One week ago, I caved to the temptation and got an iPhone 3G S. Today, as the first of 30 hackpact creations, I installed the SDK plus memo's iPhone extensions for openFrameworks and hacked together my first app. OpenGL alpha blending + multi-particle grabbing/throwing /bouncing = fun.

Next step is to go through the arduous process of enrolling in the iPhone Developer Program in order to be able to even test it on the device itself. Sigh.

Over the next 30 days, I'm participating in what has been termed a hackpact, a notion suggested by Alex a few days ago and immediately adopted by a decent group of others.

The concept is simple: create something and publicly document it, each day for a month. It's a kind of distributed cousin of Thing-A-Day, though inspired by a quite different sort of practice.

I'll thus be posting daily with an image and a paragraph or so on whatever I have produced. Many things should be created from scratch; some will be works in progress, and others will be (unashamedly) cleaning up and publishing the jumble of half-finished work that languish around various hard disks.

I've also created a personal Twitter profile for the purpose, where I'll be posting daily with the #hackpact tag. Alternatively, follow this list of hackpact-tagged blog posts.

I've been trying to step up my coding game by moving from vim and Processing's straightforward interface to the Eclipse IDE. Having followed the comprehensive Processing in Eclipse howto, the advantages have immediately been manifold: brilliant code refactoring tools, nice javadoc-generation functions, an inbuilt debugger, and svn version control integration with Subclipse.

Best of all, however, was stumbling across this guide to Java code profiling with Shark. The agent component of Eclipse's Test and Performance Tools is sadly unsupported on OS X, but this solution - using part of Apple's free Developer Tools - fits the bill perfectly. Just got an instant breakdown of the execution bottlenecks of my current Processing app, and am well on the way to a turbocharged speed boost...