February 2008 Archives

iPhones and iPod touches running 1.1.3 and later allow you to add applications to your Springboard home screen without restarting the entire Springboard process. A simple loader called "nikita" (which will play a big role in the upcoming SDK) allows...... read more

Oh man. What was I thinking. You do not need to use a core surface. The layer from a UIImageView works perfectly well. Updated easier sample code is here....... read more

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...... read more

A short while back, I wrote about my difficulties in redirecting log phone data. At the time, I could not get NSLog to properly redirect to a file using stderr. I was frustrated by the fact that NSLog didn't seem...... read more

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....... read more

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...... read more

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...... read more

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...... read more