Magpie and Feed Encoding (or “Why are there question marks everywhere?”)
So I’m working on a website that uses MagpieRSS for parsing a feed. The feed had those pretty quotation and apostrophes in it, but when Magpie parses the feed, they all get turned into question marks.
So, for future reference, you can force Magpie to parse the feed according to the encoding you need by setting a constant before calling magpie:
define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');
That’s all. Your feed will look good.
If I Had a Photograph of You (or “How to Cache Images in CocoaTouch”)
A quick note. Wanting to cache images in an iPhone app? Load the image using:
[UIImage imageNamed:]
if you use:
[UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:]
the image will not be cached.
iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor
This may come as a surprise to some of you, but debugging applications on the iPhone is no picnic. I know, crazy, isn’t it! It’s next to impossible to get the information you need from a customer’s device without building in some method to send the user’s preferences, data, etc. right into your application, which just seems messy.
Luckily another developer has created the iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor, which extracts all of the data for an application from the backups made by iTunes when you sync your device.
What a wonderful thing. Thank you, Pádraig.
MyGarden (or “Is There an App for My iPhone to Track the Things I’ve Planted?”)
My first app for the Apple AppStore is finally in the queue waiting approval to appear in the AppStore. It’s called MyGarden, and keeps track of the things that you plant in your garden.
Apple OS X WebDAV doesn’t work right (or “How To Redirect Carefully”)
I have a WebDAV server that I store all of my personal documents on, and after upgrading to Tiger awhile back I had problems with folders disappearing in the directory listing, and things just not working quite right.
It turns out that the Apple WebDAVFS (and some other WebDAV client implementations) have problems with the Apache WebDAV. Just a minor incompatibility, but annoying nonetheless. There is a configuration change that needs to be made in the httpd.conf to fix this problem:
BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.+" redirect-carefully
This should work for all future 1.x versions of WebDAVFS on OS X. I limited it to 1.x assuming that maybe, just maybe, they might fix this “problem” in version 2.0.
It’s a simple change, and will make Apache “redirect carefully”. For those interested, Apache says:
This forces the server to be more careful when sending a redirect to the client. This is typically used when a client has a known problem handling redirects. This was originally implemented as a result of a problem with Microsoft’s WebFolders software which has a problem handling redirects on directory resources via DAV methods.
If course, I would think it should always be “careful” about redirecting, but that’s just me. Maybe redirecting carelessly is the best default.