If you are a developer (which you most likely are if you are reading this) you probably have (or should have) a Twitter account.  With Twitter getting so much attention lately, you would be crazy to not include some sort of Twitter integration into your own iPhone application.

There are many ways applications can be made more social by including Twitter.  For example, you could make the application auto-tweet when you unlock a special item in a game, or beat it.  This lets all of their friends know they are playing your game and in turn gets you more exposure.  You could also use this as an idea for creating your own Twitter client (don’t just submit my tutorial to the app store).

Twitter has provided us with some very simple API’s to follow making it a snap to interface with them. I have started a series on my personal blog about creating a Twitter client for the Mac that we will be borrowing some code from.

One thing I want to note before starting is: I will be going rather quick through the tutorial when it comes to creating the interface and hooking up the IBOutlets.  If you need extended help on that, this is probably not the tutorial you want to start on. Read some of my previous tutorials and come back.

This basic tutorial will just show you how to post a status update to your Twitter. I will also show you how to create an app that run entirely in landscape mode. So it’s a two-fer.

Let’s get started…

1. Create A View Based Application

Name it something awesome. I called mine TwitUpdate (not awesome, I know).  The first thing we should do is create our IBOutets and IBActions. Now download the images for the tutorial and drag them into the Resources group inside of XCode.

2. Set up your IBoutlets and IBActions

So open TwitUpdateViewController.h. And let’s add the following code:

You can omit the UIButton outlets if you would like.  I just like having them around in case we want to do anything with the button.  This is pretty straight forward, we have a UITextView to enter our Twitter status in. And an IBAction that gets called to post our Twitter status.  Don’t forget to synthesize these properties in TwitUpdateViewController.m or you will be smitten by the compiler.  One other thing you will see here is a UIActionSheet.  We will display this sheet as our “Loading” screen when posting a tweet.

3. Build The Interface

Go ahead and open up TwitUpdateViewController.xib.

So if you are wondering how to get Interface Builder in landscape mode, it’s actually quite simple.  It is not obvious however as it took me forever and a freakin day to figure it out.  There is a little arrow (as in the screenshot below) in the top right corner of the view.  Click it and the view will rotate to landscape mode.

Now that your interface is in landscape mode, remove the Status Bar.  This is done by clicking on the view and setting the Status Bar drop down in the attributes inspector to none. This will just give you more screen real estate.

Now drag a UIImageView on your view and stretch it to fill the entire screen.  Set the Image attribute of the UIImageView to be twit_background.png and bask in the glory of my beautifully created interface!  Next, we need to add the UITextView.

Grab a UITextView and drag in on to the view and stretch it to fit just inside of the chat bubble.  Make sure to delete the lorem ipsum text inside.

The last interface element we need to add is the update button.  Drag a UIButton on to your view.  In the button’s attributes, set it’s type to custom and it’s image to btn_update.png. Make sure you drag the button to fit the update image. Your final interface should look like this

Now, connect the twitterMessageText from File’s Owner to the UITextView and the updateButton to your custom button.  Also, be sure to connect the TouchUpInside method of the UIButton to the postTweet IBAction.  Here is a screenshot of what the connection properties should look like when you click on File’s owner.

Now close Interface Builder.

4. Creating Our Twitter Request Class

So, we will interface with Twitter using an NSMutableURL request and NSURLConnection.  You have two options at this juncture, you can either download the files below and add them to your project to use, or you can head on over to http://brandontreb.com/objective-c-programming-tutorial-creating-a-twitter-client-part-1/ and learn how to create them yourself (recommended route).  I would explain it here, it’s just that I already wrote an in depth tutorial for it on my blog. This is now a tutorial scavenger hunt.

• twitterrequest.zip

If you just want to complete this tutorial and move on, download the file above, unzip and drag the files into your project.  We need to add some code to these files in order to post a status update to Twitter.  So, open TwitterRequest.h and update the following code

We have added a Boolean that denotes whether or not we are making a HTTP POST request (Twitter uses both POST and GET).  Also, there is a string that will represent the POST request.  In our case, this will just get set to “status=foo” (foo being your status update).

Also, we have added a method signature to update your status.  It takes an NSString which is just the status text.  The other variables are explained in my tutorial on brandontreb.com.  Now, open up TwitterRequest.m and add the following code.

Ok, beginning with the status_update method.  This method looks very similar to our friends_timeline method with a few exceptions.  First, we set isPost = YES.  Next, we set the request body = “status=%@” where we set %@ to our status update.

Now, for some trickier code.  In the request method of our class, we need to add some code to do an HTTP POST (rather than a GET).  This is how we tell Twitter what to set our status to.  So, the first thing is to set the HTTPMethod for the request to POST.  Next, we have set the “Content-Type” field to let Twitter know what kind of data we are sending.  Following that, the body of the request is sent.  This is the actual data that Twitter will see.  Finally, we just tell the request how large (in bytes) our data is going to be.  If this is all foreign to you, I recommend you go read up on POST and GET.

Phew… Done with that.  Now for the final part of implementing our postTweet method.

5. PostTweet Method

Open up TwitterUpdateViewController.m and add the following code.

Ok, not super complex as the TwitterRequest class does most of the heavy lifting.  As a reminder, the postTweet method gets called when you press the Update button.  The first thing we do here is build a new TwitterRequest object and set the username and password field.  Make sure you put in YOUR twitter username and password.  Next, we call the resignFirstResponder method on the UITextView.  This is to hide the keyboard.

Just so the user knows something is happening, we display a simple action sheet that has no buttons and says “Posting to Twitter…” . Finally, we call the statuses_update method in our TwitterRequest class.

The Twitter request class will then do some magic and eventually call the callback method that you specified (status_updateCallback) and send it the data that Twitter returned to us.  The first thing we do is dismiss the action sheet. Next, I am simply outputting the response from Twitter in to the terminal.

The response received from Twitter would need to be parsed and displayed or something but that’s for another tutorial.One thing to note, if you enter an invalid username or password, this app will just hang and say  “Posting to Twitter” forever.  You need to handle this in an error callback method. Again described in the tutorial in which we took the TwitterRequest code from.

6. Run The App In Landscape Mode

The last part of this tutorial is to force the app to run in landscape mode as well as hide the status bar.  Open up TwitUpdate-Info.plist. Right click on the table and select “Add Row”. Select Initial interface orientation and set the value to Landscape (left or right).  Right click again and add Status bar is initially hidden. to hide the status bar.  It should now look like this.

We also need to update the TwitUpdateViewConroller.m file to respond to the interface rotations.  Uncomment the following method in TwitUpdateViewController.m and change it to say:

Just tells the the view to rotate when the iphone is rotated…

Well, I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial.  I hope to see some cool Twitter integration in all of your apps (feel free to comment and let me know how you have implemented it in your app).  You can always ask questions in the comments of the post or write me on twitter.  And for lazy people here is the source (j/k).  Happy iCoding.

]]> http://icodeblog.com/2009/07/09/integrating-twitter-into-your-applications/feed/ http://icodeblog.com/2009/07/09/integrating-twitter-into-your-applications/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/icodeblog/~3/QCzXaFgfCJM/ http://icodeblog.com/2009/07/08/look-familiar/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:53:53 +0000 Brandon http://icodeblog.com/?p=1076 Ok, so I was perusing the App Store the other day to stumble upon this gem of an application. See the screenshot below.

If you have been on iCodeBlog before, you might recognize this “game” from a tutorial that I wrote about writing an iPhone game (link).  One thing to note here is the company name is BlaBlaIncTech (not iCodeBlog) meaning I did not submit this nor did I give permission to do so.  I find it interesting that someone has the guts to take a tutorial on iCodeBlog and submit it to the app store unmodified.

Not only was this VERY basic code meant to teach simple concepts, the graphics are absolutely atrocious as they were hacked together very quickly in Photoshop.  I actually find this quite hilarious that this guys expects me not to find out.

I wanted to highlight some of the great features noted by the “developer” of this application (Seen in the feature section of iTunes).

• “It’s basic game design makes it a fun game for someone that doesn’t play alot of games” - WOW, emphasis on the BASIC.  This game is fun for no one as it sucks! It was meant as a teaching tool moron!
• “Great Quality” - Are we looking at the same game?
• “Easy (So easy your grandma can play)” - If you have the same taste in games as your grandma, you probably don’t own an iPhone.
• “Almost no crashes” - hahahaha this is the best one. The keyword here is “Almost”.  Well, that does it, I’m sold!

So, if you want to scoop up this rad game, the link is here . I almost will pay him the $.99, just to make fun of him in the comments section.

Hello everyone, welcome to my fourth screeencast. This is the second in my series introducing readers to Objective C. Let’s dive in.

Skill Level Beginner

Source Code

Available Here

Screencast

I film myself coding out the entire sample project for each post. I personally think going through the Screencast is the best way to learn. But feel free to look through the slides and text if that suites you better.

iCodeBlog Tutorial: Objective C 2.0 An Intro Part 2 from Collin Ruffenach on Vimeo.

Tutorial

iCodeBlogClass.m:

@implementation iCodeBlogClass

@synthesize name;

-init
{
	return self;
}

@end

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.h:

#import "iCodeBlogClass.h"

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.h:

iCodeBlogClass *myNewObject = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] init];
NSLog(@"%@", myNewObject);

iCodeBlogClass.h:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

@interface iCodeBlogClass : NSObject
{
	NSString *name;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *name;

@end

iCodeBlogClass.m:

@synthesize name;

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.m:

iCodeBlogClass *myNewObject = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] init];
[myNewObject setName:@"Collin"];

NSLog(@"%@", [myNewObject name]);

iCodeBlogClass.m:

-initWithName:(NSString *)inputName
{
     self.name = inputName;
     return self;
}

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.m:

iCodeBlogClass *myNewObject = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Collin"];

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.m:

iCodeBlogClass *person1 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Collin"];

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.m:

	iCodeBlogClass *person1 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Collin"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person2 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Martin"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person3 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"vtsib"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person4 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"AppStoreMod"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person5 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Matt"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person6 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Brendan"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person7 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Geoff"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person8 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"RobotGrrl"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person9 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"brandon"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person10 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Aaron"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person11 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Brian"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person12 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Fernando"];
	iCodeBlogClass *person13 = [[iCodeBlogClass alloc] initWithName:@"Chad"];

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.m:

NSMutableArray *myArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.m:

	[myArray addObject:person1];
	[myArray addObject:person2];
	[myArray addObject:person3];
	[myArray addObject:person4];
	[myArray addObject:person5];
	[myArray addObject:person6];
	[myArray addObject:person7];
	[myArray addObject:person8];
	[myArray addObject:person9];
	[myArray addObject:person10];
	[myArray addObject:person11];
	[myArray addObject:person12];
	[myArray addObject:person13];

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.m:

	for(iCodeBlogClass *myObject in myArray)
	{
		NSLog(@"%@", myObject);
	}

iCodeBlogGetsClassy.m:

-(NSString *)description
{
	return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"The name of the object is %@", self.name];
}

Hello everyone, welcome to my third screeencast. This screencast is the result of a request made in the comments of my first post. I am going to be covering many topics in this post. But the general idea of the app we will build is that it will use an XML file online to get the URL and title of a given picture. For each URL and Title pair a view will be created with a UIImageView showing the image and a UILabel showing the title. Each of these views will be placed in a UIScrollView to flip through, like th functinoality of the Photos app.

Skill Level Medium

This app is going to require a decent amount of experience with Objective C and xCode. Also some minimal understanding of XML and XML schema/structure would be valuable.

Source Code

Available Here

Screencast

I film myself coding out the entire sample project for each post. I personally think going through the Screencast is the best way to learn. But feel free to look through the slides and text if that suites you better.

Using NSXML to Pull UIImages From the Web Screencast

SCREENCAST ADDITION

Adding a final line to layoutSubviews should be:

     [scrollview setFrame:workingFrame];

this will stop the scroll view from bouncing up and down.

Tutorial

iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController.h:

@interface iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController : UIViewController
{
	IBOutlet UIScrollView *scrollview;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIScrollView *scrollview;

iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController.m

@synthesize scrollview;

iCodeBlogXMLView.h:

@interface iCodeBlogXMLView : UIView
{
	IBOutlet UIImageView *imageView;
	IBOutlet UILabel *title;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIImageView *imageView;
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UILabel *title;

@end

iCodeBlogXMLView.m

@synthesize imageView;
@synthesize title;

iCodeBlogXMLElement.h:

@interface iCodeBlogXMLElement : NSObject
{
	UIImage *image;
	NSString *imageTitle;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) UIImage *image;
@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *imageTitle;

@end

iCodeBlogXMLElement.m

@synthesize image;
@synthesize imageTitle;

iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController.h:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
#import "iCodeBlogXMLElement.h"
#import "iCodeBlogXMLView.h"

@interface iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController : UIViewController
{
	IBOutlet UIScrollView *scrollview;

	NSXMLParser *parser;
	NSMutableString *currentAttribute;
	NSMutableArray *xmlElementObjects;

	iCodeBlogXMLElement *tempElement;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIScrollView *scrollview;

@property (nonatomic, retain) NSXMLParser *parser;
@property (nonatomic, retain) NSMutableString *currentAttribute;
@property (nonatomic, retain) NSMutableArray *xmlElementObjects;

@property (nonatomic, retain) iCodeBlogXMLElement *tempElement;

-(void)layoutSubview;

@end

iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController.m

@implementation iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController

@synthesize scrollview;
@synthesize parser;
@synthesize currentAttribute;
@synthesize xmlElementObjects;
@synthesize tempElement;

...

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

	xmlElementObjects = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

	parser = [[NSXMLParser alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://losectrl-gaincommand.com/iCodeBlogHelper/Tutorial3/iCodeBlogImageXML.xml"]];
	[parser setDelegate:self];
	[parser parse];
}

...

- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didStartElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict
{

}

- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName
{

}

- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser foundCharacters:(NSString *)string
{

}

iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController.m

- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didStartElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict
{
	if(![elementName compare:@"PictureInfo"])
	{
		tempElement = [[iCodeBlogXMLElement alloc] init];
	}

	else if(![elementName compare:@"imageURL"])
	{
		currentAttribute = [NSMutableString string];
	}

	else if(![elementName compare:@"imageTitle"])
	{
		currentAttribute = [NSMutableString string];
	}
}

- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName
{
	if(![elementName compare:@"PictureInfo"])
	{
		[xmlElementObjects addObject:tempElement];
	}

	else if(![elementName compare:@"imageURL"])
	{
		NSURL *imageURL = [NSURL URLWithString:currentAttribute];
		NSData *data =  [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:imageURL];
		UIImage *image = [[UIImage alloc] initWithData:data];

		[tempElement setImage:image];
	}

	else if(![elementName compare:@"imageTitle"])
	{
		NSLog(@"The image title is %@", currentAttribute);
		[tempElement setImageTitle:currentAttribute];
	}

	else if(![elementName compare:@"Pictures"])
	{
		[self layoutSubview];
	}
}

- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser foundCharacters:(NSString *)string
{
	if(self.currentAttribute)
	{
		[self.currentAttribute appendString:string];
	}
}

iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController.m

-(void)layoutSubview
{
	CGRect workingFrame;

	workingFrame.origin.x = 0;
	workingFrame.origin.y = 0;
	workingFrame.size.height = 480;
	workingFrame.size.width = 320;

	iCodeBlogXMLView *myView;

	for(iCodeBlogXMLElement *element in [self xmlElementObjects])
	{
		myView = [[iCodeBlogXMLView alloc] initWithFrame:workingFrame];

		NSLog(@"Element title is: %@", [element imageTitle]);

		NSArray *topLeveObjects = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"iCodeBlogXMLView" owner:nil options:nil];

		for(id currentObject in topLeveObjects)
		{
			if([currentObject isKindOfClass:[iCodeBlogXMLView class]])
			{
				myView = (iCodeBlogXMLView *)currentObject;
			}
		}

		[[myView imageView] setImage:[element image]];
		[[myView title] setText:[element imageTitle]];
		[myView setFrame:workingFrame];

		[scrollview addSubview:myView];

		workingFrame.origin.x = workingFrame.origin.x + 320;
	}

	workingFrame.size.width = workingFrame.origin.x;
	[scrollview setContentSize:workingFrame.size];

	workingFrame.origin.x = 0;
	workingFrame.origin.y = 0;
	workingFrame.size.width = 320;
	workingFrame.size.height = 480;
}

iCodeBlogXMLImagesViewController.m

	parser = [[NSXMLParser alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://losectrl-gaincommand.com/iCodeBlogHelper/Tutorial3/iCodeBlogImageXMLB.xml"]];

Hello everyone, welcome to my second screeencast. This is going to be the first in a series of screencasts that are focused at people just beginning to work with Objective C and Cocoa. For many reasons the beginnings of learning cocoa development can be frusterating and lonely to a point. Only now is Objective C and Cocoa development gaining the kind of momentum to drive the creation of resources such as iCodeBlog and others.

Skill Level Beginner

This is not going to be a tutorial for someone who has never had any experience with programming. I aviod getting into the Object Oriented Methodology side of things. All you will need to know for this tutorail is generally the purpose of Classes, Methods and Objects. If you have done any work with Java, C, C++ or C# you should be able to follow the content no problem.

Screencast

I film myself coding out the entire sample project for each post. I personally think going through the Screencast is the best way to learn. But feel free to look through the slides and text if that suites you better.

Objective C 2.0: An Intro - Part 1

Tutorial

Instructions

1. Open xCode
2. File -> New Project
3. Start a new View based iPhone Project. The type of project you create really doesn’t matter for this exercise since we will only be programming a for loop to print and not creating any User Interface.
4. Call the project iCodeBlogCounter
5. After saving the project you will be confronted with a screen looking something like this.



6. If you look in the top left hand corner you will see a folder called Classes. If you click the little black triangle to the left of the folder you will see what is included in the classes folder. In there you should see a class called iCodeBlogCounterAppDelegate.m. This is the file we will be working with. Click on it and you will see its contents appear in the editor window.



7. We will be working with the - (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application method. This method is called when the application finished launching. We will be entering some very simple code that will simple count from 0 to 99 and print the numbers in the terminal window. Here is what the method should look like:



The code here is:

for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
{
     NSLog(@"The current number is: %d", i);
}

8. That is all we need to do for this app. Now time to see it in action. To bring up the terminal window hit SHIFT + APPLE + R, this should bring up a blank window with maybe a line of text in it. Now click Build and Run or hit Apple + R. The terminal windows should say “The current number is 0″ all the way to “The current is 99″. Here is a screenshot of my window.

Instructions

1. Open xCode
2. File -> New Project
3. Start a new View based iPhone Project. The type of project you create really doesn’t matter for this exercise since we will only be programming a for loop to print and not creating any User Interface.
4. Call the project iCodeBlogGetURLText
5. Once the project is open go into the iCodeBlogURLTextAppDelegate.m file.
6. Add this code to the - (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application method

NSString *myURLString = @"http://losectrl-gaincommand.com/iCodeBlogHelper/Tutorial2/iCodeBlog.txt";
NSURL *myURL = [NSURL URLWithString:myURLString];
NSString *myString = [[NSString alloc] stringWithContentsofURL:myURL];

NSLog(@"The string from the internet is: %@", myString);

7. If you bring up the terminal window and Build and Run the App. You should see:

Instructions

1. Go back to the code we just wrote.
   
2. Erase the 4 lines of code we wrote and replace it with this line:

NSLog(@"The string from the internet is: %@", [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://losectrl-gaincommand.com/iCodeBlogHelper/Tutorial2/iCodeBlog.txt"]]);

3. Running the application again should have the same output.
4. Here is a a breakdown of out new line of code.

I know you guys are all in the middle of the next iFart project and just need a little guidance on something to finish it up.  Well, now you have your chance to get advice on what you want to learn.  Let us know what type of tutorial you would like to see appear on iCodeBlog by voting below. In addition to casting your vote, leave you suggestion in the comments section of this post.

After some time (few days or so), I will look at the votes as well as the comments and come up with some new tutorials based on them. I already have a guess as to what will win, but this ought to be fun! Happy voting!

So be sure to check out RightSignature!

Skill Level MEDIUM

Here is a link to the screencast to watch. We are working on getting an embedded version in, but I figure this is basically just as functional. Have fun!

Custom UITableViewCell Screencast Video

Source Code

Available Here

Background Information

Building The App

Step 1

This step shouldn’t require any extra information.

Step 2

Step 3

In CustomTableCellTutorialViewController.m you must define the two required UITableViewDataSource methods. These methods will fill up the table view with data. For now we will put in dummy data just to make sure all of our connections are working.

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section

{

return 10;

}

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath

{

static NSString *CellIdentifier = @”Cell”;

UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];

if (cell == nil){

cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease];

}

[cell setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"I am cell %d", indexPath.row]];

return cell;

}

Step 4

Here you will need to be in xCode and go to File -> New File…

Select Objective C Class and make sure it is a UITableViewCell subclass, depending on your version of the SDK selecting this will differ. Look around and you will find it, call it iCodeBlogCustomCell. With this done enter these IBOutlets in the iCodeBlogCustomCell.h file enter the following IBOutlets:

IBOutlet UILabel *articleName;
IBOutlet UILabel *authorName;
IBOutlet UILabel *date;

IBOutlet UIImageView *imageView;
IBOutlet UIView *viewForBackground;

Add the @property and synthesize them in the main.

Step 5

This step does not require and code but does require a lot of work in Interface Builder. I highly recommend you watch the screencast to see the step by step procedure here. Essentially what I do is create a new View XIB file. Opening this, I delete the standard UIView in the XIB and drag a UITableViewCell from my library into my document window. I assign the UITableViewCell to be of type iCodeBlogCustomCell. With this done layout the interface with the proper elements and hook them up by right clicking on the UITableViewCell in the document window.

Step 6

This is where the real magic is. We are going to return to CustomTableCellTutorialViewController.m and edit the UITableViewDataSource methods we implemented earlier. The code I use has me putting in 4 separate PNG files that I add to my project. You can find your own to put inside the cells. Make sure the UIImageView inside the cell is set for Aspect Fit so you don’t have to worry about resizing the images.  The functions should be changed to be:

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
return 100;
}

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
static NSString *CellIdentifier = @”iCodeBlogCustomCell”;

iCodeBlogCustomCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];

if (cell == nil){
NSLog(@”New Cell Made”);

NSArray *topLevelObjects = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@”iCodeBlogCustomCell” owner:nil options:nil];

for(id currentObject in topLevelObjects)
{
if([currentObject isKindOfClass:[iCodeBlogCustomCell class]])
{
cell = (iCodeBlogCustomCell *)currentObject;
break;
}
}
}

if(indexPath.row % 4 == 0)
{
[[cell authorName] setText:@”Collin Ruffenach”];
[[cell articleName] setText:@”Test Article 1″];
[[cell date] setText:@”May 5th, 2009″];
[[cell imageView] setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"1.png"]];
}

else if(indexPath.row % 4 == 1)
{
[[cell authorName] setText:@”Steve Jobs”];
[[cell articleName] setText:@”Why iPhone will rule the world”];
[[cell date] setText:@”May 5th, 2010″];
[[cell imageView] setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"2.png"]];
}

else if(indexPath.row % 4 == 2)
{
[[cell authorName] setText:@”The Woz”];
[[cell articleName] setText:@”Why I’m coming back to Apple”];
[[cell date] setText:@”May 5th, 2012″];
[[cell imageView] setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"3.png"]];
}

else if(indexPath.row % 4 == 3)

{
[[cell authorName] setText:@”Aaron Hillegass”];
[[cell articleName] setText:@”Cocoa: A Brief Introduction”];
[[cell date] setText:@”May 5th, 2004″];
[[cell imageView] setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"4.png"]];

}

return cell;
}

The End

So that is it for my first new post. I will be doing many more. Let me know your thoughts on this format in the comments. If you see anything organization wise that you think should be changed/add/removed let me know. Good Luck!

]]> http://icodeblog.com/2009/05/24/custom-uitableviewcell-using-interface-builder/feed/ http://icodeblog.com/2009/05/24/custom-uitableviewcell-using-interface-builder/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/icodeblog/~3/s-oNddYEqr0/ http://icodeblog.com/2009/05/20/great-tutorial-series-on-opengl-es/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 20:07:49 +0000 Brandon http://icodeblog.com/?p=873 Jeff Lamarche author of the book “Beginning iPhone Development” has written (and is currently writing) a brilliant series on OpenGL ES.  He does an incredibly job of simplifying the complex ideas behind working in 3D and makes learning OpenGL ES easy for even a novice programmer.

I have always struggled with OpenGL as 3D has a lot of nerdy math, this series breaks it down into the simplest of forms and helped me tremendously. So go check it out and let me know what you think.

http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-table-of.html

Jeff is also on Twitter@jeff_lamarche

EyeCue has received tremendous amount of success since its original launch. We have had thousands of downloads on the daily basis. Unfortunately, quite a few users experienced crashes due to the compatibility issues in iPhone SDK 2.1 and iPhone SDK 2.2.

In an effort the combat the incompatibility issue, we’ve recompiled the code and re-released the new and updated version in iTunes.

I have even made a video for it. Check it out here

Get your copy here

Giddy up!

Long time readers may remember a post I did back in October of last year. I was still fairly new to the SDK then and now have the skills required to make many screencasts on varying topics and tailored to many skill levels. I am going to be implementing something new in my posts to dictate the difficulty of a screencast. With the first minute you will see an overview of the skills needed to get through the screencast. I have several in mind, including a few dealing with API’s made available within the 3.0 SDK. These lessons will be posted as soon as the NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) is removed on the 3.0 software.

My first post will be coming in the next few days, but anyone with requests for screencast topics please post them here. I will pick some I think I can do and get them up for you guys in the next few weeks. Also if please use the commenting systems on the screencasts, I read every comment and really try to focus on any pointed out problems. Thanks, you’ll be seeing some stuff from me soon.

Here are the sound files you will need to download for this tutorial:

• clapping-crowd-studio-01
• tennis-volley-01

Notice that all of the audio files have a .caf extension.  This is the audio type all of your sound files must be in to be played by the iPhone.  Luckily Apple has provided us a utility for converting audio to this format. You can read up on it here. It’s pretty straight forward, just open up a Terminal and type

/usr/bin/afconvert -f caff -d LEI16 {INPUT} {OUTPUT}

Where {INPUT} is the path to your input audio file and {OUTPUT} is the file you want it to save it to with a .caf extension.

Adding the Audio Files To You Project

Start by downloading these files.  Then drag them to your Resources Folder inside of your project.  You may also want to add a subfolder called Audio to keep organized. Make sure you check the box to copy the files into your project’s directory.

Add The AudioToolbox.framework to Your Project

Since we need to call functions within this framework, we will need to add it to our project. The best way I have found to locate a framework on my mac is to search for it. Right Click on the Frameworks folder in your project and select Add -> Existing Frameworks.  In the search box type AudioToolbox.framework and select the framework among the search results. (Make sure you have Computer selected to search your entire computer)

When you find it, click Add. We are now ready to start coding…

Add the Header Declarations

Open up iTennisViewController.h and add the following code.

First we see an import for the AudioServices.h. This is needed to call the functions required for us to play audio.  Next, we declare 2 SystemSoundID’s.  These are basically just Integers (could actually use an int instead but you’d get a warning).  Next, open up iTennishViewController.m and add the following code to synthesize these variables.

Now let’s initialize our sounds objects.  Go to the viewDidLoad method and add the following code.

Pretty straight forward.  The first line gets the path of the audio file.  The next line converts the path to a CFURLRef.  Finally, we load that audio file and associate it with the given sound ID. Notice we pass &clappingFileID.  This is a pass by reference and allows the AudioServicesCreateSystemSoundID method to modify this variable.  We do the same thing to load the volley sound.  Now, let’s play the sounds.

Playing The Sounds

It’s actually quite simple to play the sounds we have loaded.  Simply call the AudioServicesPlaySystemSound method and pass it the soundID of the file you want to play.  So to play the clapping sound when someone scores, add this code to your reset method.

Notice, we are passing the clappingFileID to indicate we want to play the clapping sound.  Now, add the following code to gameLoop to play the racquet sound when someone hits the ball.

Pretty straight forward Right? Now click Build and Go and check out the game audio.  That concludes this tutorial.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section of this post or write them to me on Twitter.  You can also download the sample code here

Happy iCoding!

]]> http://icodeblog.com/2009/05/04/iphone-game-programming-tutorial-part-4-basic-game-audio/feed/ http://icodeblog.com/2009/05/04/iphone-game-programming-tutorial-part-4-basic-game-audio/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/icodeblog/~3/OYvchr7MS6g/ http://icodeblog.com/2009/03/18/iphone-game-programming-tutorial-part-3-splash-screen/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:01:04 +0000 Brandon http://icodeblog.com/?p=703 Ok, So it’s time to wrap up this series.  Today I will be showing you how to add a few “bells and whistles” that will make your game more complete.  Let’s start by adding a splash screen to your game (Again I truly apologize for the lack of graphics skillz. Photoshop and I are not friends).

Creating a Splash Page

We will be adding a splash page that will fade out into our main game screen.  Start by downloading this image and adding it to your project’s Resources Folder. Make sure you check the box to copy this image to the project’s directory.

Now we need to add a View Controller to our project that will handle the Splash View.  Go ahead and add a new file to your project that is a UIViewController subclass. Name this file SplashViewController. Make sure you check to create the .h file as well.

That’s all for today.  Join me next time when I will show you how to add audio to your game. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section or write me on Twitter.

You can download the source for this tutorial here

Happy iCoding!

This is a great way to to put a contact or bug report button on your app.  I’m going to start with a simple UI that I created.  I’m not going to discuss how it was created (I’ll leave that part up to you) as I have gone over Interface Builder quite a few times before.  

The UI simply consists of 2 UITextFields, a UITextArea, and a UIButton.  They are all connected to some code inside of the Applications Delegate.  This is not important, as the focus of this tutorial is to create a reusable function to send mail from your iPhone app. Here is a quick screenshot of the application…

You can download my source code below, or simply start with a basic view-based application and make your own UI.  So, here is a function that I wrote to send email.  You can use this function in any application you wish.

Ok, so let me explain what is going on… First, the function takes 3 arguments.  These are pretty obvious based on their name.  Next, we are building a string.  This string will have the format of a URL.  It’s pretty much the same thing as doing a “mailto” link on a webpage. One thing I want to point out is the fact that I had to use stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding .  Wow, that’s a mouthful.  You would think Apple could come up with a shorter name.  Maybe SanitizeURLString or something… Either way, this does all of the special character replacements in the URL.  So spaces get replaced with %20, etc…

The next thing we do is simply open a URL using the built in openURL method in UIApplication.  This will cause the iPhone to open up Mail.app and magically, our to, subject, and body are already filled out.  Here is how I called the function in my app.

I just connected this IBAction to the Mail UIButton in my app.  So when this method fires, it gets the value of to, subject, and body and passes it to our sendEmailTo method.  Pretty sweet ehh?  

That concludes this tutorial.  If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them in the comments section or ask me on Twitter.  You can also download the source here.

Happy iCoding!

User Interaction

The first thing we will implement is user interaction.  All we really want to do is move the paddle’s X location to the X location of the touch from the user.  This will be a very simple implementation and could be much better (I will add this as a challenge at the bottom of the tutorial).  Open iTennisViewController.m and add the following code.

Just as we did in a previous tutorial, we are overriding the touchesMoved method.  This will detect when the user “drags” their finger on the screen.  First, I added the “else if” statement inside of touchesBegan that simply forwards all events to touchesMoved if the game is in a running state.

The first 2 lines inside of touchesMoved simply detect the location of the user’s touch.  Next, we need to create a new CGPoint from the X location of the touch and the Y location of the yellow racquet (player racquet).  Objective-C won’t simply let us say racquet_yellow.center.x = location.x.  This is probably because CGPoint is immutable (not editable).

Finally, the center of the player’s racquet is set to our new location.

Collision Detection

*Update, the user Naren has pointed out a much simpler collision detection.  The code has been updated to reflect it. Inside the gameLoop method of iTennisViewController.m add the following code

So, Apple has provided us with a very handy methods to check if to object frames collide.  Its called CGRectIntersectsRect.  We simply hand this method the frame of our ball and racquet.  When the ball collides with the racquet, we want to reverse its Y velocity.  The next if statement is required because sometimes we get in a state where the ball gets “trapped” on a paddle bouncing back and for and not going anywhere.  So, we want to ensure the ball’s velocity only gets reversed if it is front of each racquet. (Note, the NSlog is not needed, it was just for debugging)

Simple Game AI

Next, we are going to discuss how simple AI can be added to allow a computer player to play iTennis with you.  Many of you might not know just how much is involved in a decent Artificial intelligence.  I could go on and on with nerdy math, philosophy, heuristics and the like, but I’m not.  I will show you some super NOOB, very easy to understand game AI.  Basically, the computer will “watch” the ball and move in the direction of it in hopes of hitting it.  Let’s get started… 

We first need to define a constant that will define how fast the computer player can move.  Add the following define to the top of iTennisViewController.m

As you start testing, you can adjust this number.  This is basically defining how fast the computer player can move in order to get to the ball.  The higher you make this number, the “better” the computer player will be.  You could actually make your computer unbeatable if this number were high enough.  Now, add the following code right under your collision detection code:

The first “if” statement is to add some difficulty for the computer.  It basically checks to see if the ball is on “his” side of the court.  The computer will not move or respond to the ball unless it’s on his side.  It could be omitted, but makes for a more interesting game.  The next if statements check to see if the X coordinates of the center of the ball are different than the X coordinates of the center of the racquet.  If the ball is to the right of the computer’s racquet, the X coordinate of the computer’s racquet is increased by kCompMoveSpeed. If the ball is to the left of the computer’s racquet, the X coordinate of the computer’s racquet is decreased by kCompMoveSpeed. 

It should now be clear how adjusting the kCompMoveSpeed variable, will affect the computer’s performance…

Now, you can actually hit Build and Go to see the game in action.  As you can see the computer responds to the ball and hits it most of the time.  There is still one last piece to make the game fun. Scoring!

Game Mechanics: Scoring

Now, we need a way to keep score.  This is actually some more simple collision detection.  We are basically checking to see if the ball collides with the back walls.  First, let’s define a few variables and a method.  Open up iTennisViewController.h.  Add the following highlighted code:

We need integer representations of the score so we can add points when the player and the computer score.  Also, we will need a function called reset that will be called to reset the ball to the center of the screen.  Now we need to define one more variable.  Add the following line to your defines at the top of iTennisViewController.m

This variable is pretty self explanatory, but in case you didn’t catch on, it defines the amount of points needed to win.  I just made it 5 for a quick game.  Now, let’s check to see if a player or computer scored.  Right after your AI code, add the following code:

Ok, first we see 2 if statements.  The are basically checking to see if the ball has hit/passed the top or bottom of the screen.  If it passes the top, the player score gets incremented.  If it passes the bottom, the computer score gets incremented.  The next line contains a little bit of fanciness if you are new to programming.  We are calling the reset function, but what is that expression we are passing to it? 

Well, if you look at the definition of reset, it takes a BOOL value that determines if the game is over.  So this can either be true or false.  We are simply passing true or false when the expression is evaluated.  So, (player_score_value >= kScoreToWin) will evaluate to false when the player_score_value variable is less than 5.  Once this variable reaches 5, it will return true and pass it into the reset function.

Why do this? Well it saves us lines of code and complexity.  So now you don’t have to do if(player_score_value >= kScoreToWin) ) [self reset:YES]; }else{[self reset:NO];} . make sense?

Now, let’s define the reset function. Add the following method to iTennisViewController.m

The first thing we do is pause the game.  Remember pausing the game causes the “Tap to Begin” Message to Display. Next, we center the ball on the screen.  If YES/true was passed in for the newGame variable, we need to do a few things.  First, we check who won by comparing the computer and player scores.  Next, we update the “tapToBegin” message to notify the player who won.  You could add another label for this, but I am just recycling this one… Finally, we reset the player and computer scores to 0 because a new game is starting.

If it is not a new game, we need to reset the tapToBegin message to display “tapToBegin”.  This has to be done in case the message was altered to say “Player/Computer wins!”. Finally, we update the labels on the screen to reflect the new scores.  Now you should be good to go…

Click Build and Go and battle the computer in an epic game of iTennis!  If you have any comments or questions, leave them here or ask me on Twitter.  You can also download the source for this tutorial here

As Promised, Here are some challenges

• Improve on user interaction - Make it so when the user taps, the racquet moves towards the tap rather than moves directly to the tap location
• Improve collision detection - When the ball hits the paddle, use some simple physics to make the speed of the paddle affect the speed (and direction) of the ball
• Improve on the AI - add some randomness to your AI, make it attempt to “predict” where the ball is going to be
• Improve Scoring - Make it used tennis scores 15, 30 , etc…
• Improve scoring - Make it so you must win by 2 points

Stay tuned for the next tutorial when I will be going over game audio, splash screen, about, and some other polishing… Happy iCoding!

A great way to store dictionary data that does not change during runtime is in a .plist file. Say you want to organize some data hierarchically or you want to store the navigation structure of a drill-down somewhere more convenient (see drill-down save example in apple docs), then a .plist file is a great way to go.

Here’s a quick example of how to restore data from a plist file. I’ll use a plist file that you can find in every app out there: Info.plist

Sometimes it’s useful to display a version number on a splash view and here’s how you can do that using the Info.plist CFBundleVersion value.


NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath];
NSString *finalPath = [path stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Info.plist"];
NSDictionary *plistData = [[NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:finalPath] retain];

versionLabel = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(100,100,60,25)]; // for example
versionLabel.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
versionLabel.textColor = [UIColor whiteColor];
versionLabel.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:10];
NSString *versionString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"v%@", [plistData objectForKey:@"CFBundleVersion"]];
versionLabel.text = versionString;
[self.view addSubview:versionLabel];


Now you can see pretty easily how the plist file becomes an NSDictionary object. Pretty easy no?

Through my travels of the internets, I have encountered a great website for iPhone developers looking to have their applications beta tested by real people.  The website is called iBetaTest.com . 

Launching their site just yesterday, iBetaTest.com already boasts 135 registered testers and 44 registered developers!  Here is the skinny on how it works (per their website).

• Beta testers and developers register for a free account
• Beta testers log in and go into the Device Manager and add all of their devices
• Developers can go to Manage Betas module and create a new beta
  - at this point they specify beta type (public, manual, invite only, the auto approve setting, etc.)
  - select which devices are required to run their application (iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod touch v1, v2, or All)
  - set number of desired testers (2-100)
  - write the application’s description
  - provide info on any incentives for beta tester participation
  - upload the application files, license file and any screenshots they want
  - write what needs to be tested and add any special instructions and voila - the app is up and running
• At this point (if app is set public), beta testers can see it and apply for it
  - ONLY beta testers with devices the application supports, and with UDID’s already entered can apply for a given beta
  - If the application is set to auto approve - they are automatically added to the list of testers, until the limit set by the developer is reached
  - If it is not set to auto approve - the developer gets an email, and then either approves or denies the tester 
• During this time, no matter if the application is public or private, developer can also send invites to anyone to come and join the beta
  - Users not yet registered on iBetaTest.com get an email, and once they sign up, their Pending Beta Testing Invitation will be shown on the Dashboard from where they can accept or deny it
  - Registered members also see it on the Dashboard, and can approve or reject any invitation straight from there
  - NO INVITE CODES are necessary. It’s all seamless and based on user’s email address, for both registered and non registered members  
• There is a convenient “Get ADC Import File” feature for developers, which lets them download a file containing beta tester’s names and UDID’s which is directly importable into Apple’s Developer’s Connection portal; no more copying and pasting 
• At any time developer can simply click Close For Signups button under My Betas module and close the beta signup process (which is not necessary)
• Approved beta testers can access all features the system offers right on every application’s home page
  - From there they may send reports (bugs, feature requests, comments) and communicate with developer and other testers
  - Everyone can also download Application files, documentation, and license files straight from there
• The system AUTOMATICALLY checks developer’s.mobileprovision files to see if the tester’s UDID has been provisioned in that version, and notifies a tester if he/she should be downloading any files yet.
  - This way, developers do not have to send the files individually to each tester. They are all available in the same pool, and as soon as the license is uploaded, beta testers know if their device can run and install it yet or not.
• During the beta testing - developers can also email users from My Betas module at any time (one by one, or all at once) with any info they have that has to get to testers right away. If a support email address is provided in developer’s profile, these emails are shown as if they are coming from that address, however, if none is entered, they are all sent from system@ibetatest.com
• Privacy is STRONGLY guarded on iBetaTest.com. From initial interviews with developers, before the system was even built, all they cared about was what the beta testers have to say - not, what their personal information is
  - The only piece of information a developer can see on their tester is the First Name (for a more professional communication), and tester’s username.
  - The system itself sends all information via integrated mailing system, thus enforcing the use of Reports Module for all direct communication with the developer
  - Each report can be set to either “for all” or “for developer only”, making it easy to talk to the developer “in private”
• Both developers and beta testers can set their personal profiles (with addition of developers also having a developer profile), where they can publish all other info they’d like to share with the world: Short bio, and links to their Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter profiles
• Once the beta testing has finished, the developer has a chance to rate the beta testers (1-5 star rating) and write a short note, which will become a part of Tester’s Testimonials Page (located right on their profile with all other info)
• Rating system is an interesting one, to say the least. Each star is 10 points. THERE WILL BE REWARDS for first testers to reach 200, 500, 1000, and so on points - and these won’t be shabby either! Stay tuned for more info on this.

After registering for a developer account, it was clear to me that this site is rock solid.  From the looks of it, they have coded it in Ruby on Rails (great choice) which is obvious by their clean URL structure and smooth ajax effects.  At the moment, the site doesn’t currently have any active beta applications, but I am sure this will change in the near future.  I will be following this site closely (and maybe even submitting some betas for testing).  They also have a twitter which can be found here: http://twitter.com/ibetatest if your a Twitter kind of person (you should be).

So, be sure and let me know what you think of this site and share your experience in the comments or write me on twitter. I can’t wait to launch the next tutorial in the game series (it will blow your socks off)… Unit then, happy iCoding!

Stay tuned for the next game programming tutorial.  Should be up soon…

Happy iCoding.

In this tutorial series, I will teach you about every aspect of developing an iPhone game.  The game will include graphics, sounds, game mechanics, and even some simple computer AI. 

The game we will be creating is called iTennis.  It is essentially Pong with a tennis theme.  It will follow all of the same rules and mechanics of Pong.  I chose this as a first game tutorial as iTennis does not require any special animation.  If there is significant interest, I will move on to a more complex game in a later series. Here is a screenshot of the game we will be making:

Let’s get started… Here are the images you will need for the project. (I know my Photoshop skillz are weak, so be easy on me).  Click the link below to download the zipped images.
   

Open up XCode and create a View Based Application. Name this application iTennis.

What does this mean for iCodeBlog.com?  Glad you asked.  It means better tutorials.  As I will be coding Objective C every day of my life, my skill set will become greater and greater.  I will be able to write more in depth tutorials.  Also,  the team at Rightsprite is made up of many brilliant individuals.  So as time goes on, you will see them posting tutorials and other resources as well.

So better content and more frequent tutorials… what’s not to love.  

Also, I don’t mean to plug the company I work for too much, but I get a lot of requests for freelance work via email.  I can now fulfill those requests via Rightsprite.  So, if you have an iPhone application that you want developed, head on over to rightsprite.com and contact the HR people.  I will certainly be one of the developers working on your application.

So be on the look out for posts from the RightSprite team.  Also, the first part in my iPhone game programming tutorial series is just about to launch.  Check back really soon…

Today I will be showing you how to work with a  UIWebview to create a basic web browser.  Here is a screenshot of the app we are going to create.

Create a View-Based Application

Ok, so let’s get started.  Start by opening up Xcode and click File -> New Project.  Next select View-Based Application and click Choose… Name this project something like iCodeBrowser and click Save.  

Now we are ready to begin coding…

Create IBOutlets and IBActions

Before we create the interface for our web browser, we need to establish the IBOutles and Actions to interface with the UI elements in code.  Start by opening up iCodeBrowserViewController.h and add the following code:

Let’s take a look at this code line by line.  The first thing we added was the <UIWebViewDelegate> to the end of our interface declaration.  This is telling the app that this class will be the delegate for our UIWebview.  

What does it mean to be the delegate you ask? Great question… A delegate is like a handler.  It is responsible for implementing certain methods in order to handle events sent by the object they are the delegate for.  So in our example, we are simply saying that we will implement some of the functionality of the UIWebView.  This is needed so we can capture certain actions of the UIWebView such as a click on a link or so we can tell when a page has started/finished loading.  If it’s still unclear, ask me clarifying questions in the comments section.

Next, we see our 3 lines of declaring IBOutlets.  These are the UI elements that we will be interacting with.  In case you didn’t know, the UIActivityIndicator is the little spinner/loading animation that you see on various apps when content is loading.  We will be using this to show that a page is currently loading.

Following this code, there are 3 IBActions.  IBActions are functions that get called in response to a user interaction with the application (such as tapping a button).  For our basic browser, we are only offering 3 types of functionality.  gotoAddress which will take a user to the address they type in the address bar and goBack/Forward should be pretty self explanatory.  

Creating the User Interface 

Now, let’s create the interface using Interface Builder.  I am going to be showing you how to do this in the video below.

Implementing the IBActions

Now that we have our interface, let’s make the app function.  We need to implement our methods.  Open up iCodeBrowserViewController.m and add the following code.

We need to synthesize our properties to allow us to interact with them.  Synthesizing automatically creates “getter” and “setter” methods for our properties.  Next, let’s implement the viewDidLoad method.  This is where we will be loading our “homepage”.  Add the following code to the viewDidLoad method.

The viewDidLoad method gets called automatically by our application whenever this view first loads.  We can know for sure that it will get called, so we can put our initialization code here.

The first thing we see is the urlAddress string.  This will be our “homepage”.   You can change this to any address you wish to start with.  Next, we build a URL object with our string.  We need to do this so we can make a web request.  Following this, we build our web request and load it into the webView.  This will display the homepage inside of our webview.  Finally, we set the text of the address bar to the homepage address.  This part is more for aesthetics to let the user know what page they are on.

Next, we implement the method that we connected to the UITextField’s DidEndOnExit method gotoAddress.  Add the following code:

This is similar to the code we wrote in the viewDidLoad method, except for the fact that we are getting our URL string from the address bar.  This method gets called when the user presses the “Go” button on the keyboard.  The last thing to note here is we call the [addressBar resignFirstResponder] method.  This simply tells the app to hide the keyboard when this method gets called.

The implementation of our Back and Forward methods are pretty easy.  Go ahead and add the following code.

UIWebViews are pretty cool because of the functionality they offer us built right in to them.  We simply call [webView goBAck] to go back and [webView goForward] to go forward.  This greatly simplifies the interactions with the webview.  If we were to code that functionality from scratch, we would have to create a stack of URLs and continually push and pop them off the stack to keep track of where we need to go.  Thanks Apple for not making us implement this.

Finally, we need to implement the delegate methods for UIWebview.  These methods allow us to write our own code to respond to actions by the UIWebview.  The first methods we will implement are the webViewDidStartLoad and the webViewDidFinishLoad methods.  We will use these to show and hide the activity indicator. Add the following code:

So when the request is first made for a ULR (before the page starts loading) the webViewDidStartLoad method gets called automatically.  We use this opportunity to start our activity indicator to let the user know the page is loading.  If you don’t have something like this, it simply feels like the app is frozen when in fact, it’s just loading the page.  Finally, the webViewDidFinishLoad method gets called when the page is fully loaded.  After this, we can stop the indicator (and it automatically hides itself).

The very last thing we need to do is define what happens when a user clicks on a link. Add the following method:

This method gets called automatically whenever the user clicks a link.  This method can be very useful if you want to make a native iPhone application that integrates with a web app.  You can use this method to trap the user’s clicks and have your application respond to web links that get clicked.  In our case, we need it to do 2 things.  The first is to set the text of the address bar to the URL of the link that was clicked on and to load that address into the webview.

One thing to make note of: We do a check to see if the URL scheme is “http”. This is to ensure that the user typed http before their URL.  You can add an else statement here that auto prepends the http if the user did not add it.  This would allow you to type in a url such as “icodeblog.com” rather than having to type “http://www.icodeblog.com”.  I chose to omit it for this tutorial.

Remember, all of this added functionality of a UIWebView can only be gotten if you tell your class that it implements the UIWebViewDelegate protocol as we did in our .h file.

The app should be complete! Click on Build and Go to see this baby in action.  Remember, you must put “http://” in front of your URL’s.  

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments section of this post.  You can download the source here . Happy iCoding!

Basically, we changed out some hair and skin tones, hairstyle, accessories. But I am still floored by the fact that the application was rejected the first time around. Apple claims that I am ridiculing public figures. However, I can just as easily say that blond guy is Eminem. But Eminem is also a public figure… does it make it OK? If people can get offended by a cartoon that looks like Obama smiling, couldn’t there also be people offended by a grinning cartoon of Eminem?

The irony is that the figure in the screenshot is NOT Eminem. What I am trying to point out is that these avatars can really look like anyone you want them to. If we are not able to depiction of certain public figures in the game, then no game is safe from displaying anything that resembles human. Doesn’t it sound crazy to you? It does to me.

No one will argue that last presidential election is historically insignificant. In many different ways, the entire election campaign, from the primary to the final election result, has meant something special to most of us. In honoring this special occasion, we at RightSprite decided to create a commemorative iPhone game that is both family friendly and light-hearted.

We’ve selected one of the most popular genres — match three puzzle — and gave it an election theme. Instead of matching 3 jewels in a row, you would match 3 voters of the same face to get the points. You are able to select an avatar and you will share the same board as the computer component. Now, we are fairly cognizant of the fact that some people may feel more sensitive about the topic, so we deliberately made cartoon versions of the candidates and removed the names. We balanced gender by having 2 male and 2 female candidates. We also made sure that there are two “blue” avatars for the Democrat party and two “red” avatars for the Republican party. Finally, in lieu of catching all the election hype and try to cash in on it, we decided that we would launch the game after the election is over and make it free.

We submitted the app last week, and last night we got a courteous reject email from Apple. Why? According to Apple, our application contains “obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.” To fix this issue, Apple suggested that we should “remove the caricatures of public figures from the application.”

After taking all the precautions, my initial reaction was that I found this to be exceedingly offensive. Other than the game is loosely themed politically, there isn’t an objectionable thing the application I can think of. Would it have been less of a caricature if we had used real photos? I think not. And, what if we had accessorized the candidates with glasses or mustaches? Would that have been any more respectful?

There is no doubt that the when players pick up this game, they will immediately make that association between the avatars in the game and the current events. Indeed, this is what we intended to do as the game itself is a commemorative piece. Without the avatars, the application is really nothing more than a mediocre rehash of a match three game.

Many of us have heard about and read the horror stories about submitting applications to Apple. We had up to this point been blissfully unscathed by the Apple AppPolice. Our streak has now run out and we have our own cautionary tale for other developers out there. Hopefully you’ll sense Apple’s logic in the censoring of our caricatures and be able to avoid making our mistake in your own apps. In the meantime, we’re back to the drawing board and we will keep you posted. Comments welcome.

It has been a while since my last tutorial.  For that I am sorry.  My wife is 9 months pregnant and about ready to pop.  This being the case, she takes up most of my free time… I have spent a little of my extra time developing a new iphone apps site called freshapps.com.

The site uses Wordpress as its main engine and aims to be a “Digg-like” site for iphone apps. It offers a new fun way to discover the “freshest” iphone apps without having to get buried in the app store.  I wrote a pretty slick homepage algorithm that aids in doing this.  

Check it out and let me know what you think! I will be continuing with the iPhone programming tutorials after my baby is born.  This should be mid December.  I am sorry for the delay.  I will still be on answering questions you guys might have and try to get back into the forums.

Thanks for being a part of iCodeBlog. Happy iCoding!

So for those of you who already didn’t know this, here is a link to the lecture slides (with sample code).

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php

I hope you find the examples and instruction here very useful. Have a great day and happy iCoding!

I’m checking a url to see if it has a substring. It would be so easy if this was ruby:

absolute_url.match(/my regex/).any?

In Objective C, you have to use rangeOfString which returns a range. If I were to run this on the string “the quick brown fox” with an argument of “brown” it would return {10,14}. If it’s not found, it would return {NSNotFound, 0}. Let’s use that to check to see if the range was found. We’ll use NSMakeRange to create the NSNotFound range and NSEqualRanges to compare them:

if(NSEqualRanges(NSMakeRange(NSNotFound, 0), [absoluteURL rangeOfString:@"my_substring"])){   NSLog(@"my_substring not found in absoluteURL %@", absoluteURL);}

This tutorial was contributed by Dave (AKA Clarke76) on the Forums.

WebSite: http://viium.com

-Main project on site is eDuo. A .Net app that connects to OWA Exchange and forwards to IMAP account. Free program for those who can’t use Active Sync

 
Important Links:

[WebService] http://viium.com/WebService/HelloWorld.asmx

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/URLLoadingSystem/Tasks/UsingNSURLConnection.html

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/XMLParsing/XMLParsing.html

http://www.w3schools.com/soap/default.asp

-After creating our XML data / SOAP  request, we create a URLRequest. We add HTTP Header values, those values you read from the WebService.

-We set the HTTP Method to POST

-We set out HTTP Body to the xml file we created

-We then create our connection, using the request we just setup.

-Once the connection is setup and delegate is set to self, we need to setup out connection delegate methods.

-The first method just makes sure it can make a connection. If it can, we make sure we have no data in our Data set so we clear it.

-Second method is called when re receive any data. If we do receive data, we just append it to our data set.

-Third Method handles any errors and releases our data and connection if an error occurs.

-Fourth Method: We take the data and create a string for Logging reasons, then release the string.

-We check to make sure an instance of xmlParser does not exist, if it does we release it.

-Create a new instance of xmlParser, set the delegate to self, want to resolve external entities, and start our parsing.

-release our connection and Data

Now we need to our our delegate methods for NSXMLParser

First method we are check the start of elements. If our element equals “HelloResult” we set our BOOL to true.  Second method records any data between an element if our BOOL is set to true.  Third method checks for our closing element. Once found sets our greeting, releases our MutableString, and set our BOOL back to false.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments of this post.  You can download the sample code here.

You use the applicationDidFinishLaunching method to kick off your application. This event fires automatically on your delegate whenever your app launches.

If your app launches from a special url schema (tel://, http://, mailto://), then another event is fired:

handleOpenUrl

As you might have noticed in the LaunchMe sample project that ships with Xcode, these two methods will most likely conflict.

Solution:

Move the functionality from applicationDidFinishLaunching and put it in another method, like postLaunch. Then add a member variable to the application delegate to keep track of how the app started:

@interface YourAppDelegate : NSObject  {BOOL launchDefault;}

@property BOOL launchDefault;

Then put this in applicationDidFinishLaunching:

launchDefault = YES;[self performSelector:@selector(postFinishLaunch) withObject:nil afterDelay:0.0];

Then in handleOpenUrl, add this:

launchDefault = NO;

Lastly, write the postLaunch method and make it check the launchDefault variable.

- (void)postLaunch{ if (launchDefault){     // Add your functionality from applicationDidFinishLaunching here. }else{     // don't do anything....let handleOpenURL run }

}

How does this work?

You’re effectively adding a method to the event chain to be called after all other events. You’re putting a 0 second delay on it, so it shouldn’t add any extra time to the overall loading time.

Recently, after upgrading an iPhone to the current iPhone development firmware Xcode was unable to detect the device. I first noticed this when trying to build directly to the device:

“no provisioned iphone os device connected”. Needless to say, the device was in fact connected.

After that, I opened the organizer and saw:

“unable to locate a suitable developer disk image…”.

The Solution:

Downloading and installing the current Xcode SDK. Wouldn’t it be helpful if the error message could tell you that?