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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Last month I was given the opportunity to write an article for The Pragmatic Programmers great magazine called “PragPub”. I am happy to say that the article I wrote for them was published in this month’s edition. The article, titled “Touching the Core”, is a walk through Apple’s great addition to the Core Data API for the iPhone.

Specifically this article walks through using the NSFetchedResultsController and some best practices in its use. The magazine is available for free on their website, [The Pragmatic Bookshelf](http://pragprog.com/magazines).

For those not aware, when you compile an Objective-C application, whether it be for the desktop or for Cocoa Touch devices, the debugging symbols are stripped out of the binaries. Therefore, unlike other languages such as Java, when a crash occurs, there is virtually no way to determine where the crash occurred. However, when the applications are compiled, a dSYM bundle is generated. This bundle allows us to match up the debugging symbols with the application’s crash log to help determine the cause of the crash.

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It’s common practice for any software project with multiple coders to use some version control mechanism. CVS or Subversion used to be popular. These days distributed systems like git and Mercurial are the quickly replacing the old standards. But what about the cases when you’re the only coder?
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Now that we’re all using XCode 3.2 on Snow Leopard (you are, right?) and building 64-bit apps you may find that not everything 64-bit works when your app is run on Leopard.
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Our 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…)

If your app is fullscreen, like a game, has a presentation mode, or plays long running movie files, you’ll want to disable the display from sleeping. DVD Player and Keynote are perhaps the two most obvious examples of this functionality.
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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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October 17th and October 18th of this year, the Voices That Matter conference will be occurring in Boston. I will be speaking at this conference on the subject of Core Animation. In addition to myself, there is a very nice list of speakers at this conference including Aaron Hillegass, Daniel Jalkut, Fraser Speirs and many others.

Early Signup

Currently, you can get $200.00 off the the price of the conference if you sign up before the 12th of September.

In addition, if you use the speaker code ‘PHASPKR’, you can receive an additional $150.00 off the price. That is a combined discount of $350.00 if you sign up before September 12th.

http://www.voicesthatmatter.com/iphone2009/

It is important to develop a consistent build process for your applications. I have written a couple of bash scripts to help me with this process.

I use git for version control and also the services of github. Now in another post on this site Marcus covered how to put git commit checksums in your Info.plist’s CFBundleVersion. I have opted to use Apple Generic Versioning (or agv for short) instead as it has an easy to read incrementing build number and is super easy to script. It’s also great for use with Sparkle since Sparkle uses the CFBundleVersion to see if the appcast has a newer version.
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I’ve seen a good bit of sample code that shows how to implement using a UINavigationController in a view controller that is managed by a UITabBarController, but I haven’t seen much on how to do it with Interface Builder. Turns out that it’s pretty simple and I’m going to show you how.
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This is the first in a short series on my adventures getting my software out the door. Rather than this first lesson be a lesson in what to do, here’s what not to do.
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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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Having finally decided that I prefer the 1920×1200 display of the 17″ Macbook Pros I am finally committing to one size of laptop. To help force myself into that commitment I am going to be selling my gently used late 2008 15″ Macbook Pro.

The specs are:

* 2.53 Ghz Intel Core Duo
* 4GB RAM
* 320 GB Harddrive
* 512 Nvidia Video cards (9400 and 9600)
* 2 USB
* 1 FW/800

All of the original hardware and equipment are included.

The asking price is $1,800.00 plus shipping.

The machine is in perfect condition as shown in these photos on flickr (http://tr.im/kQ11).

If you are interested in this machine please contact me at marcus at cimgf dot com.

Thanks to the ability to have configurations in a Core Data Managed Object Model and being able to save data to multiple Persistent Stores, it is possible to have a Core Data Model that is constructed from not only an internal model, but from the models of all the plug-ins that are loaded into the application.

In this example we are going to build a basic application with the following requirements:

• A plug-in framework
• Plug-ins can extend the managed object model of the application
• Removal of a plug-in should not corrupt the persistent store.

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