MerryCode is a registered company now, so from now on, MerryCode blog will only be used for company announcements and staff updates. All news reporting, tips and tricks and all other updates that you use to see here will be posted on Lemon Overflow.

Isn’t this how metro apps on Windows Phone should feel like? Why there aren’t such apps on Windows Phone?

Metro UI is a cool concept but I am not really impressed by it in practice. I don’t like the idea of making all apps look alike. The metro app design trend on Windows Phone gives all apps almost same look and feel. Apps are useless unless they are able to differentiate their user experience from other apps. Tweetbot for iOS is a fine example of success based on unique User Experience.

Letterpress’ user experiences gives a thought about how cool can Metro app get. But unfortunately there are no insanely awesome apps for Windows Phone that can set a fine example. Developers usually start Windows Phone application development from the provided templates in Visual Studio. Almost all applications on Windows Phone are based on those Visual Studio templates  and there is no trend of recreating the user experience from scratch to achieve something unique. Microsoft’s aim with Metro was to create a standard experience for users but I have noticed that it really gets boring and annoying when you use it for a long time. I have recently moved back to iOS after using Windows Phone for 5 months because I missed a lot of things and it really got annoying.

 Letterpress on AppStore

ZendStudio is one of the moden IDEs that is used to create rapid and quality applications that are hearted in cloud as web services and their clients are complied to run on multiple mobile platforms (The usual scenario).  Here is Zend’s senior director of product management Kent Mitchell  creating a cloud-enabled native mobile application in 10 minutes. This video shows the power of ZendStudio’s Rapid Application Development in action.

I am still a fan of using native programming languages and official IDEs for mobile application, but ZendStudio does look pretty cool.

[via TheVerge]

Create a new Objective C application in XCode. I am creating an iOS application in this tutorial.

In your header file, (in this case, header file of a view controller of an iOS app) , make sure you implement the ‘NSXMLParserDelegate’. Also for this tutorial, declare two properties ‘currentElement’ and ‘currentTitle’;

@interface MyViewController : UIViewController <NSXMLParserDelegate>
@property(nonatomic, strong) NSString *currentElement;
@property(nonatomic, strong) NSString *currentTitle;
@end

In the implementation file, lets load the data of RSS Feed we want to parse, set the parser delegate to self and start parsing.

NSURL *rssURL =[[NSURL alloc] initWithString:@”http://blog.merrycode.com/feed”];
NSXMLParser *parser = [[NSXMLParser alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:rssURL];
[parser setDelegate:self];
[parser parse];

Now the implementation of 3 delegate methods that will parse the Titles of RSS feed items and NSLog them.

-(void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didStartElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict
{
self.currentElement = elementName;
if([self.currentElement isEqualToString:@"title"])
{
self.currentTitle = [NSMutableString string];
}
}

 -(void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName
{
if([self.currentElement isEqualToString:@"title"])
{
NSLog(@”%@”,self.currentTitle);
}
self.currentTitle=nil;
self.currentElement=nil;
}

-(void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser foundCharacters:(NSString *)string
{
if (!self.currentElement) return;
if([self.currentElement isEqualToString:@"title"])
{
self.currentTitle=string;
}
}

How the above code works:

When you call the parse method for the NSXMLParser object. It starts a thread that goes through each element of the XML data. On each event of going through the XML, it calls the related delegate methods (As it is obvious). Here in the above example, I am just extracting the “Title” element of RSS feed for simplicity.

didStartElement method is called whenever the parser starts to read a new element.  self.currentTitle is being initilized whenever the started element is equal to “title”. Also self.currentElement is set to the current started element.

didEndElement method is called whenever the parser is at the closing tag of any element.  The value in the self.currentTitle (That is set in foundCharacters method) is NSLog’d. After that self.currentTitle and self.currentElement are set to nil.

foundCharacters method is called whenever the parser finds any values inside the XML. In this method, first I checked if self.currentElement is set to nil (the parser at the closing tag of any element), the method returns immediately. Otherwise, if the value of self.currentElement is equal to ‘title‘, self.currentTitle is set to foundCharacters NSString string parameter.

The description says:

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful miniature newspaper.

The Little Printer prints your favorite publications (from blogs etc), birthdays of your friends, daily puzzles, news headlines (according to your subscribed sections), task lists (from your Google account), foursquare check-ins, part works, dot-matrix style print of an Instagram photo of the day from your Instagram feed and even more. It’s the way it prints them. It prints them in its own readable and clean format. Watch the video to know more.

This cute little thing can a good rehab for someone like me whose offline hard copy reading habits have gone down the drain because of high soft copy reading accessibility.

The restaurants all over the Muslim world start offering meal deals. Eating out generally becomes cheaper, and all restaurants get  in competition to offer the best dine-in or takeaway deals. Ramadan is the month when you can get the best deals in restaurants. These deals are so good that they make Foodies fall in love.

Ramadan Deals for iOS is the easiest way to find deals around you this Ramadan if you live in London, Dubai, Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad. Keeping it simple stupid, Ramadan Deals allows you to simply go through the available deals according to your city, favourite cuisine and meal type.

The most awesome feature is ‘Nearby’. With nearby, you can quickly locate the restaurants around you offering Ramadan deals on a map. Ramadan Deals features deals with full details and prices.

New deals are added everyday. User can also submit the deals by going to Submit tab.

Ramadan Deals was ranked #1 in Food & Drink category and #9 in Top Paid on the Pakistani App Store.

Get Ramadan Deals on the App Store

I get annoyed by huge fonts, sliding pivots and too much space between text that occupies a lot of useful space  in Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 Metro apps. I call these Metro apps ‘Conventional Metro apps’ because they follow the design norms of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 design templates. Although Metro is much vast than this. Metro is a design language that has a certain fell of modernism and simplicity. Metro does not necessarily restrict the specifications of UI elements to sliding pivots, panoramas and other stuff we normally find in most of the Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 apps . This is why most apps on Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 look same and it sucks.

MetroTwit for Windows 8 is first good looking app that goes beyond the ‘Conventional Metro’ and it is pretty. There are no pivot controls that waste screen space or other ‘Conventional Metro’ stuff that makes it look like just another Windows 8 app.

I hope this app opens the design senses of all those Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 app developers who have a ‘Conventional Metro’ app that looks almost alike as any other app of same category. The design norms of iOS, that makes it win user experience race so far, is the trend among UX designers to give uniqueness to every app they design. They understand how important it is for an app to look different.

Get MetroTwit for Windows 8.

Let’s say if we want to NSLog the statuses from my Twitter timeline (@jadoon88). Here is how you can request twitter timeline using JSON and then parse it to list the statuses:

Step 1: Prepare URL request to get the user timeline.

NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=jadoon88"]];

Step 2: Perform request and get JSON as a NSData object

NSData *response = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:nil error:nil];

Step 3: Parse the retrieved JSON to an NSArray

NSError *jsonParsingError = nil;
NSArray *publicTimeline = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:response options:0 error:&jsonParsingError];

Step 4: Creatie an NSDictionary object to to store contents of any single tweet (a single JSON Object).

NSDictionary *tweet;

Step 5: Iterate through publicTimeline NSArray to retrieve NSDictionary objects. The following code NSLogs the values with name ‘text’ in an object (That are Twitter status texts, have a look at GET SEARCH in Twitter API Resources).

for(int i=0; i<[publicTimeline count];i++)
{
tweet= [publicTimeline objectAtIndex:i];
NSLog(@”Statuses: %@”, [tweet objectForKey:@"text"]);
}

That is all! As easy as a pie.

Supported devices:

- iPad 1 running iOS 5.1.1.

- iPad 2 running iOS 5.1.1.

- New iPad running iOS 5.1.1.

- iPhone 3GS running iOS 5.1.1.

- iPhone 4 running iOS 5.1.1.

- iPhone 4S running iOS 5.1.1.

- iPod Touch 3rd gen and 4th gen running iOS 5.1.1

Before you go for the guide you must know:

- This jailbreak is only for the supported devices mentioned above.

- There is no unlock available for iOS 5.1.1 if you jailbreak it with Absinthe 2.0 so people who rely on unlock you must not upgrade your iPhone to iOS 5.1.1. Read this for details on Ultrasn0w fixer that unlocks iOS 5.1.1.

- I will not be responsible for any loss of your device while attempting this jailbreak, do it on your own risk.

How to jailbreak iOS 5.1.1 with Absinthe 2.0:

1. Download Absinthe from the links provided below.
2. Backup all your data.
3. Run Absinthe and connect your iOS device to your Mac/PC .
4. Absinthe will show some text telling you that your device is detected and you should press the Jailbreak button to start jailbreak process.
5. The progress bar will tell you about the completion of jailbreak process. When it’s done, you will be greeted by the text saying “Done, enjoy”.

Download links:

• Absinthe2.0 MacOSX (10.5, 10.6, 10.7)
• Absinthe2.0 Windows (XP/Vista/Win7)
• Absinthe2.0 Linux (x86/x86_64)