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.
The availability of small, inexpensive sonar rangefinders creates new opportunities to make your home smarter. Discover two ideas for putting them to use, as well as how to use them with your Mac.
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.
Is RealPlayer badware? Why is Twitter so flaky lately? vLite might help shrink Windows Vista in virtual machines (Parallels, VMware Fusion).
I bought and took a look at the FileMaker Bento 1.0 personal data organizer. It has a lot of promise but needs a few bugs cleaned out of the meal to be a bit more palatable.
It took two email complaints, but Apple resolved the problem I had updating a second iPod touch.
As part of a redesign of their real estate Web site, German immobilienscout24.de have added interactive maps based on Microsoft's Virtual Earth technology. Unfortunately, though, Safari users don't seem to be welcome to navigate those maps just yet. Question is, why?
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
Are you driven to distraction by noise? Software solutions promise to help you concentrate, and maybe even lift your mood, by generating ambient noises that mask what bothers you. I've been using one, with pretty good success.
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.
