Internationalization Programming Topics

Locales Programming Guide

Data Formatting Guide

Sample Code: International Mountains

Additional Internationalization Tools and Resources

UUID’s are string values separated by hyphens, for example, here is how a UUID may look: 13222F23-C76A-7781-0C12-0293E3B34398.

The method below creates a UUID and returns a string representation of the same:

 

Create UUID

- (NSString *)createUUID
{
  // Create universally unique identifier (object)
  CFUUIDRef uuidObject = CFUUIDCreate(kCFAllocatorDefault);
 
  // Get the string representation of CFUUID object.
  NSString *uuidStr = [(NSString *)CFUUIDCreateString(kCFAllocatorDefault, uuidObject) autorelease];
 
  // If needed, here is how to get a representation in bytes, returned as a structure
  // typedef struct {
  //   UInt8 byte0;
  //   UInt8 byte1;
  //   ...
  //   UInt8 byte15;
  // } CFUUIDBytes;
  CFUUIDBytes bytes = CFUUIDGetUUIDBytes(uuidObject);
 
  CFRelease(uuidObject);
 
  return uuidStr;
}

This 2-day event offers dozens of interactive conference sessions across five conference tracks. Lots of new speakers have been added to the agenda since I last updated you on this event including Mike Daley, Jessica Kahn, Jeff LaMarche, and Graham Lee. These speakers will be joining Mike Lee, Aaron Hillegass, Erica Sadun, Stephen Kochan, Rod Strougo, Christian Hofstader and many others for this much anticipated event. Take a look at the complete speaker list and agenda here.

To save $150 off your conference registration, provide priority code PHEM929 when you register online, call 617-848-7026 or send an email to Barbara.Gavin@pearson.com mentioning the iPhone Developer Tips discount priority code.

My primary motivation with this blog is to give back to the same community of developers who have provided help and insight to me over my 20 years in software development. Beyond the obvious time commitment and labor of love to keep writing content, there are costs to keep this machine running – if you would like to show your support for iPhone Developer Tips, please consider clicking through the Amazon link below as you go about your holiday shopping, or if you prefer, a Paypal donation is welcome:

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Thank you very much and Happy Holidays!

John

I’ve found another good use for UIActionSheet, to show text messages with minimal coding and overhead. You might use this idea to show content sensitive help text, or maybe display a message that is shown only once upon the first run of an application.

You can get an idea of the look that I’m after from the figure below. In this example I’m showing nothing more than three paragraphs of text and a button to dismiss the view.

It’s almost embarrassing to show the code as there’s really nothing to it:

    UIActionSheet *msg = [[[UIActionSheet alloc] 
        initWithTitle:@"Lorem ipsum dolor...text goes here" 
        delegate:nil 
        cancelButtonTitle:nil  destructiveButtonTitle:nil 
        otherButtonTitles:@"Okay", nil] 
        autorelease];
    [msg showInView:window];

We have no need for a delegate in this case, and by setting all but the “Okay” button to nil, we have just one button.

The beauty of using a UIActionSheet for this type of information is that presentation is handled for you (sliding into place), all other UI elements are obscured (a modal presentation) and it’s ridiculously simple to implement.

to an icon that looks like this:

I got a question earlier today from a reader asking: “how can I create an icon with no shine effect and no border around it ? “, such as this:

Here’s all you need to do:

1. Create an image with no border (57 x 57 pixels)
2. Save the image as a transparent PNG file with the name Icon.png
3. Import the file into your Xcode project Resources folder
4. Set the UIPrerenderedIcon to YES as shown here: removing icon shine/gloss effect

You can override this default by following line to you to the Info.plist file. For example, if you prefer to edit Info.plist as a source file, add the following line:

<key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key>
<true/>

If you are editing Info.plist as an XML file (in Xcode) you can add an entry that looks as follows:

Depending on your configuration and version of Xcode, the option in the Info.plist file may looks as follows:

With the pre-rendered icon set to true, the icon shown above will now look like this:

This preference setting only applies to removing of the shine / glossy effect, the corners of your icon will still be rounded for you.

The primary reason for passing on this tip is that my web browsing experience with Firefox over the past few months has been extremely frustrating (read slow!). From the moment I started the Safari 4 beta it was clear the performance was superior to Firefox. I realize there may be more to this than simply a faster browser, as my system could use a good house cleaning. However, I continue to go between both browsers and Safari is no doubt my new browser of choice for the bulk of my time on the net.

There is one default setting that I immediately had to change in Safari, and that’s the location of the tabs. If you haven’t tried the new browser, the figure below shows how the tab bar is now on top.

I just couldn’t get used to this. Here’s how to change the tabbar to the “normal” location – from a terminal enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

You can find a list of additional configuration changes available in Safari 4 here. Beyond the tips, the About page is worth a visit, an interesting bit of trivia to be had…

For the most part, NSScanner has everything we need to parse data types (int, float, string etc) from a string.

The following is a simple method that will convert a hexadecimal color (e.g. #FFCC88) into an equivalent UIColor object.

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- (UIColor *) colorForHex:(NSString *)hexColor {
	hexColor = [[hexColor stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:
				 [NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]
				] uppercaseString];  
 
    // String should be 6 or 7 characters if it includes '#'  
    if ([hexColor length] < 6) 
		return [UIColor blackColor];  
 
    // strip # if it appears  
    if ([hexColor hasPrefix:@"#"]) 
		hexColor = [cString substringFromIndex:1];  
 
    // if the value isn't 6 characters at this point return 
    // the color black	
    if ([hexColor length] != 6) 
		return [UIColor blackColor];  
 
    // Separate into r, g, b substrings  
    NSRange range;  
    range.location = 0;  
    range.length = 2; 
 
    NSString *rString = [hexColor substringWithRange:range];  
 
    range.location = 2;  
    NSString *gString = [hexColor substringWithRange:range];  
 
    range.location = 4;  
    NSString *bString = [hexColor substringWithRange:range];  
 
    // Scan values  
    unsigned int r, g, b;  
    [[NSScanner scannerWithString:rString] scanHexInt:&r];  
    [[NSScanner scannerWithString:gString] scanHexInt:&g];  
    [[NSScanner scannerWithString:bString] scanHexInt:&b];  
 
    return [UIColor colorWithRed:((float) r / 255.0f)  
                           green:((float) g / 255.0f)  
                            blue:((float) b / 255.0f)  
                           alpha:1.0f];  
 
}

Notice that we had to first separate our the hex values for the red, green, and blue components first as substrings and then apply the NSScanner to those substrings.

In the process of creating screenshots to accompany applications submitted to the App Store, you can include up to 5 images. Although the images can be anything you like, typically the images consist of screenshots of an application running in the iPhone simulator. When working with the simulator there are two sizes used most frequently, 320w x 460h (Apple recommends not to show the status bar across the top) and 480w x 320h (landscape mode).

Until I found Capture Me, I would use the built-in screen capture, command-shift-4, to capture screenshots. Problem is, there was no means to specify the exact image size to capture, so this approach requires either a very steady hand and a good eye, or capturing an area obviously larger than needed and cropping in Preview or another tool.

To use Capture Me, you specify the size of the area to capture and then drag a semi-transparent window over the capture area. Clicking inside the capture area creates a screenshot. You can save screenshots to the desktop (filename will be automatically generated) or have the screenshot copied to the clipboard, or both!

Capture Me also offers a screen recording feature, however, I haven’t given this a go as of yet.

Additional Features:
Here are a few things that I think would make for some nice additions to Capture Me:

#1 – Specify the location to save the file

#2 – Specify the filename for the screenshot. For example, when capturing/uploading screenshots to the App Store I use the filenames “screenshot1.jpg” “screenshot2.jpg” etc. If I could tell Capture Me to use this same format, it would save me the trouble of renaming the files.

#3 – The third feature is a little harder to describe, so let me explain how I use the tool which should help clarify what I am after. As I mentioned above, I use Capture Me to create screenshots of the iPhone simulator, what this entails is dragging Capture Me over the simulator and clicking inside the Capture Me window. In order to create the next screenshot, I need to click/drag the Capture Me window and move it to the side, click on the iPhone simulator to setup the next screenshot, then drag the Capture Me window back over the simulator for the next capture.

If I could tell the Capture Me window to move to the left/right the same width of the area I am capturing (+/- a few pixles) I could quickly capture a series of screenshots with ease. Even better if one keyboard shortcut would tell Capture Me to slide to the left/right, and one shortcut to tell Capture Me to slide it back to it’s original location.

I hope to get some time over the coming weeks and/or months to poke around the Capture Me code and see how far I can get to add the features above. If you beat me to the punch, drop me a note, and count me in as a beta tester.

Many thanks to Chimoosoft for creating, and open sourcing, Capture Me.