Archive for October, 2008
How to download and process GZip’d data
HTML browsers, for the longest time, have had support for downloading and expanding Gzip content. This is an ideal way to compress the size of HTML pages because gzip is at its best when compressing text. As you can imagine, compression is even more critical when we look at consuming XML over the mobile network.
Boot Mac OS X from External Drive
Although a tad bit off topic, it’s Mac related none-the-less. I am in the midst of backing up my MacBook Pro to a remote drive as I’ll be buying one of the new machines recently announced by Apple. As part of the process, I am creating an image of my current system on a USB [...]
How to Dismiss the Keyboard when using a UITextView
Oddly this was more tricky then I would have thought … perhaps for a veteran Cocoa developer this would have been obvious, but for the rest of us struggling to get rid of the keyboard on a UITextView here is the secret sauce …
Real Men Don’t Use Interface Builder
When I start to learn a new development platform I prefer, at least in the beginning, not to develop behind a RAD tool like InterfaceBuilder. I like to understand how things work before I look to a tool to do the work for me. Doing things “by hand” (at least initially) often gives me a [...]
Showing Network Activity When there Isn’t Any
I found that sometimes you may be doing something in your iPhone application that requires the user to wait while it completes. Often this is a network related activity, but in other cases it may not be. In my case I was parsing the response from a network connection and wanted the network activity indicator [...]
Creating a Tabbar
I haven’t seen many examples of creating a tabbar controller other than “theElements” example from Apple, which is pretty intense. So, what follows is a short snippet from a proof-of-concept application I was recently working on. The basic idea is as follows: a UITabBarController contains an array of UIViewController objects, and these views are swapped [...]
JSON Framework for iPhone
Editor’s Note: Due to the popularity of this iPhone JSON series, a new three part tutorial series on working with JSON was published in August 2009. You can find the latest JSON iPhone tutorial series at the links below: iPhone JSON and Flickr Tutorial – Part 1 iPhone JSON and Flickr Tutorial – Part 2 [...]
iPhone Tech Talk World Tour
Apple has announced an iPhone Tech Talk, an event at locations around the globe targeted at developers interested in learning to build iPhone applications. Apple technology evangelists will soon be traveling the globe to bring iPhone application development expertise to a city near you. Learn about the tools and technologies you’ll use to create great [...]
Review: Marware SportGrip for the iPhone 3G
I recently received the SportGrip iPhone 3G case from Marware. With a velvety smooth feel and jet black color, for those interested in a full protection case, this one deserves a close look.
