Wouldn’t be great if there is a built in class for presenting a webpage using “presentModalViewController”? Meet MKWebViewController.

Step 1:

Drop the attached three files into your project and write the following three lines on your action callback (buttonDidTap) or equivalent methods

MKWebViewController *controller = [[[MKWebViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"MKWebViewController" bundle:nil] autorelease];
controller.url = @"http://blog.mugunthkumar.com";
[self presentModalViewController:controller animated:YES];

Step 2:

Nah, no step 2.

That’s it. On landscape mode, the controller even rotates and hides the toolbar. On portrait mode it brings back the toolbar and provides you a close button. The controller automatically handles any errors, and displays appropriate error messages, close the window when the user taps on the “Dismiss” button on the error message. What more, the controller can also display any iOS supported file format that includes, PDF, Office, iWork documents.

Give it a try, and do let me know your feedback.

Source Code

MKWebViewController.zip
–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. iPhone Tutorial: How to send In-App SMS Officially, iPhone OS 4 is out of NDA and I...

Problems using the device model

Most developers have resorted to reading the hw.machine parameter to check if the device is an iPhone or iPod touch. Another lousy way is to read the [UIDevice currentDevice].model. The problem with these methods are that, you are essentially comparing the device name with a hard-coded value. As such, code like

if(![[UIDevice currentDevice].model isEqualToString:@"iPhone"])
{
UIAlertView *alertView = [UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"Error" 
message:@"Microphone not present" 
delegate:self 
cancelButtonTitle:@"Dismiss" 
otherButtonTitles: nil];
[alertView show];
[alertView release];
}

will fail miserably on iPad and on iPod Touch if an external microphone is connected. On similar lines, you cannot assert something like,

if(![[UIDevice currentDevice].model isEqualToString:@"iPhone 4,1"])
{
// lets start a video conferencing session here.
}

Today, this code will work perfectly, but with next release of the iPod Touch or the iPad that might probably have a front facing camera, your app (or the video conferencing feature) will no longer work on the new device though it’s (might be) capable of video conferencing.

There are Apple defined ways to check the hardware capabilities rather than assuming features based on the model string. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the various pitfalls that any iOS developer may encounter and provide solutions on how to combat them. Also provided is a complete source code and an elegant, drop dead simple to use device capabilities helper class.

Gonna Vibrate the device to alert the user? Read this first

Apple has documented two functions that would vibrate the iPhone. But vibration hardware is present only on iPhones (at least currently). So how will you alert your user who uses the app on iPad or iPod touches? Clearly, checking the model is not the way to go. Apple has provided an elegant solution to this. There are two seemingly similar functions that take a parameter kSystemSoundID_Vibrate

1) AudioServicesPlayAlertSound(kSystemSoundID_Vibrate);
2) AudioServicesPlaySystemSound(kSystemSoundID_Vibrate);

Both the functions vibrate the iPhone. But when you use the first function on devices that don’t support vibration, it plays a beep sound. The second function on the other hand does nothing on unsupported devices. So if you are going to vibrate the device continuously, as a alert, common sense says, use function 2.

Phone Call Capable?

Checking if a device is capable of making a phone call is as easy as making a function call to check if the device can handle URLs of type “tel://”

Again, in future if there is a 7″ iProduct that sits somewhere in between the iPad and iPhone and has call capabilities, this method will work on that device as well.

As a side note on usability, avoid showing an error like,

Sorry, you are not running on iPhone, This feature requires an iPhone.

if your app uses this feature to detect a phone from an iPod. In most cases, you show a telphone number and have a call button to make a phone call. On iPod Touch or other devices, just hide that button. That gives a better user experience than a error message. The user already knows that he doesn’t have an iPhone and his device cannot make a phone call. You don’t have to repeat that.

Email capability

Email is a bit tricky thing. You cannot always assume the all devices will support in-app email. If you read my previous tutorial on in-app email, I would have mandated to check the email capability using

[MFMailComposeViewController canSendMail]

This class is available from iOS 3.0. You might think that, because I always set the iPhone OS Deployment target to 3.0, I don’t have to check this and can directly present the modal email sheet.  But the code will crash when the user has no email configuration setup in the Mail app. As such, you should always check for this capability before you show the in-app email sheet.

SMS capability

For SMS support, you can either use [MFMessageComposeViewController canSendText] or better check if the device can handle URLs of type “sms://”

The reason I would suggest using the latter is, MFMessageComposeViewController isn’t available on iPhone OS 3.2 and below. You app might crash if you try to send a non-existant message to a non-existant class.

Camera/Flash/Video support

Most of the camera related availability support is exposed through the UIImagePickerController. The UIImagePickerController has class methods that can be used to check if there is a camera hardware present in the device. Do note that, it’s important to check even for the availability of the Photo Library before you ask the user to pick photos. For example, if the user’s iPhone is new and he doesn’t have any photos in his Photo Library, it’s better to show an error rather than crash the application. As such, the method below returns NO when there is no photos in the user’s library.

[UIImagePickerController isSourceTypeAvailable:UIImagePickerControllerSourceTypePhotoLibrary];

A bit tricker thing is detection of Video Camera. You can detect the presence of a video camera in a iOS device using the following method.

- (BOOL) isVideoCameraAvailable
{
	UIImagePickerController *picker = [[UIImagePickerController alloc] init];
	NSArray *sourceTypes = [UIImagePickerController availableMediaTypesForSourceType:picker.sourceType];
	[picker release];
 
	if (![sourceTypes containsObject:(NSString *)kUTTypeMovie ]){
 
		return NO;
	}
 
	return YES;
}

Gyroscope support

With iPhone 4, Apple added yet another hardware to the iPhone, namely the Gyroscope. Using Gyroscope. The Gyroscope related functions are grouped together under the CoreMotion framework. The CMMotionManager has a property called gyroAvailable to check if the device has gyroscope. Good news here is that, even if you make calls to CMMotionManager related to Gyroscope, the SDK converts them no-op on unsupported devices.

- (BOOL) isGyroscopeAvailable
{
#ifdef __IPHONE_4_0
	CMMotionManager *motionManager = [[CMMotionManager alloc] init];
	BOOL gyroAvailable = motionManager.gyroAvailable;
	[motionManager release];
	return gyroAvailable;
#else
	return NO;
#endif
 
}

Retina Display?

Use the [UIScreen mainScreen].scale to check if the display is retina capable. The scale property isn’t available on all SDKs. Use respondsToSelector methods for checking the availability

+ (BOOL) isRetinaDisplay
{
	int scale = 1.0;
	UIScreen *screen = [UIScreen mainScreen];
	if([screen respondsToSelector:@selector(scale)])
		scale = screen.scale;
 
	if(scale == 2.0f) return YES;
	else return NO;
}

Multitasking support

Not all devices support multitasking even on iOS 4. The iPhone 3G, and the iPod touch 2nd generation can be upgraded to iOS 4, but still will not get any of the multitasking or fast app switching benefits. I’m just re-writing Apple’s own code here

- (BOOL) isMultitaskingCapable
{
	UIDevice* device = [UIDevice currentDevice];
	BOOL backgroundSupported = NO;
	if ([device respondsToSelector:@selector(isMultitaskingSupported)])
		backgroundSupported = device.multitaskingSupported;
 
	return backgroundSupported;
}

Source Code

To make life easier, I’ve put together a sample application and a helper class that demonstrates most of these capabilities. You can download it from here or go to github. Again, it’s a singleton class based on my previous xcode singleton template

MKDeviceHelper.zip

Using this Class

Just drag the two files MKDeviceHelper.h and it’s counterpart. Add the frameworks, AVFoundation, MessageUI, AudioToolbox, CoreLocation, MobileCoreServices and CoreMotion frameworks. Build your app and you are good to go. If you can’t find any of the XCode. The current version works fine on XCode 3.2.3

Note that these frameworks are dynamically linked. They will in no way bloat your app.

Licensing

My only request is don’t pass of this code as your own. Fork it or do whatever you want, commercial/non-commercial but retain a reference to this blog post in the code and don’t remove the URL in the source code files.

Hope you find this helpful

–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. iPhone Tutorial: How to send In-App SMS Officially, iPhone OS 4 is out of NDA and I...
2. iPhone Tutorial: Scheduling Local Notifications using a Singleton class In iOS 4, Apple introduced a new way to send...
3. iPhone Tutorial – Enabling reviewers to use your In-App purchases for free In-App purchases is a great way for developers to upsell...

If you were following my blog, you might have already read about the singleton xcode template I wrote about previously. If not, go ahead and download the Singleton class template. Install it into your xcode installation folder (which is normally /Developer). Come back here.

Let’s get started.

Step 1:

Create a view based application. (Or any application type you prefer)

Step 2:

Add a Singleton class using my template and call it, say, MKLocalNotificationsScheduler

Step 3:

Within the sharedInstance static method (which is the constructor), add the following lines of code

// iOS 4 compatibility check
Class notificationClass = NSClassFromString(@"UILocalNotification");
 
if(notificationClass == nil)
{
_instance = nil;
}
else
{
_instance = [[super allocWithZone:NULL] init];
_instance.badgeCount = 0;
}

This class is the singleton method’s sole constructor. This sharedInstance is accessed your view or any other class that requires this class’s object.

In this class we write code for checking if UILocalNotification class is available. Remember that it’s available only on iOS 4 and above. The “constructor” intelligently allocates a instance of itself only when it runs on iOS 4. Otherwise the shared instance is always nil.

You should by now appreciate the power of singleton and it’s design elegance. Do note that, because we are going to channel the complete notification mechanism of the application through this single class, we can maintain the application icon’s badge count as a instance variable.

Step 4:

Now, lets write the real meat.

Scheduling a local notification is far easier compared to push notifications. Just allocate a instance of a UILocalNotification and fill in the necessary parameters and submit it to the applications’ shared instance.

In our singleton instance, we will create a helper method that automatically creates a local notification object, fills it with default values properly and schedules it. The helper also takes care of incrementing the badgeCount, thereby maintaining its state.

- (void) scheduleNotificationOn:(NSDate*) fireDate
								text:(NSString*) alertText
								action:(NSString*) alertAction
								 sound:(NSString*) soundfileName
						   launchImage:(NSString*) launchImage
							   andInfo:(NSDictionary*) userInfo
 
{
	UILocalNotification *localNotification = [[UILocalNotification alloc] init];
    localNotification.fireDate = fireDate;
    localNotification.timeZone = [NSTimeZone defaultTimeZone];	
 
    localNotification.alertBody = alertText;
    localNotification.alertAction = alertAction;	
 
	if(soundfileName == nil)
	{
		localNotification.soundName = UILocalNotificationDefaultSoundName;
	}
	else
	{
		localNotification.soundName = soundfileName;
	}
 
	localNotification.alertLaunchImage = launchImage;
 
	self.badgeCount ++;
    localNotification.applicationIconBadgeNumber = self.badgeCount;
    localNotification.userInfo = userInfo;
 
	// Schedule it with the app
    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] scheduleLocalNotification:localNotification];
    [localNotification release];
}

Step 5:

Now, to test this, un-comment the viewDidLoad method from the view controller generated by XCode. Add the following line

[[MKLocalNotificationsScheduler sharedInstance] scheduleNotificationOn:[NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:20]
text:@"Hey there"
action:@"View"
sound:nil
launchImage:nil
andInfo:nil];

Note that, except the fireDate, all other parameters can be nil and the helper automatically fills in the default values. As such your calling code is just a one liner.

Step 6:

Now, when a local notification arrives, the operating system, notifies you through two different channels. One is the

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions

method and the other is

- (void)application:(UIApplication *)app didReceiveLocalNotification:(UILocalNotification *)localNotification;

A better design guideline would be to pass this localNotification object to our Singleton class as that Singleton class is the one that “best knows” what to do with the notification payload.

UILocalNotification *localNotification = [launchOptions objectForKey:UIApplicationLaunchOptionsLocalNotificationKey];
 
if (localNotification) 
{
    [[MKLocalNotificationsScheduler sharedInstance] handleReceivedNotification:localNotification];
}

Step 7:
Write a function within our Singleton to handle the notification payload. In our case, we just NSLog the notification description and reduce the badge count. You can add your app-specific sophisticated logic here.

- (void) handleReceivedNotification:(UILocalNotification*) thisNotification
{
	NSLog(@"Received: %@",[thisNotification description]);
	[self decreaseBadgeCountBy:1];
}

Also write other miscellaneous helper methods that handle badge count

- (void) clearBadgeCount
{
	self.badgeCount = 0;
	[UIApplication sharedApplication].applicationIconBadgeNumber = self.badgeCount;
}
 
- (void) decreaseBadgeCountBy:(int) count
{
	self.badgeCount -= count;
	if(self.badgeCount < 0) self.badgeCount == 0;
 
	[UIApplication sharedApplication].applicationIconBadgeNumber = self.badgeCount;
}

Now run the app on simulator or device. Note that unlike, push notifications, local notifications work on simulator. Since we schedule a local notification after 20 sec, close the app by clicking the home button on the simulator (or device) and wait. You should see a alert box like this.

Source Code:

The complete source code is available at Github. Feel free to tinker with the code and mainly, if you fork it, and want me to have a look, do drop me a message or leave a comment here.

That’s it for this tutorial. Happy coding (and designing).

–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. XCode Tip: Objective-C Singleton Class Template I have a habit of creating Singleton pattern classes for...
2. iPhone Tutorial: Better way to check capabilities of iOS devices The iPhone OS started off with a single device, the...
3. iPhone Tutorial: How to send In-App SMS Officially, iPhone OS 4 is out of NDA and I...

The advantage of using a Singleton pattern is, the class completely isolates you from what it is supposed to do. For example, if you are using my MKStoreManager for doing your in-app purchases, you might have noticed that the four classes you downloaded will take care of all the in-app purchase nitty gritty code by completely encapsulating the Apple’s StoreKit. You have to write just 3-5 lines of code to make a real purchase.

Singleton is a very powerful way to create “global” classes that might otherwise end up in your AppDelegate. Matt Gallagher from Cocoawithlove has an excellent article on why cluttering your AppDelegate might be a problem, read it on his blog here.

Though it’s very easy to create a Singleton class, to make things even easier, I wrote a XCode template which is loosely based on Jeff Lamarche‘s NSOperation template.

Download the file from Attachments section. Extract the file from Command line using

unzip SingletonTemplate.zip -d /

Attachments

You can download the file from here

SingletonTemplate

Warning

This overwrites the built in TemplateChooser.plist file. If your XCode installation is vanilla, you don’t have to worry about this. But if you have installed any custom templates, you might lose them all.

When you are done, open XCode and click File -> New File.

You will see a prompt like this.

Choose Cocoa Touch classes and choose Objective-C class. You will see an additional option in the “Subclass of” combo box. Choose NSObject based Singleton and click finish.

You will get a boiler plate class that you can use it as as a Singleton.

Hope this helps.

In my next post, I’ll be writing on how to encapsulate your Settings bundle using a Singleton pattern. Keep coming back.

–

Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

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A quick comparison in the displays of iPad, iPhone 4 and Nexus One. The iPhone 4 display is clearly superior.

You can download a higher resolution version of this image by right clicking the above image and clicking “Save link as…” Be forewarned, most low end computers can’t even open that image (as on the date of writing this). The image is fairly large at 10000X3000 pixels at 300PPI. It’s about 35MB to download.

If you zoom the image, you will notice that even at this high resolution, the pixels of iPhone 4 are not visible.

–

Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

No related posts.

In this article, I’ll take you through the bare minimum steps to setup git on your computer and start XCoding.

Before we delve into the detailed steps, a couple of words about Git.
Git, unlike SVN is a distributed version control system. which means, when you commit a repository, you actually don’t commit to the central repo. In Git, every user has his own local repo and he at his own will can “push” changes to the central repo.

Once you get this concept of distributed source code control, Git is a cakewalk. Believe me.
Now, let’s get started.

Step 1: Install Git.

Yeah, a no brainer step, pick up the installer from here

Step 2: Generate your keys

Git uses a private/public key authentication to verify YOU before you access the remote git repository.
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C ""
Just keep on pressing enter for any question it asks till your public key gets generated

Step 3: Copy keys to clipboard

But, why is this a separate step? Because you can do it easily through command line.
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy

Type this to “copy” the public key to clipboard (Equivalent of Cmd + C)

Step 4: Add this public key to your remote repository

Update your public key into your remote Git Repository. All Git Repositories like github, sourcerepo, beanstalk provide a interface to add your public key to your user profile.
That’s it! Now you can start using Git. See it’s that simple.

Now we shall start using Git to commit your changes and push it to the central repository.

Step 5: Create your first Git local repository

To get started, create a directory and cd into that directory

mkdir GitFolder
cd GitFolder

Step 6: Initialize your local repository

Initialize a git repo in that new directory by typing in the following command.
git init

This command initializes the empty directory you created with a git repository. Unlike SVN, git repositories are not stored in some different location. The git repo is stored within the folder you created inside a hidden folder called “.git”

Step 7: Clone a remote repository

git clone "" .
Now clone your remote URL to your current directory (.)
(Be sure to type the last “.”, it’s not full stop)

That’s it.
Your GitRepo is now on your local drive.

Step 8: Making your first commit

Now, let’s make a change and commit this to your local repo. For this, edit any file in the project and come back to Terminal.
Type
git diff

You should see the changes you made on the console. To commit these changes, type
git commit -a -m "Your commit comment"

Step 9: Pushing your changes to remote repository

Now, remember that, Git is a distributed version control system, so, these changes aren’t yet available to other users/contributors of the same remote repository. You must “push” these changes back to the remote repository. For doing this,
you have to configure a remote location using the following command.
git remote add "remote location name" ""
Your remote location starts with ssh:// and looks like this
ssh://github.com/foo/bar/MyGreatiPhoneApp.git
Your “remote location name” can be anything and most tutorials like those from github tend to use “origin”

Step 10:”Pushing” your local commits

Now that you have configured a remote location,
git push "your remote location name" master
or in short,
git push origin master

Now your code has been successfully committed to the central repo.

Step 11: “Checking out” a remote repository

“Checking out” from a git repository is called as “pull”. The command for that is very similar
git pull origin master

Note that cloning a git repo is to copy the entire repository where as pulling just updates the latest incremental changes. Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is no equivalent of clone in SVN. Just remember that you are doing this step because Git is a distributed revision control system.

Step 12: Setting up a default remote location

You can setup this location permanently as your default remote location by typing in this command
git config branch.master.remote "your remote location name"

From now on, you can just type git push and git pull to commit and retrieve changes to and from the repository.

Step 13: Adding exclusions

Every project always contains some auto generated “build” folders that need to be excluded from being committed. To do this, you use a “.gitignore” file. Create a .gitignore file and type the relative directory addresses one per line and Git automatically ignores them. My .gitignore file usually looks like this
build/
.gitignore
fbconnect/src/build/*
MyiPhoneApp.xcodeproj/mugunthkumar*

The first line is to exclude the build directory, the second line is to exclude this .gitignore file and the third line is to exclude the fbconnect (or any third party library)’s build folder and the last line is to exclude your personal XCode editor settings from being committed into the repository.

So, that’s it for setting up Git for your great iPhone App.

Git has even more powerful tools to branch and merge locally and pushing/ignoring a certain branch. But I will leave that for another post.

Happy Gitting.

–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

No related posts.

As usual, you prepare a AdHoc build and zip the .app bundle, attach it to the email along with the mobile provisioning profile and send it to your customer. On macs, things are pretty straight forward. On Windows, however, your customers are prone to fall into these common pitfalls which might cause a troublesome nightmare for you.

First Pitfall:
Extracting the .zip file you sent using Windows Explorer’s built in Compression Engine.

I repeat. DON’T DON’T DON’T extract the zip file using the Windows’ explorer’s built in “Extract Here” command. The default compression engine bundled with Windows messes up the CRCs by adding temporary files into the .app bundle. Ask your testers to use a better de-compression tool like 7-Zip, WinZip or WinRar.

Second Pitfall:
Opening the .app folder out of “curiosity” to “see” what’s inside.

Never double-click and “open” the extracted .app “folder” (On windows the .app bundle appears as a folder) . Windows is a sh**. I agree. It automatically creates a “Thumbs.db/Desktop.ini/folder.htt” (some created by Virus, some by Windows) file whenever you access a folder and that again changes the CRC of the bundle. Just drag the .app “folder” immediately after extracting into iTunes. Also drag the provisioning profile into iTunes and sync the app.

If you think your users’ might not follow all these steps, you can send them the .IPA file instead of the compressed .app bundle. This .IPA file can be generated on your mac by dragging the .app bundle into iTunes. When you drag the .app bundle into your iTunes library, it internally creates a .IPA file. This IPA file can be located in Finder from iTunes. Just Cmd click your app on iTunes and click “Show in Finder”. Send this .IPA file (and the mobile provisioning file) to your testers.

Hope that clears the air around AdHoc provisioning on Windows.

–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

No related posts.

For example the below code works perfectly on iPhone OS 3.1 and below but fails on iOS 4.

- (void)start
{
[self willChangeValueForKey:@"isExecuting"];
_isExecuting = YES;
[self didChangeValueForKey:@"isExecuting"];

NSURLRequest * request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:_url];
_connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request
delegate:self];
}

Seems like Apple has made a change where in if the NSURLConnection’s initWithRequest method is called from a thread that’s not the main thread, it doesn’t start downloading the URL contents immediately. The bug fix for this issue is fortunately simple.

- (void)start
{
[self willChangeValueForKey:@"isExecuting"];
_isExecuting = YES;
[self didChangeValueForKey:@"isExecuting"];

//iOS 4 bug fix
if (![NSThread isMainThread])
{
[self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(start)
withObject:nil waitUntilDone:NO];
return;
}
}

Hope this post solves your problem.

–
Mugunth

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

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Prior to iPhone OS 4, developers have to depend on

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: @"sms:12345678"];

The problem with this is not just that it closes your app, but there is no way to specify the body content of the SMS. Secondly, you are restricted to send the SMS to only one person. However, with the new MessageUI SMS controller, you can send SMS to multiple people at the same time. You can also pre-populate the SMS body field.
Developers of famous apps like Whatsapp Messenger, copy the SMS text content to clipboard and open the SMS app to allow users to paste the content. But with this newly allowed In-App SMS sheet, users can send SMS without quitting the app.

So, Let’s get started.

Step 1:

Import the MessageUI Framework into your project and #import the header file into the “.h” file of your controller where you want to open the In-App SMS sheet.

Step 2:

You might already have a button handler IBAction where you want to send the SMS. If not create a Button on your XIB file and write IBActions for it.

Step 3:

The real code

-(IBAction) sendInAppSMS:(id) sender
{
	MFMessageComposeViewController *controller = [[[MFMessageComposeViewController alloc] init] autorelease];
	if([MFMessageComposeViewController canSendText])
	{
		controller.body = @"Hello from Mugunth";
		controller.recipients = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"12345678", @"87654321", nil];
		controller.messageComposeDelegate = self;
		[self presentModalViewController:controller animated:YES];
	}
}

The most important part here is the line [MFMessageComposeViewController canSendText].
When sending a in-app email, you can choose to ignore this (atleast as of now) because most of the devices would have upgraded to iPhone OS 3 and all those devices would have the ability to send in-app email. However, the same doesn’t apply to SMS. Remember that even if a device is running iPhone OS 4, if it’s an iPod touch, it will never be abel to send SMS within app.
In this case, I have used a if condition to send the SMS. Practically speaking, you should enable/disable the button the user taps to send the sms based on this. You can add the code that does this in your viewDidLoad method.

Secondly, you have to set the messageComposeDelegate to self and not delegate. If you set the controller.delegate to self, you will not get the didFinishWithResult callback and the In-App SMS sheet will not close.

Step 4:

Implement Delegate Callbacks.
In your header file, implement the callbacks, MFMessageComposeViewControllerDelegate and UINavigationControllerDelegate. If you don’t you will get a warning at the line,

 controller.delegate = self;

You have to handle a callback method of MFMessageComposeViewControllerDelegate so as to dismiss the modal view controller.

- (void)messageComposeViewController:(MFMessageComposeViewController *)controller didFinishWithResult:(MessageComposeResult)result
{
	switch (result) {
		case MessageComposeResultCancelled:
			NSLog(@"Cancelled");
			break;
		case MessageComposeResultFailed:
			UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"MyApp" message:@"Unknown Error"
														   delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:@”OK” otherButtonTitles: nil];
			[alert show];
			[alert release];
			break;
		case MessageComposeResultSent:
 
			break;
		default:
			break;
	}
 
	[self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
}

That’s it. Your app should now be able to send SMS using the new Message UI sheet.

Where the heck is MMS in this tutorial?

As on date, the MFMessageComposeViewController doesn’t support sending MMS. The controller.body is a NSString and setting a NSData pointer obviously crashes the app. Hopefully, one day, Apple will allow sending In-App MMS and I’ll probably blog about that too…

©2010 MK Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

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iPad

At the time of writing, Elements costs 14.99$. To most of us, it might seem a bit pricey. While a similar printed book, which might not even interactive might cost more, the iPad version is priced comparatively lower especially given the effort the developers have put in the app. (and hence the value you get as a consumer). As the narrator explains, the Elements app is not just an electronic version of the paper book, but something that have been remade completely. Apps like these that take advantage of the huge multi-touch screen is going to be a huge success with the users. Apps like these will be used by users longer than they use a similar iPhone app. A longer usage cycle translates to higher customer satisfaction. So you might not say, “Did I pay this much for this crap?”.

Next category of apps like these will be for education related apps for young, growing kids. You might have got expensive “animal” book that teaches your kid how the animal looks. Now with the iPad, there would be an app that meows like a cat, barks like a dog and roars like a lion.
Or you can get a slate and chalk app like this for a dollar which your kids can draw on.

If you are a Asian (Chinese/Japanese), you could download an app that allows your kids to draw over a dotted Kanji and teach them how to write a Kanji the right way. I use Kanji Flip and Japanese Flip on iPhone to learn Japanese Kanji.

Kanji Flip Helps you learn Japanese Kanji on your iPhone

Probably the developers might come up with an iPad equivalent soon.

The level of interactivity is much higher that, software on these devices becomes more and more intuitive and this could potentially change how our future generation youngsters are molded. As the media industry converges with the software industry, there isn’t a reason that stops you from becoming a Apple developer.

Now, If Apple could successfully convince e-book publishers to use their platform like they did with the media industry, electronic books will be the next big thing in this decade. Students would find themselves renting textbooks during the course period rather than buying them. Blackboard has a iPad app that helps students stay in touch with what’s happening in class. So if your university uses this software, (I know Nanyang Technological University uses it) you can use this iPad app to go through the courses and course materials.

History has proved that, it’s not the product that endures. It’s the killer ecosystem that sustains the product. For example, in 1980s, the sales of IBM PC was boosted just by the software called Lotus 1-2-3. The sales of XBOX 360 was sustained just by one killer game, The Halo Series. On a business sense, these products are called as killer apps. Today we buy computers not for the processor/hardware inside but for its ability to run the software of our choice.

Successful apps like these will drive the iPad as the next generation computing platform and as Apple already says, there is an app for anything, only on the iPhone, that might just be true for the iPad as well.

–
Mugunth

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