August 2011
2 posts
12 tags
Using PhoneView during iOS Development →
vinnycoyne:
If you’re debugging an iOS app on-device, and need to access data that you’re storing somewhere within the app’s home directory, just fire up PhoneView and click on the Apps section. Easy!
An iOS Developer Takes on Android
nfarina:
Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps.
We didn’t use one of these “Cross Platform!” tools like Titanium. We wrote it, from scratch, in Java, like you do in Android.
We decided it was important to keep the native stuff native, and to respect each platform’s conventions as much as possible. Some conventions are easy to...
February 2011
1 post
Infinite Touch iOS Development →
This is the website for my new Irish iOS development company, which will largely become my primary business site. This makes luibh.ie my personal website now, which is no bad thing.
If you need an iPhone app developed or need some help with your objective-c then feel free to get in touch.
January 2011
1 post
Speculation on the next MacBook Pro →
Looking forward to whatever new Macbook Pro comes out, hopefully soon, as its time I got a new one !
marco:
Given how awesome the new MacBook Air is, I’m interested to see what Apple does with the other laptops in the lineup.
I’ve had three 13” laptops (including the first-generation and current-generation Airs) and two 15” laptops, and I’ve previously been torn between these two sizes:...
November 2010
2 posts
Default.png Dilemmas →
Gives me some ideas on a loading screen for my new app. I think I’ll probably go with the empty user interface while it loads instead of a splash screen which I was going to use.
marco:
iOS apps display a prerendered, static image when they launch called Default.png. Developers can set it to anything they like. This is Instapaper’s:
This matches the iOS convention of showing the app’s...
Marco.org: Developers don't rush to new platforms →
marco:
A common fallacy is assuming that any new platform in an exciting market — recently, smartphones and tablet computers — will be flooded with developers as soon as it’s released, as if developers are just waiting outside the gates, hungrily waiting to storm in.
In two recent cases, that’s exactly…
October 2010
2 posts
App Icons for iPhone, iPhone 4 and iPad
When submitting a universal binary which you’re going to be using on ‘normal’ iPhones, the iPhone 4 and the iPad you need to include a separate app icon for each one. These are specified within the APP.plist file as follows:
The icon.png file size should be 57x57.
The Icon@2x.png should be 114x114.
The Icon-72.png (iPad) is optional but needs to be 72x72 if using it.
Simple...
July 2010
1 post
New Intrade iPhone App Released
So after many months hard work and revisions, the Intrade.com iPhone application has finally made it onto the App Store.
Its an application to accompany the Intrade.com website which allows people to place predictions, and virtually trade, on future events.
Further information and download available from iTunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/ie/app/intrade/id380355142?mt=8
Andy
April 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Activity Indicator in UIToolBar
For a while now Ive been trying to get an activity indicator to show programmatically within a toolbar, and my last attempt resulted in manually adding it to the toolbar within IB. That works nicely if you’ve added the toolbar yourself either within IB or code.
However, using a navigation controller it didn’t appear to be quite so easy because whatever I tried I could not get the...
2 tags
Easy JSON Parsing for the iPhone/iPad
So you have access to a JSON stream through an RSS feed or a rest API and you want to use the information in objective-c.
Easy. Just include the ‘json-framework’ files in your application, #import “JSON.h”, and then do:
SBJSON *jsonParser = [[SBJSON alloc] init];
NSDictionary *dictResult = [jsonParser objectWithString:theString error:nil];
You can then move through...
March 2010
3 posts
2 tags
UITableView Selection Smoothing
If you use table views, and you need to smooth the transition a little bit when selecting a row and pushing a view controller, I’d recommend looking into ‘performSelector’. Its basically a timer which allows you to call a method after a certain short delay.
When using table views this gives the selected row enough time fully animate the selection, before moving onto the new...
2 tags
UITableView with Asynchronous Image Downloads
It seems that a lot of applications Im working on these days require a table view which downloads images off the web. Doing this synchronously is very messy and only results in a very laggy application while scrolling, so I found a nice solution by markj of markj.net.
He’s created an AsyncImageView class which allows you to supply a URL, and have it download the image in the background....
NSXMLParser Freezing ? Put it in a thread.
Running NSXMLParser can be surprisingly time consuming when actually run on the device, even if the test data you’ve been using in the simulator gets parsed quite quickly, and takes next to no time at all.
Unfortunately when you go to run it on the iPhone itself, it can take a couple of seconds or more to do something which took milliseconds on your dev machine. This results in a fairly bad...
February 2010
1 post
1 tag
iPad Economics
marco:
Given:
iPhones and iPods Touch in use today: 50-60 million1.
iPhones sold in the first year (Q3-4, FY 2007): about 1.4 million2. For most of this time, the price started at $499, but nearly everyone bought the $599 model.
iPhones sold in the second year (FY 2008): about 11.6 million, over half from Q4. Most sales in FY 2008 were the better, cheaper iPhone 3G.
How many iPads do you...
December 2009
2 posts
3 tags
ASIHTTPRequest - CFNetwork API Wrapper →
An easy to use wrapper around the CFNetwork API that makes some of the more tedious aspects of communicating with web servers easier. It is written in Objective-C and works in both Mac OS X and iPhone applications.
It is suitable for performing basic HTTP requests and interacting with REST-based services (GET / POST / PUT / DELETE). The included ASIFormDataRequest subclass makes it easy to submit...
2 tags
Creating UIColor Objects from Hex Values
If you come to the iPhone from a web background, or are simply more used to hex based colors it can be a bit of pain working out their RGB equivalent for use as a UIColor.
Fortunately though there is a rather simple work around in the form of a macro.
#define UIColorFromRGB(rgbValue) [UIColor \
colorWithRed:((float)((rgbValue & 0xFF0000) >> 16))/255.0 \
...
November 2009
6 posts
1 tag
Detect Single Tap in UIScrollView
There are an increasing amount of occasions when I’d need, and like, to be able to tap the background of an application to hide a keyboard during editing. It just seems to make good UI sense to tap on the main background and hide the keyboard so you can see what you’ve typed properly.
The following article does just that, and explains how to create a new instance of the UIScrollView...
3 tags
Accessing the Phone from within an Application
For some reason I had a hard time finding decent code for actually opening the phone application when a phone number is tapped.
This is what I managed to come up with attached to a see through (no background color) UIButton, which was placed over the UILabel phone number text.
// read phone number from current advert data
NSString* value = [[resultsEntries...
3 tags
Resizing Remotely Fetched Image
So I had the code sorted for loading images remotely, and storing them in arrays to be displayed later, and then also fetching them directly from a URL to be shown in a UIImage. However up until this point Ive not had to resize them based on the newly loaded image data. After a few fruitless searches I came across the following code which seems to work very well (so far).
// fetch...
Enrolled in iPhone Developer Program
Now that Im somewhat close to getting my app ready for testing, and ultimately submitted to the app store, I finally registered for a fully paid up developer account.
The process is straight forward enough and took maybe a week altogether before I was able to login and get access to iTunes Connect.
Since I wanted to charge for my apps I had to fill out the banking and tax information. Thanks...
Reusable Text Cells in Interface Builder
Since someone asked me how to use a UITableViewCell created in interface builder as a reusable cell I thought I should post the code below. Its all straight forward enough and really its the same as a reusing a programmatic cell with ReuseWithIdentifier except the identifier is also defined in the identifier field of the table cell in IB.
- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView...
2 tags
Delegates and Protocols →
Very good tutorial on creating delegates and protocols, which enabled me to dismiss a modal view and then send control back to the main results view controller so that I could add a progress view and update the search results. Happy days.
October 2009
4 posts
2 tags
From nikf at the Brighton iPhone Developer Group. Will have to test these out when I get a chance, as I do use quite a bit of HTTP (and XML) code in the app Im working on.
Fade Out Your App’s Default.png file - Totally self-explanatory, with code for your use, it’s a nice touch to add to any app.
Speed Limit and SlowMo - If you’re wanting to recreate cellular network bandwidth and device-like...
2 tags
3 tags
“Bring me then the plant that points to those bright Lucidites swirling up from...”
– Eugenio Montale