Ben S. Stahlhood II's Blog

Creating native iPhone applications

2008-01-04T22:51:00Z

I just wanted to let you guys now that I just posted a guide over at www.cocoamachine.com on how to do get setup for native iPhone development on your Mac using Leopard and XCode 3.0. I have this blog and my Mac blog. I try to keep them separate unless I feel the information is useful enough to post here too. Some of the stuff I will be doing will be related to C#, Mono, and Mono on iPhone. I had talked to Zac Bowling awhile back and he said Mono on the iPhone is a mess, but that he was hacking on it. I will keep you posted once I have more info.

Okay Scott, you and your team rock.

2007-12-22T03:49:00Z

It has been awhile since my last confession. Having kids sucks the time right out of you. Nothing puts it in perspective like having a couple. You hear about it all the time, but until you have some, you have no clue! I have been busy with my job and new family. I am loving every minute of it. My son, Benjamin Scott Stahlhood III, will be here in 23 days. He will be the next hacker in the family. His ultrasound picture had the number 013370 on it, that is just a sign of things to come ;)

Scott Guthrie and company have been rocking lately man. I have to tell you, I am super impressed with what has come out of that team recently. I am sorrry. I am sure I am setting my self up as flame bait here, but ASP.NET MVC framework is a Ruby on Rails killer. It is awesome with a capital A baby. It has plenty of time to get better too. It is nice to see that Subsonic is making its way to ASP.NET. I think it was a great move for Scott to contact Rob. Rob is a great addition to the team.

I have had a lot of stressful things going on and that has sucked the extra time I used to devote to helping out the community and working on cool projects that others can use and from using can learn. Things are looking pretty good and I hope to get back into helping the community out.

Scott, you and your team rock. Keep up the great work. Even thought it does not matter from a an average Joe like me, tell your team they rock too and I appreciate all the great stuff you guys are doing. It is great to see killer tools being released for the developers. I feel you guys are truly being innovative and delivering from a developer point of view.

Everyone be careful over the next week. Have fun, but don't endanger others!

XM Interface Cable, XM Protocol Spec Document, Hybrid Mobile

2007-03-25T00:04:00Z

It has been awhile since I posted on my blog. I have been super busy with getting Hybrid Mobile off the ground. Hybrid Mobile is doing a lot of cool things, and a lot of these things I speak of will finally be usable by the public sometime in July. Hybrid Mobile has a business plan with many phases, the first of which is the automotive market. I am excited to be working on this stuff. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I have developing it.

We finally are selling our cables again. You can get a XM Interface Cable that is RS232, which will plug right into an XM Commander or XM Direct, and allow you to have XM Radio on your computer. You can purchase an XM Direct or Commander at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or Circuit City. You can get purchase them in many places, but I figured I would mention a few.

You can now get a Hybrid Mobile XM Interface Cable at our website: http://www.hybrid-mobile.com/OurProducts.aspx

You can also find the Hybrid Mobile XM Protocol Spec Documentation at our website: http://www.hybrid-mobile.com/OurProducts_Downloads.aspx

The XM Interface Cable Basic Home Edition is the one most people get to work on development. You can message me through my blog, if you would like any help. I will be releasing all my C# code for XM and Sirius as open source on our new open source page, which is coming soon. I am working on updating the XM Protocol Spec document and I am creating a new one for Sirius Radio too. All the code will be tested on Mono with Windows, Mac OS X, and various Linux platforms. That way everyone gets some love ;)

We have a lot of new products on the way, including some new ones for XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please let me know.

C# Telematics/Infotainment HTPC Pimp My Ride Take 3!

2006-11-06T19:07:00Z

So my C#/.NET based software Mobile Media Center has now been used in 3 Pimp My Ride vehicles. It was used in the ice cream truck this season, a Pontiac Solstice for GM based on a James Bond theme, and a Lincoln Navigator with motorized Wine Rack in the back :) The Lincoln Navigator was at the SEMA show this past week in the Gaplin booth. Mad Mike just called us and said he now wants MMC in his personal SUV :) We are doing a totally unique skin and some custom stuff for him to show off. We will be doing OBDII integration and CAN Bus / HVAC control for him, which is some of the new modules I have been working on... cool stuff. A lot going on too that I can not talk about here... yet.

It is being designed to run on Mono, so MMC will eventually be a complete HTPC / Digital Lifestyle / Home Automation software that runs seamlessly on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux flavors. I have been testing with Mac OS X in Kiosk mode on the new Apple Intel Mac Mini's with a Xenarc touch screen and it's hot! I will keep you guys posted. I will need a lot of beta testers.

We are still looking for investors too ;)

Later!

C# Telematics/Infotainment HTPC Pimp My Ride SEMA Show

2006-10-09T14:02:00Z

The framework I designed for telematics/htpc is being used in some more Pimp My Ride episodes and now it will be featured at the 2006 SEMA Show. We just finished a Pontiac Solstice that had a James Bond theme going. It ran my framework with a touch screen computer that controlled machine guns, smoke screen, GPS, etc.

I did the Ice Cream truck shown off at the beginning of this season. The Pontiac was just finished. I am now working on a Lincoln Navigator that will be shown off at the SEMA Show GAS/Pimp My Ride booth. If any of you happen to be out there check it out. It was written in C#//NETFX 2.0. My company is Hybrid Mobile Technologies. I know, the site sucks. I am working on getting a good web designed to redo it for me.

Cheers

ASP.NET Atlas DefaultButton bug?

2006-09-08T20:17:00Z

A buddy of mine works for Virtual Bank. They were working on an internal application that is based on ASP.NET/ATLAS. They were setting the defaultbutton attribute at the form level to a button they had on the form and it was only firing the OnClick event the first time it ran.

He called me up and asked if I could help solve there issue. I recreated the problem by creating a simple web application and dropping a button on it. I set the defaultbutton attribute and ran the application so I could see what was going on behind the scenes.

The client code that was produced was the folloing:

<form name="form1" method="post"

 action="Default.aspx"

 onkeypress="return WebForm_FireDefaultButton(event, 'Button1')"

 id="form1">

I noticed the call to the javascript function WebForm_FireDefaultButton. So I saved the website to the hard drive. Two files are created in the subfolder with the same name of the page you saved. Inside the folder you will find two files. One of them will be named "WebResource.axd". I opened this file and found the code to WebForm_FireDefaultButton. The code looks like the following:

var __defaultFired = false;

function WebForm_FireDefaultButton(event, target) {

    if (!__defaultFired && event.keyCode == 13 &&

!(event.srcElement && (event.srcElement.tagName.toLowerCase() == "textarea"))) {

        var defaultButton;

        if (__nonMSDOMBrowser) {

            defaultButton = document.getElementById(target);

        else {

            defaultButton = document.all[target];

        if (defaultButton &&

typeof(defaultButton.click) != "undefined") {

            __defaultFired = true;

            defaultButton.click();

            event.cancelBubble = true;

            if (event.stopPropagation) event.stopPropagation();

            return false;

    return true;

You will notice that __defaultFired is being set to true when the function is fired. So here is the kicker. With ATLAS it only updates sections of the code.
In the old postback model this works fine because everything is reset. In ATLAS this variable is not being reset because of the intelligent updates. So we have to create a work around. This is what I suggested and it seemed to work great. I told my friend to create a client side JavaScript function called ResetDefault and reset the __defaultFired variable to false manually. Then call that by adding it to the button using the OnClientClick attribute. So the two parts look like this:

<script type="text/javascript">

    function ResetDefault()

        __defaultFired = false;

</script>

<asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server"

    Text="Button"

    OnClientClick="ResetDefault" />

This works everytime you hit the enter key on the page now. I just figured I would share this in case somone else runs into the same issue. If there is a better way, please let me know. This seems to be a bug? There might be a proper way to do default buttons with ATLAS and I am just not aware of it yet due to my lack of experience using it.

Take care

Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista, Flamewars... Oh My!

2006-08-10T02:13:00Z

I have to say that the last few days have been interesting to say the least. I have been reading all the diarrhea of the mouth that has been spewing back and forth between Mac's and PC's ;)

This post is in response to many post I have been reading. I happen to pick 3 out of the bunch, but there are more where these came from, trust me.

http://www.internet-nexus.com/2006/08/leopards-ten-new-features-dissected.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/08/mac_os_x_leopard_preview/

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/cultofmac/0,71557-0.html

I have to say that it all comes down to ignorance. I have been part of the Windows world ever since I can remember and been doing development on Windows since I was 17. I have always had my likes and dislikes about Windows. I think everyone does. I started using a Mac when they released Mac OS X version 10.0. I am a technology freak. I love reading about new OS releases. I remember reading about NeXT and their technologies. I knew that what was being released was part of what came out of the Apple purchase of NeXT.

Once I started using Mac OS X, I started getting familiar with that user base. Their big expo shows, the keynote speech, and all the hype. It was like waiting for your birthday or Christmas. I remember saying to my self I have become one of these fanatics. So knowing what I do about their shows. The WWDC is held every year for the developers that support the Mac OS X platform. Everything presented and announced at these shows are for the benefit of the developer.

So I wanted to touch on the things that Steve Jobs announced and throw in my .02. First of all, Steve and company did not keep using the term of innovation for everything they were showing off. Innovation is creating something new, even if that means utilizing something that already exist and making it better or easier to use. The iPod is innovative. It the whole idea something new? No it is not. There were MP3 players out before the iPod. The iPod just was an innovative way to store and play your music. The way you interacted with it and retrieved your music was a major part of what was innovative with the iPod. With that said, I will continue on with my comments.

In general, when Steve and company say something is new in this keynote, they really mean it's new for the Mac community. So the new Mail features are new to Mac users. They were not claiming that it was some new thing that no one else has in there Mail application. This conference was for Mac developers. This was not a consumer show. Everything was relative to Mac OS X, the development of Mac OS X, and the developers of Mac OS X. The fact that he had others come out and help... maybe, just maybe, he is allowing the people that had a huge hand in developing these technologies present them so they feel like they have a part. It's called being a team. Maybe you never heard of that?

Time Machine; This is based on a technology that is seen in many other places. One of the places mentioned a lot was Windows Server 2003. This is all true. So what is innovative about this? The interface. The way that they made it easy enough to use and understand so that the average consumer can use it. My mother could use Time Machine. My mother could not use the Restore Point system and Previous Versions that Windows Server 2003 contains. It has an SDK that developers can use so that their applications can utilize the same functionality. That is the difference.

Spaces; Yes it is virtual desktops for Mac OS X. Yeah we all know that KDE, GNOME, et al have had Virtual desktops since before the man was here. Once again it is new to Mac OS X and has a very easy and clean interface. The thing I liked was the monitor panel like view, where you see all 4 desktops at once and interact with them while there zoomed out. This is just a start of something they can expand on. I think it is a great addition... FOR MAC OS X.

CoreAnimation; This is strictly for developers. All the Core "pillars" that Apple has provided are for developers so they can provide great technologies to the developers. Once again this is new for developers. Animation is not something Apple invented and they are not claiming that!

Universal Access; I think you would have to be a drooling invalid to not see this is way better then Windows Vista and not innovative. That voice is one of the best I have heard in text to speech systems.

Mail; The features were new to Mac OS X users. The other features like notes and to-do's are just the start of a system wide set of services that will allow collaboration across the board for applications. They will release an SDK to developers that will allow them to add the same services in there applications and share data. The other features are similar to other Mail applications, but much easier to use. That seems to be a constant theme... easier to use. Hmm, interesting. That is all I got to say about that *Forest Gump*.

iChat; Once more, these are all new features for Mac OS X users and developers. I figure if I keep repeating my self, they will get the point eventually. I do have to say that the collaboration features are great additions and much cleaner then most IM apps I have used.

Mac OS X Leopard is still in development. There will be many more features. Steve even mentioned some top secret features that were not going to be shown at this time. These features are most likely something that is geared toward the users and will be big when they are announced. I just have to say I still use Windows everyday. I am a .NET Developer. I think .NET and C# is probably the best things Microsoft has released in a long time. I am very disappointed in Vista. Vista has been in development for 5 years and we still do not have a product close to production release. Mac OS X has had 6 major updates since 2001. Leopard will be a big release too when it is complete. I can honestly say that using my MacBook Pro has restored my faith in computers. It is really refreshing to use a system that I do not have to reformat my hard drive and reinstall the operating system on a regular basis. I do not have to worry about all the viruses and spy ware. I can just get up in the morning and work. I even do .NET and C# using Mono on Mac OS X. So I am still using the technologies I use every day in the Windows world on my Mac. I still have a Windows PC at home, but my girlfriend uses that since I am on my Mac almost 100% of the time now. She is always complaining about pop ups and search bars being installed that she never authorized. I just smile and let out a sigh of relief. I don't have to worry about those things.

Take care until next time ;)

Ben

first initial + lastname at g to the mail dot com

first initial + lastname at mac dot com

http://www.myspace.com/sanityisfordeath

C# .NET Framework 2.0 Telematics featured on Pimp My Ride - Take 2

2006-07-31T23:36:00Z

So I told you guys a couple weeks ago about the Ice Cream Truck episode of Pimp My Ride. It went over pretty good. All the touch screen software solutions, including the POS, and the cash drawer was all me. It came out nice. It was written in C# using Direct X for graphics and video stuff. It is all based off a product I created called Mobile Media Center. It is an application for people who want to a media center for there car or house that is quick and to the point. It started out as a project on mp3car.com. It has since been featured in a DUB car and on the Pimp My Ride show.

So what happens from here? It will be on another episode of Pimp My Ride. This time a spy theme care with machine guns, etc. The touch screen software will control GPS and all relay controlled devices. It will be using the Mobile Media Center core again. The company is called Hybrid Mobile Technologies (http://www.hybrid-mobile.com/) We have a lot in the pipe for a full platform and framework. We have a nice business plan that we completed recently too. We need investors to take this to the next level. If you are an investor or know of any investors please contact me: bstahlhood [[AT]] gmail [[DOT]] com for questions or further details.

You can also check out myspace at http://www.myspace.com/sanityisfordeath

C# Telematics on Pimp My Ride

2006-07-06T01:28:00Z

Just wanted to let everyone know that the telematics framework I architected and implemented for Hybrid Mobile Technologies will have a piece of it being shown off on Pimp My Ride tomorrow night at 10PM EST. Mad Mike and I worked together to pimp out an ice cream truck with a touch screen system that allows kids to do there ordering on the outside of the truck. It uses the framework and foundation of the Mobile Media Center system I did for Hybrid Mobile Technologies. http://www.hybrid-mobile.com/. It was written in C# with all kinds of interop code with DirectShow and a butt load of other technologies.

My myspace account is http://www.myspace.com/sanityisfordeath if anyone would like to add me as friends for networking and development discussions.

ttyl

Monodevlop on Mac OS X

2006-05-22T18:51:00Z

I returned my MacBook and I am going to the Apple store this evening to get a MacBook Pro. I decided if I am going to spend the money, do it right ;) I will be starting on the Mac OS X Package tonight. I know many others have ran into problems, but I am going to try my best to make this installation as easy as possible for those that want to use Monodevelop on Mac OS X. I know I do!

I now have my cable modem installed and my office at home is all set. I am ready to catch up with everything. I also want to get an update of the XM Protocol specification out as well. I also plan on releasing some Cocoa apps that I have been wanting to work on for some time now. I am stoked to have a Mac again! I love developing on a Mac, even when I have to develop software for Windows, I like using my Mac. It just seems so enjoyable for some reason. I know I know... I sound like a Mac addict now, what can I say, I am a switcher ;)

Stay tuned