Get answers from your MP on their expenses, using your iPhone!

14 Dec 2009

Don’t think that MPs have suffered enough over MP expenses? Then the latest iPhone application from Satosoft, MP Expenses, will make you very happy and make your local MP start to cry all over again. It gives you easy access to the information that UK MP’s have tried to cover up for years.

MPs will be dreading this iPhone App, as it will mean that the information superhighway delivers angry constituents straight to their door. At the touch of a button you can look at your MPs expenses on your iPhone, which then helps you to send them an email to voice your views.  Alternatively you may find the need to call them on their direct line, also displayed on the iPhone.

“Six hundred and forty five MPs expenses condensed in an easy to read format and then direct contact to voice your views about how they are spending your hard earned cash…the newspapers have done their job in bringing this subject into the open but we thought of this application because so many people want to find out more details on their MP but its not easy.  This application means within a couple of minutes you have the knowledge to question them directly about their free spending behaviours with your money on your time” said Graham French, founder of Satosoft.

“We’ve had excellent customer feedback already, customers have found it informative and entertaining,” said French. “We built it to show people that MP’s are more accessible than you would think. You don’t have to write a letter or meet them face-to-face. You can contact them right now! The favourite feature so far, is the ability to email the MP’s direct and phone their offices” continued French.

Penny Searles from Hampshire said “ This is just a great application for my iPhone, my friends and I looked at my MPs expenses and couldn’t believe some of the stuff on there, stuff that my taxes paid for, within minutes we emailed him from the phone and asked for an explanation…something I wouldn’t have been able to do without some research.  The newspapers have been great but my MP wasn’t high profile enough to get his expenses listed and I didn’t know where to look, so this is just great, and I don’t intend to let it lie!”

Satosoft is an independent, innovative, iPhone software producer.

At long last!

After almost a month in review with Apple, the latest iPhone App from Satosoft, MP Expenses is now available in the App Store!!

This App gives the user the ability to email an MP, ring their Parliament Office or Constituency Office, direct from the Application.

Click here to see the full product information.

Or click here to download it directly from the iTunes App Store!

I’ve noticed that the iPhone will not call a phone number that you have coded into your App, if it has spaces in.

This can be a problem if you have hundreds of rows in a Sqlite Database, which contain phone numbers that have spaces within the phone number.

Rather then manually updating them, which can take many hours, here is a simple command to run.

UPDATE [TableName] SET PhoneNo = REPLACE(PhoneNo, ‘ ‘, ”)

This takes each row in turn and replaces any spaces with no spaces, regardless of how many spaces are in the phone number.
Hope this helps.

Cheers

Graham

Yesterday, satosoft.com CEO, Graham French, received an email from Chris Noel of BrightHouseLabs, asking if satosoft were interested in either selling them the iAboutClock application or some source code.

After a relatively brief email exchange, satosoft declined to take the talks any further.

“We were somewhat surprised to hear from another iPhone App developer.” said Graham, “Especially when they were looking to purchase one of our applications, the iAboutClock, for their own development use”

Bright House Labs have been criticised in the past for creating a high volume of apps in the iTunes App Store, which are very similar, if not almost identical to others.

Graham added, “It was a short email exchange, we’d never heard of Bright House Labs. After looking them up, we decided that we did not want to be associated in any way with them or their iPhone App strategies!”

A copy of the last email sent to Chris Noel is shown below;

Chris,

Thanks for your interest.

I’m unable to take this conversation any further, for two specific reasons;

1. You mention below that you are looking to provide a small payment for this. As mentioned in my previous email, I’ve never considered doing this, especially for what would be a sum of money so small, that it would be insulting.
2. Secondly, yet more importantly, we’ve done some research on your company, having never heard of you before. To be brutally honest, satosoft.com would never be associated with the type of company you are. The damage to our high value brand would be too great. Your company’s method of producing multiple, almost identical apps, flooding the iTunes App Store with what we consider to be questionable quality, is far, far below the ethical standards that we live by.

I wish you the best of luck in your ventures.

Regards

Graham

“I’ve not had a reply from them and I’m not expecting one!” Graham finally added.

Another quick tip!

If you need to convert from an NSString format to a Char format, it’s a really easy one line of code as follows;

const char *fooBar = [barFoo UTF8String];

Here, fooBar is your new Char and barFoo is your previously allocated NSString.

Simple!

Cheers

Graham

Objective-C on the iPhone isn't always the easiest of languages to get you head around. Somethings that are easy in other programming languages can be a bit more obscure.

One thing that I've done a lot in VB.Net is string manipulation. It's easy, straightforward and very powerful!

The documentation around strings is thorough, but lacks enough examples of code usage in real life situations!

So, if you need to concatenate two or more strings together, use this example below!

NSString *foobar = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@", aStringObject, anotherStringObject];

Don't forget to leave a space or spaces, if you want spaces between your strings!

Happy coding!

Cheers

Graham

The latest update of our flagship application, iAboutClock, is now available for download in the iTunes App Store!

The new version, iAboutClock 1.0.3, allows the user to customise the time settings.

So instead of it showing the time as ‘It’s More or Less Five’ you can edit the time to show ‘It’s More or Less Home Time!!’.

It’s only limited by your imagination!

Great for having a laugh with your friends!!

A quick tip for the frustrated iPhone developer!!

Even if you set the minimum font size in Interface Builder for a UITextField, it doesn't work how it should!

Here is a one line fix!!

myUITextField.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:12.0f];

Cheers

Graham

Apple announced that all applications submitted to the iTunes App Store must work on both 2.2.1 and 3.0, in order to make it through the submission process. If you application doesn’t work on V3.0 it won’t go up for sale. It’s as black and white as that!!

However, you can’t create V2.2.1 versions in V3.0 Xcode, so you must install both versions onto your Mac!

It’s easier then you think!

When you install V3.0, you get the option of where to put the install files. By default, this will be in the Developer folder on your Mac Hard Drive. When you get to this stage on the pre-install menu, choose a custom folder that you can create on the drive in a different location of your choosing.

It’s as simple as that!

Don’t forget where you’ve decided to place it, as you will need to access that folder in order to run V3.0.

Happy coding!!

Cheers

Graham

Whatever you do, don’t do this!!

You’ve been warned!! 

I know it’s nothing to do with iPhone development or for that matter, iAboutClock or iTextClock, but I just couldn’t resist posting these!

Way too funny!!

Click on each image to see it properly, enjoy!!

Just a quick one to let you know about iAboutClock version 1.0.2.

It’s been uploaded to the iTunes App Store and is now awaiting approval from Apple. Once it’s been received, you can download the free update.

This update gives a randomisation of the approximations on the time. So, instead of it say ‘It’s about Ten’, it could say ‘It’s More or Less Ten’.

There are currently five randomisations per approximation. More will be addded as time goes on!

We are now working on the next incremental update, which will include user’s customisations, more on this later!

Cheers

Graham

There are a number of different methods for creating random numbers in Objective-C.

Here is a method for creating a random integer between and including zero and a given number, that you have entered into the code.

This code gives a number up to 21;

int myRandomInt = arc4random() % 21;

Give it a go and let me know how you get on!!

Cheers

Graham

The second Satosoft iPhone Application is now available for purchase on the iTunes App Store!!

It took a week to get the nod from Apple, which is a bit longer then iAboutClock, which took four days, but better late then never…

Here is the link for the iTextClock.

It’s a clock, accurate to the second, that uses text instead of number to show the date and time.

Like the iAboutClock, it’s fully customisable, you can change the font, the font colours and background colours.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

Cheers

Graham

At last!!

After, what seemed like the longest wait in history (four days), Apple have approved my first application for sale on the iTunes App Store!

Here is the link iAboutClock.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

Cheers

Graham

If you have the following error “Command /usr/bin/codesign failed with exit code 1″, try this;

First of all, ensure that you have one and only one developer provision and developer application on the iPhone at a time otherwise you will get installation errors.

Also, check that you have the correct Bundle Identifier in the Info.plist file and make sure the ‘Code Signing Identity’ and ‘Code Signing Provisioning Profile’ are also correct.

Finally, but most importantly, run the Keychain application and run the Keychain First Aid app: Keychain Access -> Keychain First Aid.

Run the verify first to see if there any errors. If so, run repair, then verify again. This should the problem.

Good Luck!

Cheers

Graham

It’s a bit of a pain if you decide that you need to rename you iPhone project.

You would think that it’s a straightforward affair, but you’d be wrong!!

First of all, you need to double click on your info.plist. Inside this file, you will see a number of settings. The one’s you should change are;

• Bundle Display Name
• Executable File
• Bundle identifier

Also, you will need to do the following

• Double click on the Target to bring up the Target Info. It’s the one under the ‘Targets’ icon.
• Scroll down to the packaging section
• Change the Product Name

Rebuild the application and all should be well!!

Cheers

Graham

If you need to open a web page from your iPhone application, one line of code is all you need!

The most likely scenario of this is having a help or support link, within your application, for your users to click on. From there, it will launch Safari on the iPhone and go to your link.

You can use a button or any other clickable item.

Here is the code;

-(IBAction)openBrowser {
	// Launch the Satosoft website.
	[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.satosoft.com"]];
}

I’ve used an action from the Interface Builder, as a hidden button, kicks off the code!

Cheers

Graham

Yes, we’ve taken the plunge and decided to get onto the micro-blogging site, twitter.com.

You can catch up with us at;

http://twitter.com/satosoft

We’ll be posting a lot more often over there!

But we’ll still be posting over here as well.

Cheers

Graham

A lot of the time, you can use buttons or tables to allow the user to interact with the UI of the iPhone.

What happens though, if you want the user to use the UITouch methods and have a double tap on the screen?

Well, this is incredibly easy to do!

Put the following code in your ViewController file, of the view that you want the user to double tap.

#pragma mark -
-(void)touchesBegan:(NSSet *)touches withEvent:(UIEvent *)event {
	UITouch *touch = [touches anyObject];
	NSUInteger tapCount = [touch tapCount];
	switch (tapCount) {
		case 2:
			//Put your code here

			break;
		default:
			break;
	}
}

If you look at the code, you will see that under the ‘case 2:’ you can put your code. This bit runs if the user has tapped the at least twice.

All this code does is to look for the number of taps that are received, the ’switch’ function can be edited to run code to whatever number of taps you want.

So, if you changed ‘case 2′ to ‘case 3′ the code would run after 3 taps.

However, there is a caveat here!!

You cannot use this code to run multiple separate tap counters. So if you wanted code to run after two taps and then a different bit of code to run after three taps, both sets of code would be run if the user entered three taps.

The code for two taps would run after two taps, regardless of how many more taps the user would enter!!

Of course, if you had something like ten taps, you could use it to hide easter eggs in your code!!

Any comments or questions are welcome, if you want to twitter, digg this or subscribe to the RSS Feed, please do!!

Happy coding!

Cheers

Graham