rob’s blog

As I build upon my understanding of Objective-C, I’ve been working to better understand the concept of a delegate and when they should be used.  In searching for clarity, I came upon an explanation by Mark Hernandez the administrator of iPhoneDevForums.com.

For posterity, I’ve copied Mark’s explanation here. For his full explanation and his code example, follow the link above.

My favorite way to explain how delegates work involves animals.

Let’s say you are going to create a particular bird. You start with a predefined class definition of a bird (provided in the existing framework as, say, CFBird). The existing framework class assumes all birds have certain things in common — they hatch and grow the same, poop the same, fly the same, and lay eggs the same way, etc. (tee hee, I said poop.  ) But different birds look different, are different sizes, chirp differently, eat different things, and may mate differently. Continue Reading »

I’ve been experimenting with a multiview iPhone / iOS app with a tab-based navigation and came across an error and solution for “unrecognized selector sent to instance.”

In one of the tab’s views I had a standard button with a Touch Up Inside event that I had connected to a buttonClicked method in the view’s controller.  For some reason, when I tapped that button the app would crash.  This was not happening when I built the same stuff in a single view app.

I went searching and was happy to find that the problem was well described and solved in the developer forums of MacNN.  It turns out that when you have have multiple view controllers for separate .xib files being controlled by a Tab Bar Controller you need to take an extra step of setting the Class Identity for that particular view. Here’s how: Continue Reading »

I’m pumped to announce availability of Rock Show 2.0.  This is the first version of Rock Show that works on the iPad and both the iPhone and iPod Touch.  A lot of fixes and tweaks are in this version of the application, along with some new posters as well!

Two articles are up about the release, Padgadget is hosting one item and a second can be found at IntoMobile.  For a full low-down and updated info on the app, visit its page: http://www.rockshow.fm

When you submit an iOS application for review, you’ve got to make sure your ad copy is tight.  The app description may be the last thing holding back a tap to buy your app.

Apple doesn’t give much guidance on this important chunk of text. “Write your Application Description with a focus on what makes the functionality or design of your app unique.” was a tip from this past June from the App Store Tips blog.

We know that 4000 characters is the limit.  And App descriptions are made up of simple text, including unicode symbols like checkboxes (✔) and more (♣☢☂).  Apple takes your unicode text and formats it for display on the web via Web Preview, in iTunes and on the iOS devices themselves (the app store).

Since you probably have very specific points you want to get across, and users have a very short attention span, you need to pay attention to how Apple will format what you write.  In this entry I discuss how to create app descriptions that look great everywhere Apple publishes your app description.

Continue Reading »

Aaron Fechter the President of Creative Engineering, Inc has been reprogramming a working animatronic bear-band set up.  It looks like the company created it for a line of restraunts similar to Chuck E. Cheese.  He’s currently taking cash bids to do syncing or “choreography” for the band members.

The way the performance is filmed and presented are awesome.  Shakey prolonged shots, quick pulls outward.  The overall video quality is low and the colors look a bit washed out.  Everything is blurry and the bear with the guitar has a spooky shadow.   Great media.

Something almost every iPhone application needs is an About and Help view that allows the user to learn a little bit about the application they’re using and  how it should be operated.  The problem with a UITextView in Apple’s XCode and Interface Builder SDK is that you can not use rich-text styling or even bold one line over another.

One solution to this problem would be to create image files containing stylized text and then rasterize them and allow the user to page through them.  The problem with this is that you can’t have tappable URLs or links embedded in the text.

David Peixotto, coding ninja and my business partner for Neutrinos, suggested we look at using a Webview or HTML view and put an imageview in the background.  The trick is telling the iPhone to display a UIWebView with a transparent background.  I looked around for the solution to this and came across this helpful post in the iPhone Developer SDK forums.

Step one of getting a transparent web view in interface builder is to create HTML in the controller.m for the view containing the webview that contains the CSS line: <body style=”background-color:transparent”> Inside the <head> </head> sections of the html.

Step two is to set the background color of the webview to clear or transparent:  myWebView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor]; Continue Reading »

Some pages require an inordinate amount of time to load.  For most sites, this is a big problem.  Webmasters and SEO specialists know the value of a quick landing page load, because they know that netizens have short attention spans.

Dynamically built webpages, (especially applications), require time to load and visual feedback that something is happening.  The most famous example is the gmail loading page:

Gmail uses a more sophisticated progress bar to represent the loading of the webpage.  I found an article on yensDesign that gives some great advice on how to do this, if you want to get really fancy.

If you have a dynamically built page that you’d like to give a loading message to that doesn’t require a full progress bar, I recommend simply displaying a message and an animated gif.

The Method

The trick to accomplishing this is a small mix of JavaScript and CSS.  You don’t have to be using <div>’s to display your content, but you should.  My example uses <div>’s. Continue Reading »

I was just doing a ShareThis icon for a client I’m working with and found that how to properly style the button is poorly documented.  In order to replace the whole icon and text, you are supposed to use the developer API.

I only wanted to style the text, so I was hunting for some CSS to style the text and could not find the right classes to call.  Some hunting turned up the following: Continue Reading »

The web Contact Us form serves as an important starting point for people interested in a product or service.  For a big company, handling inbound leads over the course of a long sales process requires a strong CRM.  SalesForce is a fully featured CRM plaform, however in my experience it has somehow ignored an important source for sales leads: contact us forms on the company website.

Salesforce does not explain how its clients should go about crafting a quality Contact Us web page.

What is a quality Contact Us web page?  

Generally you’ll find the same type of fields on Contact Us pages across the web.  You are asked for your first and last name, job title, complete address and something specific about your query, like Where did you hear about us? Or What model Range Rover are you interested in?

 What’s the use of having their name if you don’t have their phone number?  Usually, a company will want to set specific form fields to required. Checking whether a potential customer has filled out a required answer is called form validation. Continue Reading »

In the past I’ve written about the Facebook platform as being the wild west of software development.  The reasoning was that 3rd party developers like myself were watching the platform shift and change on a daily basis.  The result was that functions were being introduced in beta, or replaced and deprecated frequently.

Developers working on emerging software platforms are a flexible bunch.  They’re used to having theirapplications break so long as the platform overall is being improved.  A better platform means more users, which means greater opportunity for 3rd party developers.  One thing developers do not like, however is having their software tools gobbled up an encorporated into the core of the platform.

I wrote about how this was happening in my blog post, Nationalization or Expropriation? Independent Facebook Application Developers Continue to Face Uncertainty.  Something entirely different is happening right now on the Touch platform, however.

Continue Reading »