iPhone-Simulator Cropper

This tool works by capturing the screen of the simulator runnning on your system. One really slick feature is the option to create captured images in two primary formats – first, a format suitable for upload to iTunes for your application screenshots – second, capturing a screenshot that is suitable for display on a website.

The following images show the iPhone-Simulator Cropper application, as well as two sample images captured:

iTunes Connect / App Store:

Website (iPhone Device from Apple Marketing):

In a previous post I wrote about my experience using iSimulate in an iPhone project I was working on at that time: Testing Multi-Touch, Accelerometer and GPS using the Xcode Simulator. In addition iPhone Developer Tips hosted a contest for a free copy of iSimulate: iSimulate Giveaway.

In a nutshell, iSimulate is an iPhone application that sends multi-touch events, accelerometer data and GPS location information to the iPhone Simulator wirelessly, which is very handy, as the Xcode simulator does not offer such support to exercise your code.

The latest release of iSimulate, includes support for streaming your application as video to a device as well as recognizing orientation changes and notifying your application running in the iPhone Simulator.

iSimulate consists of an SDK library, which is free, that creates a listening server in the simulator that communicates with an iPhone/iPod running the iSimulate client. The client captures all data from the accelerometer sensor, the touch events, the location and device ID and streams them to the server. The iSimulate client is available for purchase on the App Store.

iSimulate is a great addition to any iPhone Developer’s toolbox.

The timing for working with iSimulate couldn’t of been better – I’m in the midst of testing an application that uses the accelerometer as the primary input mechanism. Unfortunately, with the iPhone simulator alone, there is no built-in mechanism for capturing and processing accelerometer data – welcome iSimulate.

The application I’m building is a simple shoot’em up gun simulation, you’ve seen any number of these on the App Store. There are a range of guns to choose from, and each has a unique loading sequence, all tied to movements of the device. For example, the grenade launcher, loads with a flick of the wrist, mimicing how one would flick a pistol to open the chamber. There also is an assault rifle that loads in two steps, sharp thrust down followed by the same movement up (think of a pump shotgun). To fire each weapon, you point the top of the phone at your target, and flick you wrist back, similar to the effect of a recoil.

Given the focus of my work on the above application, my testing of iSimulate was limited to the accelerometer, which consisted of running through all the simulations (loading and firing) for each gun in my application.

Using iSimulate requires purchasing an iPhone application of the same name, and installing a free SDK library. Installing the SDK was a walk in the park, it took all of 2 minutes. Once you rebuild and launch your application in the simulator, you start the iSimulate application on your iPhone. The two will sync-up and you are ready to go, you can now use a real iPhone to test your multi-touch, accelerometer and GPS code.

The video that follows is a screen capture of my iPhone application running with the Xcode simulator, with all accelerometer data coming from iSimulate running on my iPhone. It worked without a hitch and made for a speedy code, build, test cycle, as the iPhone application is loaded into the Xcode simulator, versus the actual device, cutting down the load time significantly.

One update that I would welcome to iSimulate, if technically possible, would be support for the built-in camera. This would have been very handy when I was working on iHuntNet and iFishNet, where a photo was taken of a trophy “catch” (fish, deer, etc) and the device was used to determine the size of the “catch” by comparing against an object with a known size (dollar bill, beer can, etc). In the Xcode simulator I could take a photo, however, the resulting image was blank so testing of the scaling code for size determination could only be done on a device. Having the means to test in the simulator where an actual iPhone takes the photo and makes this available to the iPhone app, would of saved oodles of time in the testing process.

I found iSimulate to be a very creative use of technology to solve a real-world development issue, namely, no support for testing accelerometer, multi-touch and location code within the Xcode simulator. If you are working with any/all of these technologies, I highly recommend you take a closer look. You can learn more about iSimulate here: iSimulate.

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.

Apple recommends the loader for binaries that are over 200MB. I’ve used it for applications that are much smaller as I find the information it provides of great value. You can find the loader by following these steps from within iTunes Connect:

• Choose Manage You Applications
• Scroll to the bottom of the page
• Click the Get Application Loader link
• Click the Download Developer Guide link (good stuff in here, btw)

To use the loader, during the process of adding a new application to the App Store, when prompted in iTunes Connect (on the Upload tab), click the checkbox that says Check here to upload your binary later.

Complete the rest of the information required for uploading an application. To begin uploading with the loader, start the application and select New from the file menu. You’ll be prompted for your login information to connect to iTunes. At this point, if all is well, you’ll be shown a dialog box that has a drop-down list of all the applications iTunes Connect recognizes that are waiting for a binary. The rest of the steps for uploading are self explanatory as the loader walks you through the paces.

Important Note:
There is one gotcha that I ran into when rejecting a binary and attempting to re-upload a new binary with the loader. After rejecting the file, I created a new build and fired up the loader. Unfortunately, the loader did not recognize that there were binaries to be uploaded into my iTunes Connect account.

Here’s what I had to do to fix the problem:

• Login into iTunes Connect (with a web-browser)
• Choose Manage You Applications

You’ll see a dialog similar to the figure below for each application in which you rejected a binary:

• Click on the Replace Binary
• From the Upload Application screen, click the checkbox Check here to upload your binary later
• Save your changes

Start up the Application Loader and you should now see the application you rejected earlier as an option for uploading a new binary.

My first use of Free Ruler was to determine how much space remained on the iPhone screen after I created a tabbar, navigation bar and a row of custom images along the bottom of the display (just above the tabbar). I needed an approximate count of the pixels remaining so I could layout a table in the remaining screen space.

The image below shows how one might use Free Ruler to count the number of pixels between the bottom of the navigation bar and the top of the UIDatePicker.