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Should Apple Give a Rat's Ass that Developers Aren't Getting Rich off of the iPhone Platform?
By Mark SigalOctober 7, 2009
Apple's iPhone Platform is a runaway success relative to just about any metric that you can throw at it, save for one. Where are the breakout successful developers for whom the platform is a 'True Wealth' inducing moment? Read on...
O'Reilly Books Example updated: Show a different image for each book
By Elisabeth RobsonJuly 12, 2009
I got some great feedback on my first screencast - thank you! A few of you asked: how can you show a different view for each of the rows in the table view, instead of just showing the same view...
iPhone workshop frequently asked question: Key Value Coding error
By Elisabeth RobsonJuly 1, 2009
One of the most common questions from the iPhone workshops we held recently is: "What is key value coding and why the heck am I getting this error?"
Tab bars and Navigation bars together
By Elisabeth RobsonJune 24, 2009
The TableView is a common way to display data on an iPhone. Combining a tab bar with a table view and navigation bar isn't very difficult, but it took me forever to figure out how to do it properly.
Big learning curve for iPhone development
By Elisabeth RobsonJune 22, 2009
I just started learning how to develop for the iPhone. After helping to put together an iPhone workshop with my friend Joe Heck, I got really excited about this new platform. I've dabbled in Cocoa and Objective C before, many years ago, and figured it was time to relearn Mac development so I could write my own apps for the iPhone.
On Vibration
By Erica SadunJanuary 23, 2009
Making an iPhone vibrate requires nothing more than a simple call to Audio Services. Deciding on when your application should buzz is a different matter. The code for producing that short buzz effect is this:
Opt-In Complexity
By Chris AdamsonJanuary 16, 2009
It's an interesting trait that the Mac and iPhone stacks work this way, opting in to complexity and keeping the higher-level APIs sparser and simpler, and you have to wonder whether it's a conscious design decision or a happy accident.
Bring Airplane Mode control back to life
By Erica SadunJanuary 16, 2009
At some point, my apmode utility got dropped from Erica Utilities and a number of people, particularly my pal Pytey, asked if I could find some time to bring it back to life. Last night, I decided to see if I could put this together using 2.x technology after having put this off for far too long.
Thinking about table selection: Persistent or Active?
By Erica SadunJanuary 9, 2009
A colleague recently had his application rejected from App Store because he used what I can only call a noun-verb approach. He allowed items in the table to be selected, and highlighted upon selection, and then provided buttons that used that choice to perform an action. His application was rejected, with the rejection citing the following from the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines:
Defining legal input characters
By Erica SadunJanuary 2, 2009
I sometimes use a little trick to ensure that a UITextInputField only accepts a certain subset of characters. Say for example, you want to ensure that a user enters only letters and spaces. A UITextField delegate can catch each character as its typed and decide whether to add items to the active text field. Here's how.
iPhone without Cocoa?
By Daniel H. SteinbergDecember 29, 2008
There are a ton of people attracted by the iPhone gold rush who want to write iPhone apps without taking the time to learn Cocoa. Come for the phone but stay for the Mac.
Useful Core Graphics functions
By Erica SadunDecember 26, 2008
Last week, I introduced several handy utilities that let you convert standard Core Graphics structures to and from strings. This week, I thought I'd continue to explore utility functions, moving on to ways you can work with points and rectangles for on-screen calculations. Like the string utilities, these are functions, not methods, and are as such called using standard C rather than Objective C.
Converting Points and Rectangles to Strings and back
By Erica SadunDecember 19, 2008
Two core graphics structures, the CGRect and the CGPoint, play a large role in iPhone development. They are used to position items on-screen and to set their size. Every time you use a UIView, you can work with its frame, its center, and its bounds--all of which use these two structures to handle geometry. Here's a quick review of the structures in question.
Converting Points and Rectangles to Strings and back
By Erica SadunDecember 19, 2008
Two core graphics structures, the CGRect and the CGPoint, play a large role in iPhone development. They are used to position items on-screen and to set their size. Every time you use a UIView, you can work with its frame, its center, and its bounds--all of which use these two structures to handle geometry. Here's a quick review of the structures in question.
Thoughts on AVFoundation
By Erica SadunDecember 12, 2008
In the beginning, or at least the iPhone's beginning, there was Celestial. It offered a fabulous QuickTime-esque approach to handling media of all kinds. Of course, this was back in the days of the first jailbreaks and there was no official SDK. When the SDK finally did roll around, its Audio Queue approach to handling audio playback and recording proved to be an extreme disappointment.
Thoughts on AVFoundation
By Erica SadunDecember 12, 2008
In the beginning, or at least the iPhone's beginning, there was Celestial. It offered a fabulous QuickTime-esque approach to handling media of all kinds. Of course, this was back in the days of the first jailbreaks and there was no official SDK. When the SDK finally did roll around, its Audio Queue approach to handling audio playback and recording proved to be an extreme disappointment.
The case of the Missing MapKit
By Erica SadunDecember 5, 2008
While wading through the new 2.2 Frameworks, I suddenly noticed that MapKit, once a Private Framework was missing in action. MapKit, which was available until SDK 2.1, offered all kinds of utterly yummy features including Trip Players, Traffic tiles, Route Views and more. So what happened to MapKit?
The case of the Missing MapKit
By Erica SadunDecember 5, 2008
While wading through the new 2.2 Frameworks, I suddenly noticed that MapKit, once a Private Framework was missing in action. MapKit, which was available until SDK 2.1, offered all kinds of utterly yummy features including Trip Players, Traffic tiles, Route Views and more. So what happened to MapKit?
Locating, tagging, and retrieving views
By Erica SadunNovember 28, 2008
Last week, I wrote about exploring subviews both of the user-added and Apple-created varieties. Many GUI components contain view classes that are hidden from the developer but are composed of perfectly standard components.
Locating, tagging, and retrieving views
By Erica SadunNovember 28, 2008
Last week, I wrote about exploring subviews both of the user-added and Apple-created varieties. Many GUI components contain view classes that are hidden from the developer but are composed of perfectly standard components.
View Spelunking Part 1: Exploring subviews and layout
By Erica SadunNovember 21, 2008
It's often helpful to take a look at your UIView hierarchy; and when I say "look", I mean all the way down. You can just as easily look at the component subviews that comprise on-screen objects like buttons, switches, and sliders, as you can at the UIImageViews and UIButtons that you add directly to your screen. UIButtons, for example, are composed of three image views and a label. Some UITextFields are built on a private UITextFieldRoundedRectBackgroundView, with a number of UIImageViews that are added below that class.
View Spelunking Part 1: Exploring subviews and layout
By Erica SadunNovember 21, 2008
It's often helpful to take a look at your UIView hierarchy; and when I say "look", I mean all the way down. You can just as easily look at the component subviews that comprise on-screen objects like buttons, switches, and sliders, as you can at the UIImageViews and UIButtons that you add directly to your screen. UIButtons, for example, are composed of three image views and a label. Some UITextFields are built on a private UITextFieldRoundedRectBackgroundView, with a number of UIImageViews that are added below that class.
The Joys of Vertical Audio
By Erica SadunNovember 14, 2008
One of the things I hate about the Media Player framework is that although it offers easy-to-use audio playback, it does so horizontally. Users have to flip their phones onto the side and access the playback controls in landscape. It's not all that hard to force Media Player into portrait mode and today I'll show you how.
Hunting down Info.plist Preferences
By Erica SadunNovember 7, 2008
I've spent some time recently trying to hunt down items for use in your Info.plist files. The natural place to look for these is the SpringBoard executable in the iPhone's Core Services folder. I ran this file through a strings filter, looking to see if I could find groupings of items that might work.
Recovering multiple touches
By Erica SadunNovember 1, 2008
A view that handles multiple touch points must announce itself. Add the isMultipleToucheEnabled handler and have it return YES. Doing so allows your touch methods (touchesBegan, touchesMoved, touchesEnded) to work with several touchpoints at once.
Creating a Full-Screen Camera Preview
By Erica SadunOctober 24, 2008
I'm not big on the whole Image Picker Camera interface. I hate how slow it is and how it prevents you from scraping the screen. So here's my work around. In the following code, I scan down the UIImagePicker presentation to find my way to the actual preview window.
Timely UI Updates
By Erica SadunOctober 17, 2008
Laggy UI updates are a frequently occurring problem on the iPhone. With operationally intense work, your GUI may not always keep sync with your requests, particularly when you try to update status information to let the user know how things are going.
Programming with Safety Scissors and Glitter Glue
By Erica SadunOctober 10, 2008
Although the NDA is on the way out, not all is restored to sparkly brightness in the world of the iPhone SDK. Developers must still deal with day-to-day limitations built into Apple's development environment.
A proposal for SDK-compliant copy & paste
By Erica SadunOctober 3, 2008
This morning, I had one of my d'oh moments: finally figuring out exactly how to do inter-app copy and paste without breaking SDK rules. It basically goes like this, in a similar fashion to the Core Location service I wrote about a few months ago:
Creating an iPhone-based Web Service: Part 3
By Erica SadunOctober 3, 2008
Over the last two weeks, I've shown you how to create a socket to listen for web requests and how to produce an artificial index.html file that advertises the files you're willing to serve from your iPhone. Today, I'll wrap things up by adding error pages and the actual file server.
Goodbye NDA
By Erica SadunOctober 2, 2008
Goodbye NDA and welcome to the age of open collaboration. Yay.
Creating an iPhone-based Web Service: Part 2
By Erica SadunSeptember 26, 2008
The iPhone's "no disk access" policy shouldn't bar you from sharing your application's files with the world at large. Last week, I showed you how to build a listening socket that polled for requests on a random port. This week, it's time to parse those requests.
Creating an iPhone-based Web Service: Part 1
By Erica SadunSeptember 19, 2008
The iPhone provides no disk access. The backup mechanism hides your files into mdbackup archives. Apple disabled attachments for email. So what do you do when you want to share your data with the world. Creating your own web server is one way to provide a connection between your iPhone data and your users.
And The Winner is: Games
By Oliver BreidenbachSeptember 17, 2008
After about 2 months of the App Store, Games clearly dominate the market place. From the 10 Top Paid Apps, 8 are games and the 2 remaining are in the category "Entertainment" which is really just another word for "Games"....
Sandbox: Think like Apple
By Erica SadunSeptember 12, 2008
Apple allows read access to nearly the entire iPhone file system. This is a mixed blessing. Your Application can read that data -- but it shouldn't. Apple has been rejecting apps that stray outside their sandbox. From the various rejection letters that I've seen, Apple cites non-specific "violations". These violations have nothing to do with the actual reason that application will not get into AppStore. It helps to see a cross section of these letters because you wouldn't necessarily pick up the point directly from the email.
Uncovering Notifications at Run Time
By Erica SadunSeptember 5, 2008
Quite a while back, I posted about uncovering selectors at runtime. Detecting selectors allows you to reverse engineer the way Apple uses delegation calls to communicate between objects and clients. Delegation is a key way that objects communicate. Another way is intra-application notification. As with selectors, you can uncover notifications at runtime. Notification are electronic semaphores that pass between objects within a program.
Scraping AppStore Reviews
By Erica SadunAugust 28, 2008
I know I promised last week to post about intra-app notification, and I'm still planning to but after chatting with Øivind Kjellnø over email, I decided to change directions for a little while. I'll get back to notifications but for today, I'm going to show you how to access your app reviews throughout the world.
SDK Code Samples at iDevKit
By Erica SadunAugust 28, 2008
iPhone developer Mxweas (author of mxtube) writes "I made a forum for iPhone SDK and Toolchain development called idevkit.com. There are tons of code samples already up and it currently has about 460 members. Feel free to check it out."
Finding iPhone inter-app notification names
By Erica SadunAugust 22, 2008
A few weeks ago, I wrote about listening to iPhone inter-application notifications. Several readers contacted me, through the post comments and through private mail, asking if I could explain how to create the list of notifications that was omitted from the original post. So today, I'm going to walk you through the basics of doing that
Retrieving Device Information
By Erica SadunAugust 15, 2008
As the open iPhone toolchain reveals, Apple has supplied a limited device-specific information class. You can retrieve far more information from your iPhone through its IO Registry. As on the Macintosh, the IO Registry provides a great deal of hardware specific information, which can be queried and used by your programs.
Tweeting
By Erica SadunAugust 8, 2008
So today, keeping in the theme of posting useful code snippets that do not rely on privileged SDK calls, let me show you how to Tweet. The API itself is really simple: you provide a user name, password and a Twitter message. What complicates this from an iPhone point of view is that you can't just assemble a URL and shoot it upstream to Twitter.com. The request requires POST.
iPhone Notifications
By Erica SadunJuly 31, 2008
Listening to notifications isn't hard. Just call CFNotificationCenterAddObserver and add your application as a listener. Unfortunately, unlike standard notification centers, the Darwin forbids eavesdropping. You must specify exactly which notification token you want to listen for.
iPhone 2.1 SDK goes live. Beta 2.1 firmware available
By Erica SadunJuly 25, 2008
Head on over to the iPhone developer site to get your fresh hot copy of the iPhone 2.1 sdk and beta firmware. It's unclear whether the SDK beta NDA agreement still applies to this new release. In other news: pwnage is now out of date.
Pwnage, Jailbreak and now...what?
By Erica SadunJuly 24, 2008
Now that the iPhone has been jailbroken, may people are asking "So now what?" What use has the jailbreak been, especially considering the easy advantages of App Store distribution. The answer to that depends on how you use your iPhone.
“Opening up” the iPhone
By Richard ThallyJuly 23, 2008
The iPhone Dev Team have released their pwnage tool for 2G and 3G phones. The tool jailbreaks both generations of phones on the 2.0 software, and also unlocks the 2G’s. (Full disclosure, I am on the Dev Team) “Ebony and...
Hello. Again.
By Giles TurnbullJuly 23, 2008
New Inside iPhone contributor Giles Turnbull says hello.
A Place for the Novice iPhone Developer
By Matt TwomeyJuly 19, 2008
Opening the book on my journeys in iPhone development, mistakes and all. Come read along, follow along, and join in the discussion.
iPhone Backups Part 5: Even more about Backups
By Erica SadunJuly 18, 2008
The past few days, I've returned to playing around with backup files. Among other things, I discovered that the name of each backup file is actually the SHA1 hash of its path. So there really is a logic between the mdbackup naming and the files they represent!
On NDA's and the NSA
By Daniel H. SteinbergJuly 17, 2008
There are so many things that we just don't know.
Waiting on Apple
By Erica SadunJuly 11, 2008
When it comes to the iPhone, supply and demand principles are surely in action. iPhone developers, who have been waiting for Apple to throw open the beta program to all comers may have to wait a little longer. As of today, Apple had made no announcement. Many developers have been left on the sidelines feeling marginalized by the opening of AppStore with their products yet untested on the actual iPhone or iPod touch, let alone ready for sale along side early admissions.
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