August 2008 Archives

I know I promised last week to post about intra-app notification, and I'm still planning to but after chatting with Øivind Kjellnø over email, I decided to change directions for a little while. I'll get back to notifications but for today, I'm going to show you how to access your app reviews throughout the world.... read more

iPhone developer Mxweas (author of mxtube) writes "I made a forum for iPhone SDK and Toolchain development called idevkit.com. There are tons of code samples already up and it currently has about 460 members. Feel free to check it out."

I believe that it's only a matter of time before AT&T Mobility offers iPhone 3G users the ability to tether their iPhones to any other Internet-centric device that they carry. For the past week, courtesy of the Nokia Blogger Relations...... read more

When you've been using a particular gadget for some time, you develop what seems to be a personal, and perhaps, even a somewhat intimate relationship with that object. The contents, the settings, and even the characteristics of a gadget that...... read more

Sadly I have only half a post for you today; I was hoping for something much more detailed, in order to spark off some debate. Alas, only half the tale can be told. But perhaps we can have the debate...... read more

Last week, I talked about Steven Frank's conflicted feelings regarding the App Store, and how I share many of the same qualms. While discussing this, however, I also said: "As a businessman, I'm in awe of the potential to so...... read more

A few weeks ago, I wrote about listening to iPhone inter-application notifications. Several readers contacted me, through the post comments and through private mail, asking if I could explain how to create the list of notifications that was omitted from the original post. So today, I'm going to walk you through the basics of doing that... read more

I've been experimenting with AOL Radio, Last.fm, and voice recording apps to get a better sense of the iPhone's ability to be a general purpose audio device. In the course of regular use over the past three weeks, I'm really...... read more

Over on his personal weblog, Steven Frank of Panic Software has an excellent analysis of the iPhone App Store. It's well worth a read, as he distills down some important thoughts on the basic principles of software sales, and where...... read more

As the open iPhone toolchain reveals, Apple has supplied a limited device-specific information class. You can retrieve far more information from your iPhone through its IO Registry. As on the Macintosh, the IO Registry provides a great deal of hardware specific information, which can be queried and used by your programs.... read more

I watched a couple of hours of presentations from iPhoneDevCamp on August 2 over my home office broadband connection. One of the presentations I heard (because the video wasn't working for me at the time) was from PinchMedia, a company...... read more

A short series of interesting tidbits from the week in iPhone: Firmware 1.2 Beta 3, iFund, and iOlympics... read more

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of Apple's App Store being the sole provider of software for the iPhone. I discussed this at length in One Little Article, but the complaint boils down to this: I believe Apple...... read more

So today, keeping in the theme of posting useful code snippets that do not rely on privileged SDK calls, let me show you how to Tweet. The API itself is really simple: you provide a user name, password and a Twitter message. What complicates this from an iPhone point of view is that you can't just assemble a URL and shoot it upstream to Twitter.com. The request requires POST.

A friend recently asked me if I had seen Hotels.com's iPhone App? I said no, because I had no need for a hotel room anytime in the next few weeks, and I'd probably book ahead when I did need one....... read more

"Hey Erica, I was hoping you could help get the word out about a forensics seminar and workshop I am giving in Boston this fall."... read more

What happens when you lock a couple hundred iPhone developers in a room with an equal number of iPhones? Community, that's what.... read more

Listening to notifications isn't hard. Just call CFNotificationCenterAddObserver and add your application as a listener. Unfortunately, unlike standard notification centers, the Darwin forbids eavesdropping. You must specify exactly which notification token you want to listen for.... read more