Category Archiveprogramming
Apple & css & iphone & mobile computing & programming & sdk rob on 26 Jun 2009
Using an HTML Web View with a Transparent Background in iPhone SDK’s Interface Builder and Xcode
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 »
css & design & programming & www rob on 20 May 2009
Display a Simple Loading Message and Animated Loading Gif Using JavaScript
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 »
css & programming & www rob on 06 May 2009
Custom Styling the ShareThis Button Using CSS Without API Calls
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 »
programming & salesforce & sdk & www rob on 08 Apr 2009
Contact Us Javascript Form Validation and Custom Fields in SalesForce
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 »
Apple & iphone & legal & programming & sdk rob on 13 Sep 2008
Apple Touch Platform Applications Approval Process Stirs Concern
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.
iphone & legal & marketing & programming & sdk & technology rob on 14 Aug 2008
Developing within iPhone NDA Muffle aka The Cone of Silence
Neutrinos just wrapped its second iPhone application, it is a 20 questions trivia game called iQ. It is great step from our first app, TipTotaler. For iQ, I took on the user interface design for the application in addition to my normal website design and marketing.
The amount of graphic design and image handling in iPhone development is extensive and I’ve already blogged about a tool to assist in the 3d iPhone application icon design. But the most interesting stuff is happening in Interface Builder and in xCode that I’m not supposed to talk about here.
Apple has an NDA up with all developers that they can not talk about their experience with the SDK.
design & iphone & marketing & photoshop & programming & technology rob on 28 Jul 2008
iPhone Developer Resource: Preview Application Icon 3D Effect
My friend Dave Peixotto is in charge of coding and software repository work on our iPhone application development. I am in charge of the marketing and business aspects of our software company, Neutrinos, LLC.
One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app. As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.
There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers: First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57. Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.
api & ethics & facebook & politics & programming & technology & www rob on 29 Mar 2008
Nationalization or Expropriation? Independent Facebook Application Developers Continue to Face Uncertainty
There is some interesting discussion going on in the Facebook Developer’s forum. The gist is that Facebook has made changes that are causing some developers to feel disenfranchised. A few developers are upset enough that they are speaking of creating a union of independent Facebook application developers.
What might the goals of a union of Facebook application developers be? It would help to look at what has stirred the pot recently. About two weeks ago someone posted a complaint that Facebook had unfairly bent the rules to give CBS’s Sports NCAA bracket application advantages for faster viral spread across the Facebook user base. Adding insult to injury, the thread also pointed out that the CBS Sports NCAA bracket application had a poor user rating.
Two days ago another developer posted a thread titled, “Facebook has stolen my idea!” which describes the recently added “Do you know these people?” page on Facebook. The developer suggests he feels “cheated” because the new Facebook page duplicates his own application’s functionality. The developer’s application was forced to comply with platform development rules that required an obstructive approval process in order work correctly.
Facebook’s “Do you know these people?” page circumvents this approval process because it is not subject to the rules independent application developers must follow. Facebook made a better version of the application a part of the Facebook experience by bending the rules that crippled the original developer’s work. Continue Reading »
Society & art & programming & technology & video games rob on 18 Feb 2008
The History of the Video Game Development Process
The modern software development process is sort of out in the open. Any sizeable project like a new version of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop is discussed widely in technology forums and blogs. Although beta testers generally sign NDAs with companies, details or full copies of beta software leaks regularly.
Google’s Android OS is not quite Open Source, but will rely heavily on the Open Source contributions from the public. This past weekend an ARS Technica article about updates to Android acknowledged Google’s creation of a public bug tracking system as a “sign that Google is taking the needs of the Android third-party developer community more seriously.”
Clearly, expectation of visibility into today’s major software projects has increased with the growth of the web. But what about older software? Who is looking into the games and tools that we used on a daily basis 15 years ago?
Know Your Mario History
A new Download Squad article discusses the impending release of a historical documents related to Sega video game development between 1993 and 1994. It claims that a “large community of Sonic fans have been searching for prototypes and lost levels in the games for many years now.” Indeed, you can read the granular details.
The new article says that a community member is planning on releasing “an entire year’s backup of data from the Sega of America offices from 1993-1994.” The article calls the eagerness of the community to review the information as part of a post-modern archeology culture, where people examine the assembly-level code of these game ROMs. Continue Reading »
entertainment & facebook & fbml & programming & weekly davespeak & www rob on 02 Feb 2008
My First Database Refactoring
I spent a good portion of the day today refactoring the database used to power the Dave Matthews Band application I’ve been writing for Facebook.
I’ve been interested in writing for Facebook for some time because I believe that companies need to be expanding their online presence into applications built for major social networking platforms. It is easy to say that people should pay attention to things like OpenSocial or Facebook’s API, there have been plenty of articles about it. But nothing can convince you like building and running one yourself.
My application began with only allowing users to choose a photo for their profile. Then I added the ability to select prior Dave Matthews Band shows. The problem came when people said they wanted to show their tour history further back than 2007.
I’ve been sourcing my data from the DMB Almanac, a site that I promote fairly heavily through the Weekly Davespeak’s front page and in the forums. I have a feeling I send them a good portion of traffic. Continue Reading »