourse delete anything you don’t want, or select which phone number (if there are many) to send.

Safari: Besides the issues listed above under copy and paste, Safari now seems to randomly crash and close relatively often. I’m sure this will be sorted.

Safari: Copy/Paste seems to want to grab ‘elements’ as opposed to

The ‘Network’ pane in Settings takes an ‘age’ to load. Interestingly this is the pane that purportedly includes the tethering settings.

Phone: Phone would often freeze when beginning calls – prompting it to appear that it wasn’t calling, but actually be ringing. It also frequently crashes and closes when going to the ‘recent’ tab of the application.

Spotlight: Very excited about this one. I’m not sure that the UI is final; I for one would certainly like it to change. It’s a little sluggish getting accross to it, but I’m sure that’s for the reason above. It doesn’t index / search SMS. No SMS. Why no SMS? That would be one of my key items that I’d like to search! Hopefully they’ll add that!

Voice Notes: This is one of the slowest, and most horrid to use applications ever. Pressing the record button has quite a pause before it records, it doesn’t fit the iPhone UI at all… the meter looks stupid. It’s just really bad. The syncing is very good though! :)

Okay.. and just completed my downgrade to 2.2.1. It works and is easy; I’ll post a guide for that too!

Chris