Day Job - Bye Bye MLB, Hello Hot Potato

So, it’s been 4 or so years since I started at MLB, and it’s been great. But, it’s over. I’ve been lucky enough to become involved in a new venture with some old co-workers and some new friends.

It’s called Hot Potato and I’ll be working there full time once friday passes, which is my last day at MLB. I’m hoping I’ll be posting here more often, talking about the process we’re going through there to launch our product. I think it’s going to be pretty awesome, and I hope you will too.

Ok, enough for now. Hopefully, I’ll have some good stuff to share here soon.

Day Job - MLB.com At Bat now with Push/In-App Purchases

Just a quick update. MLB.com updated the iPhone app to have Push Notifications and In-App Purchasing to stream individual games. Pretty fun stuff to work on, and big thanks to all the different teams at MLB.com that brought this together, especially Warner, Emily, Mohammad and Tracy who all did some great dev on the actual client.. Great stuff.

TUAW weighs in on it.

iTunes link.

Touch Factory - Update

Things are coming along with Touch Factory. We’re talking 80%. But the last 20% will probably be the hardest. I just wanted to let people know it’s not dead.

Sorry things are taking a while. I want things to be “Just Right”, and if they are not, well, then I don’t want to release it.

Fingers crossed for finding the time.

//jeremy

Day Job - MLB.com At Bat Reviews Boston

A few reviews so far…

“Why can’t all iPhone sports apps be as good as MLB.com At Bat?”

- Boston Herald

“MLB.com At Bat 2009 hits a home run!”

- TUAW

“The 2009 edition of MLB.com At Bat is out for the iPhone, and it looks great.”

- Daring Fireball

and lots of tweets on Twitter

- Twitter search

DevTip: Abuse threads

Sometimes your interfaces can become clunky. You hit a button, or slide a slider and things get all stuttery. No good. People hate that and so should you. Usually this is because when your control (button, slider, tab, etc) calls back to your handler, there is too much work going on.

Just start a new thread. This sounds simple, but sometimes people over look it. I ran into this when I was adding the volume control on the new audio stream player for MLB.com At Bat. I thought, yeah, no problem, I can make a call to the audio session and store the value in my user defaults in real time. Easy! But no, it made the volume control sticky, so I had to spawn threads. See below.

In Interface Builder, connect your control to your handler for the given event the IBAction below, and then in that method, start a thread and don’t wait around for the result.

- (void) threadedTargetMethod:(id)object {
   //Do you time consuming stuff
}


- (IBAction) targetMethod:(id)sender {
   [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(threadedTargetMethod:) 
                          withObject:nil 
                       waitUntilDone:NO];
}