Oh man. What was I thinking. You do not need to use a core surface. The layer from a UIImageView works perfectly well

After chatting with iPhone developer Cobra about his most recent UICoverFlowLayer example, I decided to simplify UICoverFlowLayer creation. What I found was this: programming cover flow is eerily reminiscent of programming tables. Like tables, you create a data source method in your main application. This data source supplies your coverflow layer with images on demand. And, like tables, you build delegate methods that react to selection changes. When a user taps on an image, you can catch that selection change and do something about it.

This past weekend, I made a startling discovery. Apple included another log function, hidden in its GraphicsServices framework. It's called GSLog and as far as I can tell, acts almost exactly like NSLog except it works correctly and will redirect its output

As anyone who has worked on the iPhone knows, issuing a sound alert comes with a price. If you use the standard QuickTime-esque Celestial audio controller to play your sounds, you'll stop any ongoing iPod or Video playback at once.

Apple provides a simple and beautiful way to handle operations that may take a bit of time. Use the UIKit class UIProgressHUD to create a simple window with a rotating progress indicator and a short message. Programatically, all you have to do is allocate an object, initialize it with your main window, and tell it to go.

A question came up over the weekend as to download an image off the internet and add it to a UIImage object on the iPhone. The answer is to create an NSData object that grabs the contents of the URL and then initialize the image with that data, as such

When it comes to the iPhone, phone function comes first. Incoming calls, SMS, and USSD (unstructured supplementary service data, including account balance notifications for prepaid plans) messages will supersede your application. You can program around this by watching for core telephony events and shutting down key processes as needed. The iPhone's core telephony system sends out distributed notifications to warn about these status changes.

So now that we know. Apple will be using signing for iPhone Applications. Readers what to know how developers will be able to sign their programs to authenticate them for the iPhone. Short answer, I don't know. Apple hasn't shared this information yet.

In anticipation of the upcoming SDK, I've set up a iPhone SDK mailing list.

If you want to find out how your software will run under 1.1.3 and the SDK, I recommend you test it out under 1.1.2 or 1.1.1 as user "mobile". First, consider where all your resources will be located (in /var/mobile rather than /var/root). Next, start thinking from a ~mobile perspective. Issue a "sudo - mobile" from the command line and...