October 2008 Archives

A view that handles multiple touch points must announce itself. Add the isMultipleToucheEnabled handler and have it return YES. Doing so allows your touch methods (touchesBegan, touchesMoved, touchesEnded) to work with several touchpoints at once.... read more

The iPhone App Store has been open for just over 100 days now, and in that time I've downloaded dozens of different applications. I have a screen full of third party software that I occasionally use, including Twitterrific, NetNewsWire, and...... read more

I'm not big on the whole Image Picker Camera interface. I hate how slow it is and how it prevents you from scraping the screen. So here's my work around. In the following code, I scan down the UIImagePicker presentation to find my way to the actual preview window.... read more

I'm continuing to work on RinkAtlas for iPhone to make it more iPhone-friendly. This required me to get serious about using the tools that Safari and Mobile Safari provide to help developers debug web applications. Although I am not a...... read more

When you mix apps with adverts, you get appverts. They've started to appear on the App Store, but do they deserve space there? And what do developers think of building them anyway?... read more

Earlier this week over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber had a couple links related to refunds for mobile software purchases. The first was a link to Michael Tsai's post on App Store Usability. Both Gruber and Tsai agreed that they...... read more

Apart from getting all my existing CA examples onto the iPhone I've also been toying with what the best way to build out the 'photo city' demo from WWDC 2008 would be (my next Core Animation screen cast series)....... read more

Laggy UI updates are a frequently occurring problem on the iPhone. With operationally intense work, your GUI may not always keep sync with your requests, particularly when you try to update status information to let the user know how things are going.

Way back in September 2007 I attended an iPhone Tech Talk in New York that was all about building iPhone Web Apps. This free Apple-sponsored event helped me get a very basic iPhone-optimized version of my Google Maps mashup called...... read more

Here's a desktop app to make iPhone developers smile... read more

Although the NDA is on the way out, not all is restored to sparkly brightness in the world of the iPhone SDK. Developers must still deal with day-to-day limitations built into Apple's development environment.

When I started writing for Inside iPhone, I promised that I'd talk about why iPhone web apps are still important. I decided to make good on that threat this week. One of the reasons that I think it's necessary to build websites that are iPhone-friendly is that lots of people will surf to your website before thinking of picking up your free app in the App Store. Do you want those people to have the somewhat-degraded user experience that comes from using a version of your website that's intended for a desktop or notebook computer?... read more

By now, almost everyone who has an iPhone and who have downloaded apps from the App Store, will most likely know what 3rd-party software means, and by natural extension, who the 3rd-party software developers are. And everyone also most likely...... read more

This morning, I had one of my d'oh moments: finally figuring out exactly how to do inter-app copy and paste without breaking SDK rules. It basically goes like this, in a similar fashion to the Core Location service I wrote about a few months ago:

Over the last two weeks, I've shown you how to create a socket to listen for web requests and how to produce an artificial index.html file that advertises the files you're willing to serve from your iPhone. Today, I'll wrap things up by adding error pages and the actual file server.

This post was revised on October 3, 2008. My latest post on Inside iPhone generated a lot of feedback. Several readers told me that I misinterpreted Apple's eight sentence announcement that it was dropping the Non-Disclosure Agreement that covers "released...... read more

Goodbye NDA and welcome to the age of open collaboration. Yay.... read more

Back in July, I had a post titled &*%#ing NDA wherein I discussed the problems of the NDA surrounding development for the iPhone. To wit, an NDA surrounding the iPhone SDK makes it difficult for developers to communicate, share code,...... read more

While the program at iPhoneLive was already really exciting with all the great speakers and content we had lined up. Now the the NDA has been lifted all the speakers are going to be able to share more detail in...... read more

Victory!?...... read more