1
Mar
2011
 

Subduing CATiledLayer

by Matt Long

Many technologies we use as Cocoa/Cocoa Touch developers stand untouched by the faint of heart because often we simply don’t understand them and employing them can seem a daunting task. One of those technologies is found in Core Animation and is referred to as the CATiledLayer. It seems like a magical sort of technology because so much of its implementation is a bit of a black box and this fact contributes to it being misunderstood. CATiledLayer simply provides a way to draw very large images without incurring a severe memory hit. This is important no matter where you’re deploying, but it especially matters on iOS devices as memory is precious and when the OS tells you to free up memory, you better be able to do so or your app will be brought down. This blog post is intended to demonstrate that CATiledLayer works as advertised and implementing it is not as hard as it may have once seemed.
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23
Jun
2010
 

View Your iPhoto Library From Your iPad [UPDATED]

by Matt Long

Announcing PhotoGrab for iPad! I wrote this little utility app that allows you to browse your iPhoto library shares across your wifi network and download and save either a hi-res version of your photos or a version resized especially for display on iPad. It features multi-download as well as a slideshow mode. Just share your photos from within your iPhoto preferences sharing tab and you will be able to access your photos across the network from your iPad.

I wrote the app because I don’t sync my iPad with the computer where we store all of our photos, but from time to time I like to grab a photo from the iPhoto library without having to sync.

I just submitted a new point release that fixes a few crashers and other bugs to the App Store, but go ahead and take a look at this one and let me know what you think.

Free Promo Codes!

Just for the readers of this site! If you’re interested in the app, send an email to promocodes at cimgf dot com with the subject line PhotoGrab Promo Codes. I will send an email containing a promo code to the first 50 I receive (since the Apple only issues 50 of them per version). Be patient with me as I will be responding manually as I receive the messages. It will be first come, first served. Otherwise, check it out in the App Store. Promo codes are only valid in the US App Store.

Update on Promo Codes

I have received a lot of email requests for promo codes and will be sending them to the first 50 by the end of the day today (06/23/2010). If you do not receive a code by the end of the day, you were not in the first batch. When the next release hits the App Store, I will have another 50 at my disposal and will send those to the next group. Thanks for your interest.

 
14
Jun
2010
 

Differentiating Tap Counts on iOS [UPDATED]

by Matt Long

In your iPhone/iPad apps you often need to know how many times your user tapped in a view. This can be challenging because, though the user may have tapped twice, you will receive the event and it will look like they tapped once as well as twice. If the user triple-tapped, you will get the event for one tap, two taps, and three taps. It can get a little frustrating, but the trick is timing. You simply have to wait a period of time to see if another tap comes. If it does, you cancel the action spawned by the first tap. If it doesn’t you allow the action to run. There’s a few little nuances to getting it to work, but it can be done. Here is how.
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5
Jun
2010
 

Re-Ordering NSFetchedResultsController

by Matt Long

So Marcus is the Core Data guy, but I’ve been working with it a good bit myself lately and was recently faced with having to add re-ordering for a list of entities in a UITableView. The methods I found online for accomplishing this all suggested using an NSMutableArray as the data source for the table view. That will work, but I came up with another method, though similar, that achieved what I need without having to switch from using my NSFetchedResultsController as the data source behind the UITableView. In the end, I did use an NSMutableArray, however, I end up using it just to take advantage of its indexing. Read on to see what I mean.
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24
May
2010
 

Fixing the UISplitViewController Template

by Matt Long

The default implementation of the UISplitViewController based template in Xcode does not provide a navigation controller stack in the detail view. Instead it is just a regular old view with a navigation bar at the top. I suppose there are cases when you might want such an implementation, however, i think you would more commonly want there to be a navigation stack for cases when you wan to push new view controllers for your users to see. In this post i intend to demonstrate how to convert the default template to something more useable.
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12
Feb
2010
 

Accessing The Cloud From Cocoa Touch

by Matt Long

Everything is moving toward the cloud and unless you’re building calculators, unit converters, or miniature golf score keepers your iPhone app needs to know how to get data from it. In this blog post I intend to demonstrate how to set up a simple server application and how to retrieve data from it and post data to it using Cocoa Touch. I have chosen to use PHP on the server side because of it’s simplicity and ubiquity, and because I’ve know it, somewhat. You should, however, be able to implement something similar using your server side language of choice.

In many cases when you go to access remote data, you do so through a web service API. While services based on such technologies as SOAP or XML-RPC are standards that provide reasonable methods for retrieving and updating data, REST seems to be the methodology gaining the most ground lately. For our purpose in this post I won’t get into great detail of how to implement a REST base web service as, again, REST is not a specific implementation but rather a methodology. (Read up on it elsewhere if you don’t understand what this means). However, I will talk about it briefly so that you can get on the right path for doing your own REST implementation.
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30
Jan
2010
 

Getting “Real Work” Done

by Matt Long

I had to post a link to this one as well as Fraser does such a great job explaining why the iPad is so compelling . From Fraser’s post:

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work.”

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organizing the party.

Exactly! The iPad is genius and it will revolutionize not just books, magazines, etc., but it will revolutionize computing as we know it. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got the new SDK fired up and ready to start rocking some apps and it is a very exciting new platform!

 
28
Jan
2010
 

Fun With UIButtons and Core Animation Layers

by Matt Long

Upon first glance, the UIButton class doesn’t seem to provide what you might expect in terms of customization. This often causes developers to resort to creating buttons in an image editor and then specifying that in the Background field in Interface Builder. This is a fine solution and will likely give you what you need, but with Core Animation layers there is a simpler way to achieve the look you want without having to create an image. This post will demonstrate how.
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20
Oct
2009
 

Marching Ants With Core Animation

by Matt Long

Marching AntsOur Core Animation book should be available by the end of the year. Go ahead and pre-order it now at Amazon if you would like ;-). When we started writing for Addison-Wesley back in September of 2008, I had no idea how long to expect it to take to finish a technical book as this was my first. One thing I discovered though, is that it is when you are about ready to go to production you start to realize all of the things that you probably should have added to the book, but didn’t think of in time. This blog post will cover one such item as a way to make up for not thinking of it in time. I may include this in a second edition if there is one, but consider this one a freebie. (more…)

 
23
Sep
2009
 

UITableViewCell Dynamic Height

by Matt Long

At first glance setting a height dynamically for table view cells seems a little daunting and the first most obvious answers that come to mind are not necessarily correct. In this post I will show you how to set your table view cell heights dynamically based upon the text content without subclassing UITableViewCell. You can subclass it, however, doing so does not make the code much cleaner as setting the height is done in your delegate for the table view itself rather than the cell anyhow. Read on to see what you need to know to make dynamic cell height sizing a breeze.
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11
May
2009
 

Magical iPhone View Controllers

by Matt Long

Update: This is documented behavior.

Every now and again while doing development you stumble upon something that makes you go, hmmmm. Those are normally the moments at which you have to ask yourself, “is this a bug or a feature”. If it’s a bug, then you should file a radar with Apple, however, what if it’s a feature? You blog about it, of course!

I have done a bit less iPhone development than Marcus, so he was a little stumped while looking through some of my code where I created a view controller using a simple alloc/init. Most interestingly is that fact that the app works. It loads the correct nib and displays the view just fine without any trouble. Notice I said alloc/init and not alloc/initWithNibName. How can this possibly work? How did my controller “know” which view to use?
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3
Feb
2009
 

Record Your Core Animation Animation

by Matt Long

Every once in a while I find a way to combine multiple technologies that, while they don’t produce anything terribly useful, are very interesting when combined. In this post I will be taking a look at combining Core Animation and QuickTime. As you may or may not be aware, you can draw in a graphics context while your Core Animation animation is running and add each image created to a QTMovie object from QTKit. This enables you to create a QuickTime movie of your Core Animation animation. Here’s how.
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13
Nov
2008
 

Landscape Tab Bar Application for the iPhone

by Matt Long

As you develop applications for the iPhone, you will likely use the project templates provided in Xcode. One such template, called “Tab Bar Application” helps you get a tab bar application set up quickly, but by default the application it generates only supports portrait mode for display. So how can you make the application also support landscape or even only support landscape? In this post we will address that question.
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5
Nov
2008
 

Core Animation Tutorial: Interrupting Animation Progress

by Matt Long

Starting and stopping animations in Core Animation is as simple as adding and removing your animation from the layer upon which is being run. In this post I am going to talk about how to interrupt animation progress and how to determine whether an animation completed its full run or was interrupted. This is accomplished with the animation delegate -animationDidStop:finished.
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