iCodeBlog

iPhone Coding – Turbo Charging Your Apps With NSOperation

So, let’s face it, MANY applications in the app store are “Clunky”. They have jittery interfaces, poor scrolling performance, and the UI tends to lock up at times. The reason? DOING ANYTHING OTHER THAN INTERFACE MANIPULATION IN THE MAIN APPLICATION THREAD!

What do I mean by this? Well, I am essentially talking about multithreading your application. If you don’t know what is meant by multithreading, I suggest you read up on it and return to this post. Let’s dig in and I’ll give you an example of the problem.

Adding TwitPic to your Application

Introduction Back in July of last year. Brandon put up a post showing you how to integrate twitter into your application. Today I am going to take the class he made last year and add a new class which will let you [...]

iPhone Coding Recipe – Shortening URLs

I had some a to shorten URLs for an in-application Twitter client I'm working on and thought I would share my simple solution with you guys. It's actually pretty straight forward and can be done in 1 line of code. I have broken it up into several for clarity.

Who’s Up For Some iPad Coding?

Apple’s developer center is down for now. But, I can assure you we will be downloading the SDK as soon as it goes live. Get ready for some iPad dev tutorials!

App Store Overpopulation

The number of applications in the app store is approaching 100,000. The quality of applications in this massive of a marketplace is hard to measure. Apple provides the star ratings for applications but I like to have a few more [...]

CES 2010 – Mobile Processors, eReaders and Tablets

This year I was lucky enough to go to CES in beautiful Las Vegas. While I’m sure you all know, CES is the Consumer Electronics Show, and it is one of the largest trade shows in the world. Everyone who [...]

iPhone Coding Recipe: Live Character Counter, Word filter, and 1337 Translator For A UITextField

I'm sure you have seen a Twitter client such as Twittelator Pro or Tweetie 2 count down the characters as you type your Tweet. This is done by responding to the Editing Changed action on a UITextField.

Today, I will show you how you can implement this functionality in your application as well as show you some other real world examples of responding to this action. Here are a few of the uses that we will discuss:

Countdown of characters allowed - Used when the user is limited by a certain number of characters
Word filter - useful in filtering out swear words or other unwanted text
Live translator - our example will translate english to 1337 :)

I will create the core code and show you how to modify it slightly to implement the other 2 applications.

Cocoa Development in 2010

2009 will be known as the year the world learned the word app. With the first full calendar year of the app store coming to a close it is amazing to look back and see the growth that has occurred [...]

UITextField – A Complete API Overview

The UITextField is probably one of the most commonly used UI controls on the iPhone. It is the primary method of user input via the keyboard and provides a great deal of additional functionality. With the success of our las API [...]

Introduction to MapKit in iPhone OS 3.0 Part 2

Introduction Back in September I posted a large post going over all the components required to implement the MapKit in your application. The MapKit is a framework introduced in iPhone OS 3.0 and allows developers to easily take advantage of Google’s [...]

Introduction to MapKit in iPhone OS 3.0

Introduction Hello everyone. Welcome to another screencast. Today we will be looking into the MapKit, a new API’s made available by Apple in the iPhone OS 3.0 release. The MapKit allows simple access to the map seen in the maps application. [...]

Special Deal For iCodeBlog Readers On An Invisible Shield

The site invisibleskinz.com has decided to give iCodeBlog readers a 20% discount on the Invisible Shield for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The iPhone is Bad at Keeping Secrets

Today an article from TaranFx has been making the rounds talking about a new open source application called SpyPhone that highlights all of the “information vulnerabilities” within the current iPhone SDK. You can check out the article here: SpyPhone App Steals [...]

iPhone Coding Tutorial – In Application Emailing

A lot of applications you see have an email button. When you click it then it will leave the application and take you to the Mail application. It can get really annoying leaving the application and then going back in [...]

iPhone In Action Book – Free Chapter Downloads

Manning Publishing has started their MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) for the book I am working on. What this means for you is FREE DOWNLOADS. There is currently only one chapter available, but there will be more as the book progresses. The chapter currently available is about audio recording and playback. It goes into detail about the AVAudio frameworks as well as the MPMediaPlayer.

iPhone Coding Tutorial – Inserting A UITextField In A UIAlertView

This will be a simple tutorial showing you how to put a UITextField in a UIAlertView. This is simple and just a couple lines if code. You will learn CGAffineTransform and coding UITextField programmatically. Heres a screenshots of what we should [...]

iPhone Tech Talk World Tour: San Jose

Last week I went out to San Jose, CA to go to Apple’s iPhone Tech Talk World Tour! Apple once a year holds 9 single day “Tech Talks” across the world. This year only 3 were in the US and I [...]

iPhone Coding Tutorial – Creating an Online Leaderboard For Your Games

As you may have seen, there are quite a few services out there offering free leaderboards. These are great and all, but sometimes you want to have complete control over your data. I have put together a complete tutorial detailing step by step how you can create your own online leaderboard. This will also give you a very simple introduction to interfacing with web services.

Floodgates opened for iPhone development

For as active as iPhone application development community is, achieving success in iTunes has been an elusive affair for those who participate in this vertical. The two main obstacles presented to anyone who wants to create an iPhone applications are: one, finding resources/developers with the right skill set; and two, marketing the application after the application has been submitted. The bad news is Apple keeps iTunes a black box. Unless your application has been reviewed or mentioned on review sites or blogs, no one will be able to find your application outside of iTunes. This makes marketing your application relatively difficult. Here's the good news: the cost to build an iPhone application should come down substantially as it no longer requires a developer with an exclusive knowledge to a specific technology to build an application for iPhone.

Debugging Tutorial – Automating Your Tests With A UIRecorder Instrument

If you have ever experienced a bug in your application that took many steps to reproduce, then this tutorial is for you. By nature, testing and debugging are very tedious processes. This is especially the case for the iPhone. Say you [...]

360iDev Conference Day 1

Today was the beginning of the 360iDev conference in Denver Colorado. So far, I must say I am very impressed. There have been some great speakers and some very smart dudes in attendance. In case you are unfamiliar with 360iDev, [...]

Code Snippet – Quickly Find The Documents Directory

As many of you may have seen by now, there are quite a few ways to find the documents directory on the iPhone. For those of you who don’t know, the documents directory of an app is the location where [...]

Objective-C Tutorial: NSArray

The NSArray is a huge workhorse that we use quite frequently without even thinking about it. The NSArray class isn't just your ordinary array. Not only does it provide random access, but it also dynamically re-sizes when you add new objects to it. While I won't go over every method in NSArray (there are quite a few), I will discuss some of the more important ones that are most commonly used. Let's take a closer look at this class.

Forums Are Back!

After the server switch, we seemed to have lost the forums. They are now back up at http://icodeblog.com/forum . I will do my best to keep up with them (as I have tended to neglect them in the past). Just, please [...]

How to deal with iPhone Device Provisioning without Stabbing Your Eyes Out

Introduction So for any developer than has joined the iPhone Development program and attempted to throw their app on their phone, the process of provisioning is a familiar and likely painful process. Like many developer you may have several projects going [...]

iPhone Development: Where is all the $$$

Hey guys, So this is the first post we are doing that is more about developers than about developing. The Guardian put up a great article today talking about the app store, developers and what is driving sales. The app store [...]

Getting Images From The iPhone Photo Library Or Camera Using UIImagePickerController

This will be a simple tutorial showing you how to access the iPhone’s photo library as well as the camera. Since the 3.0 update, the methods for picking photos have been deprecated. So this will be a 3.0 [...]

Programmatically Getting a Screencapture of any UIView

Introduction Hey guys. This post is in response to a comment made in my last post about NSTimers. Techy asked if we could do a post on how to take screenshots programmatically using the iPhone SDK. For this minor project we [...]

iPhone Programming Tutorial: Animating A Game Sprite

One thing I have noticed about many of the games in the app store is they lack animation. Of course, the huge companies like Sega and PopCap have some pretty amazing animation, but what about us indie iPhone game [...]

NSTimer: The Poor Man’s Threading – Code Snapshot

Introduction Hey guys. So usually the posts we put up here involve screencasts and presentations, but we are going to start also posting small less time consuming pieces for the site. Today I bring to you a small project involving NSTimers. [...]