Core Services
Creating Repeating and Non-Repeating Timers
Let do a quick run through of the basic operation of the NSTimer object. Timers are generally divided into one of two buckets, repeating and non-repeating. In either case, a timer event is fired after a specified amount of time has elapsed. As the name implies, once the repeating timer fires, it is rescheduled to [...]
NSClassFromString to Check for Class Availability
I recently received a question about how to check if a class is available – the specific question was in regards to the TWTweetComposeViewController. There are two common ways to check for a class. First, if a feature is tied to an OS version, you can check what version of the OS is running. For [...]
Remind Users to Restart Your App
This tip shows you how to create a local notification that will be trigged when a user exits your application. I would recommend you use this sparingly, for example, if the user was in the middle of setting up configuration information needed by an application. Let’s start with a quick look at how this appears [...]
Get List of Installed International Keyboards
The NSUserDefaults object is typically used to save/restore your application related preferences, configuration data, etc – see Write and Read User Preferences for more information. In addition to application specifics, there is a system wide default list that is available to all applications, accessible using the class method standardUserDefaults in the NSUserDefaults object. To get [...]
iOS 5 : Look Up Definitions Using Dictionary Service
With iOS 5, there is now a dictionary service that you can access to look up definitions of words. UIReferenceLibraryViewController makes it as easy as creating an instance of the class and providing a term/word to lookup. The view controller will handle the display of the definition and managing the UI (scrolling, etc). // Create [...]
iOS 5 : Twitter Framework – Part 3 – Display List of Twitter Accounts
In the previous two iOS 5 Twitter Framework posts, I covered using TWTweetComposeViewController to display a pre-built controller for posting to Twitter and also wrote an example on how to use the TWRequest object to create an HTTP request to access the Twitter API. Over the past few weeks I’ve had a number of requests [...]
iOS 5 : Twitter Framework – Part 2 – Call Twitter API with TWRequest
In the previous post on iOS 5 and the new Twitter framework, I walked through how to use TWTweetComposeViewController to display a pre-built controller for easily integrating and posting to Twitter. In this post I will show you how to use the TWRequest object to create an HTTP request, and in turn, sending and processing [...]
iOS 5 : Twitter Framework – Part 1 – Compose a Tweet with TWTweetComposeViewController
This is the first post of two on how to work with the new Twitter framework in an iOS 5 app. This post will cover the basics to create and display a dialog for composing a tweet. Part 2 in this series can be found here. The primary controller for working with Twitter in iOS [...]
How to Keep the Screen from Locking
By default, iOS will lock the screen and disable the touch sensor if there are no touch events for a specified period of time. Depending on your application, there may be times that you need to keep the screen from locking. For example, if your application is primarily accelerometer driven (such as a game), there [...]
