January 2009 Archives

One of the secrets of MacOS ninjas are shortcut utilities such as TextExpander, TextMate, and TypeIt4Me. These programs allow you to type abbreviations that are automatically replaced by words, sentences, or whole paragraphs. Apps like these have been absent from...... read more

My wife gave birth to our second son, Peter, last week. The proud parents are both iPhone users, so you'd expect us to have an iPhone-based solution for announcing the big news to our friends and family. Although we tried...... read more

Making an iPhone vibrate requires nothing more than a simple call to Audio Services. Deciding on when your application should buzz is a different matter. The code for producing that short buzz effect is this:

It's an interesting trait that the Mac and iPhone stacks work this way, opting in to complexity and keeping the higher-level APIs sparser and simpler, and you have to wonder whether it's a conscious design decision or a happy accident.... read more

At some point, my apmode utility got dropped from Erica Utilities and a number of people, particularly my pal Pytey, asked if I could find some time to bring it back to life. Last night, I decided to see if I could put this together using 2.x technology after having put this off for far too long.

With the weather as brutal as it's likely to get this winter in much of the Continental United States, now is a great time to take a quick look at the leading free weather apps for your iPhone and iPod...... read more

For the first time in the history of the App Store, the same iPhone application holds the #1 spot in both the Top 25 Paid and Free apps lists. The app is iShoot by Ethan Nicholas. It's a fairly straightforward...... read more

A colleague recently had his application rejected from App Store because he used what I can only call a noun-verb approach. He allowed items in the table to be selected, and highlighted upon selection, and then provided buttons that used that choice to perform an action. His application was rejected, with the rejection citing the following from the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines:

I've been cheerleading for iPhone tethering since this past summer. In spite of that AT&T and Apple have failed to announce it. With Macworld Expo 2009 almost over, I'm beginning to wonder if Apple considers this feature a maybe-someday feature...... read more

I am really impressed with Tweetie, the multi-account Twitter client iPhone application. I find it bizarre that Loren Brichter (the developer) has created a true, multi-account Twitter client for the iPhone and there's still not a native application for the...... read more

Headed to Macworld? There are number of iPhone-related talks and events taking place at and surrounding Macworld this year. This is liklely not a complete list, but I provide some of the items that stand out. This information is collected...... read more

I've been thinking about learning styles recently. I'm working on a set of blog posts to demystify the way that iPhone stuff works. And I've been going back and forth between doing them as posts or as video screen casts...... read more

I sometimes use a little trick to ensure that a UITextInputField only accepts a certain subset of characters. Say for example, you want to ensure that a user enters only letters and spaces. A UITextField delegate can catch each character as its typed and decide whether to add items to the active text field. Here's how.