Archive for October, 2008
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A Java Developer’s Guide to Threads on iPhone
Java makes it ridiculously simple to run code in threads and ensure that your objects are thread safe. When developing user experiences, threads enable you to do things in the “background” (like downloading and parsing content) without rendering your application unresponsive and giving the user the sense that the application may have “frozen”. [...]
Launching the Browser from within an iPhone application
It is sometimes nice to be able to launch a browser from within your applications. Though not as elegant as the use of a UIWebView, it is much easier.
NOTE Because it is possible for an application to bind itself to a URL (like Google Maps), this technique can also be used to launch other [...]
Tools for Creating iPhone Wireframes – OmniGraffle iPhone Stencils
Editor’s Note: There is an update to this post as of October 2009 with an additional stencil. You can read the newest post here: Tools for Creating iPhone Wireframes – OmniGraffle iPhone Stencils – Update Oct 2009
I’m in the midst of creating a set of wireframes for a client revolving around a very intriguing iPhone [...]
How to download and process GZip’d data
HTML browsers, for the longest time, have had support for downloading and expanding Gzip content. This is an ideal way to compress the size of HTML pages because gzip is at its best when compressing text. As you can imagine, compression is even more critical when we look at consuming XML over the [...]
Boot Mac OS X from External Drive
Although a tad bit off topic, it’s Mac related none-the-less. I am in the midst of backing up my MacBook Pro to a remote drive as I’ll be buying one of the new machines recently announced by Apple.
As part of the process, I am creating an image of my current system on a USB drive, [...]
How to Dismiss the Keyboard when using a UITextView
Oddly this was more tricky then I would have thought … perhaps for a veteran Cocoa developer this would have been obvious, but for the rest of us struggling to get rid of the keyboard on a UITextView here is the secret sauce …
Real Men Don’t Use Interface Builder
When I start to learn a new development platform I prefer, at least in the beginning, not to develop behind a RAD tool like InterfaceBuilder. I like to understand how things work before I look to a tool to do the work for me. Doing things “by hand” (at least initially) often gives [...]
Showing Network Activity When there Isn’t Any
I found that sometimes you may be doing something in your iPhone application that requires the user to wait while it completes. Often this is a network related activity, but in other cases it may not be. In my case I was parsing the response from a network connection and wanted the network activity indicator [...]
Creating a Tabbar
I haven’t seen many examples of creating a tabbar controller other than “theElements” example from Apple, which is pretty intense. So, what follows is a short snippet from a proof-of-concept application I was recently working on.
The basic idea is as follows: a UITabBarController contains an array of UIViewController objects, and these views are swapped when [...]
JSON Framework for iPhone
Editor’s Note: Due to the popularity of this iPhone JSON series, a new three part tutorial series on working with JSON was published in August 2009. You can find the latest JSON iPhone tutorial series at the links below:
iPhone JSON and Flickr Tutorial – Part 1
iPhone JSON and Flickr Tutorial – Part 2
iPhone JSON and [...]
iPhone Tech Talk World Tour
Apple has announced an iPhone Tech Talk, an event at locations around the globe targeted at developers interested in learning to build iPhone applications.
Apple technology evangelists will soon be traveling the globe to bring iPhone application development expertise to a city near you. Learn about the tools and technologies you’ll use to create great iPhone [...]
Review: Marware SportGrip for the iPhone 3G
I recently received the SportGrip iPhone 3G case from Marware. With a velvety smooth feel and jet black color, for those interested in a full protection case, this one deserves a close look.
Troubleshooting NSURLConnection
I was recently helping a friend debug an interesting piece of code to asynchronously download images. Without giving away the application idea, let me explain what we were attempting to do from the 30,000 foot view and then share what we discovered, hopefully saving you time should you ever need to implement similar functionality.
iPhone Mockups with Photoshop
Geoff Teehan at teehan+lax sent me a link to a Photoshop PSD file they created to help quickly create mockups of iPhone applications.
If you’ve spent any amount of time scrambling to create a prototype, you’ll greatly appreciate how much tools such as this can help. The screenshot below gives you an idea of how the [...]
How to Uninstall Xcode
A friend in San Francisco, Rodney Aiglstorfer, was recently jumping through hoops to get Xcode to cooperate with his iPhone. There’s nothing more aggravating than having your application running within the simulator and getting stuck downloading to a device.
At one point in the process he opted to remove the Xcode developer tools and start the [...]
