Most of the time, we need multiple values selector in iOS for example selecting multiple days of the week, selecting multiple contacts, selecting multiple countries from dropdown. If there is one country selected in dropdown, then it will show selected country. If there are multiple countries selected then it will show “Multiple Countries

Download from Github:

Source Code

Developer: asif.noor@techipost.com

]]> http://www.techipost.com/2013/04/26/open-source-multi-values-selector-dropdown-in-ios/feed/ 0 http://www.techipost.com/2012/11/07/responsive-business-portfolio-folio/ http://www.techipost.com/2012/11/07/responsive-business-portfolio-folio/#comments Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:27:30 +0000 Umair Ashraf http://www.techipost.com/?p=1247 Folio is a responsive html  business portfolio template.The template is exclusively  designed/developed  for techipost.com by Sarfraz Shaukat. Its intuitive text/image slider gives you a good showcase to project your Business Portfolio, Projects,Products etc. Its simple and clean design makes it more attractive and eye catching for users.

This template is best suitable for all those developers who want rapid development of business portfolio websites.

Main Features

• Intuitive JQuery text Slider
• Fully Responsive Design & Layout
• Valid HTML/CSS
• Cross Browser Compatible
• Working Contact Form
• Portfolio Items Showcase

Licensing

This template is free for personal and commercial use. If you want to spread the word please link to this page directly.

View Demo

Download Source Code

Developer: asif.noor@techipost.com

Motivation behind learning iOS development or becoming iOS developer

Well ! to be honest, I started iOS application development in mid of 2010 because everyone was talking about iOS and being an iOS developer you can earn more than developing for other platforms. Mobile development is dominating the market.Moving from developing applications for PC to mobile was exciting transition. Flows of application on iOS was different. Because of less memory available on phone, developers also need to do memory managements which was new to me at start when shifting from .Net development to iOS development. Tuning applications for performance is always a key goal in iOS. Do you also plan to start iOS development? then why not !

How to start and from where to start?

iOS development

Lot of people in industry ask me how they can start developing awesome apps for iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod) platform. The biggest problem they face is how to setup development environment because they dont have mac machine, where to start, how can they launch apps to app store? So I am writing this post to help out all those individuals who are thinking about to start developing application for iOS platform.

1.Install Mac OS X or Snow Leopard

 The biggest hurdle for most of the people that mac machine is too expensive and they can’t buy it. So, solution is that you can install Mac operating system on your windows pc in virtual machine or dual boot. I prefer dual boot because running Mac OS in virtual machine is usually very slow. If your laptop or PC supports hardware virtualization, then you can install easily and have intel mother board. You can find out VM image on internet.

2. Install Xcode SDK as development environment so that you can start developing application for Apple platforms. You can develop application for iPhone,iPod,iPad and Mac platform also. It is just like visual studio for apple platforms. It is free of cost even if you dont have Apple developer license.

3. Resources for learning iOS development. Sequence should be first you should learn the language then iOS controls for example, how tableviews, buttons, textfields works, how we can store data in iOS applications etc.

iOS development learning resources

A.Thanks to apple for course CS 193 P Stanford University video lectures which are freely available on Youtube and iTunes.Best thing to start with is watching this Stanford Course video tutorials.

B. First you should learn Objective-C, for learning Objective-C I followed this book.

C. For learning iPhone development, alot of people including me recommends this book Beginning iPhone Development Exploring the iPhone SDK.

D. You can also look at iOS dev centre for different iOS material.

E. Lot of people recommends looking at other developers’ code. So here is link which contains lots of iOS source code. You should look at them and get the idea how to structure you iOS application. How to manage large scale project. What are best strategies while developing iOS products.

F. MIT open source iOS application source code  ”MIT-Mobile-for-iPhone“is really nice. You will learn a lot by looking at this code.

 4. I would recommend that while you are learning either through reading or by watching video lectures you should develop sample applications otherwise you will forget most of things when you develop after watching videos.

5. There are few concepts or controls that you will be using again and again while development that you must learn carefully are listed below.

• Table View
• Navigation Controller
• Tabbar Controller
• Memory management (you should study this in depth)
• Interface builder (You can drag and drop components on nibs (forms) to create GUI)
• Protocols and delegates
• JSON and XML parsing
• Reading and writing to plist
• Core Data for data storage

6.If you want to publish your apps to app store, you have to enroll yourself  in iOS developer program which cost $99 for one year. You can launch as many apps as you want in one year. Next year you have to renew this program.

7.  You can start cloning address book application while learning iOS development. It is also available in iPhone simulator. You can look at it and start cloning it.

8. For learning JSON parsing,  develop application like movie application in which you will use JSON parsing while consuming web services. Follow this link of Rotten tomatoes API.

Good luck everyone !

Let me know your thoughts, comments , suggestions.

]]> http://www.techipost.com/2012/10/17/how-to-become-an-ios-developer/feed/ 4 http://www.techipost.com/2012/10/11/one-pager-wordpress-theme/ http://www.techipost.com/2012/10/11/one-pager-wordpress-theme/#comments Thu, 11 Oct 2012 12:15:09 +0000 Umair Ashraf http://www.techipost.com/?p=1208

I recently developed this one pager business portfolio wordpress theme for Egrappler . Here is the Standardized version of this theme without using any external Option Tree framework. This version is perfect for those user who are getting issues with the  Option Tree version.

Special Features :

• Custom Post Types .
• WordPress Standardized for all versions.
• Excellent jquery sliders
• Easy to configure and install
• Integrated contact form
• Skill measurements

View Demo

Download WordPress friendly version

Brownie is a  clean , beautiful and responsive Premium WordPress theme developed by Umair Ashraf . The template of this theme is designed by  Sarfraz Shaukat  Brownie template .  You can visit his site Egrappler.com for his other valuable and excellent designs and resource.

The most exciting feature of this theme is its  beautiful design which supports cross browser comparability.Its responsive design allows this theme to be easily viewed by all major hand held devices.

Main Features

• Responsive template
• Valid CSS3 & HTML5
• WordPress Standardized
• Easily Customizable

Download Theme

Online Demo

IAmCreative is another simple, clean and responsive HTML5 portfolio WordPress theme developed by Umair Ashraf. It helps you to effectively project your work and it is perfect for any designer, photographer, illustrator, creative person or agency. It focuses on displaying a high quality portfolio, large typo presented in a really elegant way.

Main Features

• Built using HTML5
• Responsive and Adaptive Design
• Working Contact Form
• Intuitive Image Slider and Image Gallery
• Easy to use Option Panel

Installing Creative

Download the theme from the link given below and copy it in to the WordPress themes folder.Finally go to appearance->Themes to activate this theme.

Setting up Creative

Go to pages tab and Add three pages one by one.For each page choose the page template as Main,Contact and Work appropriately.Go to Appearance and Create a menu with three menu items Home,Contact and Work .Assign the three pages to these three menu items one by one.

Download Theme

Online Demo

Demo video

If you have following questions in your mind

1. What is MVC (Model, View, Controller)?
2. What is role of Model, View and Controller?
3. What piece of code I should place in model, what in controller and what in view?
4. DOB that I am getting from server is not according to format that I want to display in view. Where should I place function (method) to format the date controller or view or in model?
5. Is cocoa version of MVC different from traditional MVC?
6. Does NSNotification in cocoa break the MVC architecture?

Then I am writing this post to help you out to understand the MVC and I will try to answer all above questions in my post.

What is Design Pattern?

A general reusable solution to recurring problem is called design pattern. There are many design patterns for example Factory pattern, Proxy pattern, Façade pattern and also MVC.

MVC Design Pattern?

 First of all I will start with basics of each component of MVC (Model, View, Controller) one by one and then I will jump to Objective-C code example, through which I will show how to implement MVC in iOS application.

MVC design pattern makes your code more reusable and extendable. If you want to make change in your code on new requirement, you can change it easily.

Brief overview of MVC

You click on a button on the view in iPhone or iPad (View) to display person information; it is delegated to controller against that button action which gets called when button is pressed (Controller). Controller then calls model to return person info object, so that controller can give this data to view to display it.  Now this call to fetch data, fill object and returning that filled object or any value is part of model object (Model).

MVC Roles

Model, view, and controller are three different roles that objects can play in an application.

View

View should be only responsible for displaying data. What can be part of view? For example, if you make a view without nib then your label, buttons, textfields can be part of it. I will show example through code, which will clear the concept. View should not store data but it can cache some data for performance optimization reasons.

Objects in the ‘view’ role make up the application’s interface to the outside world. The user interacts with view objects. View objects know how to display information and collect user input, but they don’t make any decisions about what to do with the data.

We normally create view components alloc/init them, set their frames and add them as subviews in view.

Controller

You press a button from view; against that touch there is function that gets called. That function is part of controller. This function can call model to respond back to this call. Controller can communicate to both model and view because it has references to both of them.

Sometimes view can ask for information which view wants to display or sometimes view gives command to store new value in model for example when user enters new values and we press update button. These calls are delegated to controller and controller sends them to model. Model responds back to controller and controller then give data to view to update it.

Controller sits between model and view. If an app needs to display some data, the controller retrieves the data from the model object(s) and gives it to view objects to display. When the user causes some action to happen (say, they press a button), the controller decides how to respond.

You can apply formatter and any kinds of checks here. For example, you are fetching date and it is not according to format that you want. Then you change format in controller before sending to view.

Model

Model objects are those store data and, often logic (operations/ functions) that relates the different pieces of data to each other. For example, if I am fetching data from core data table from employee table then I will create a model object employee with all properties that can. Any data that is stored persistently in application is normally part of Model. In ideal MVC, there is not any kind of contact between model and view.

Is cocoa version of MVC different from traditional MVC? Yes. It is bit different. Because in traditional MVC model, model can communicate with views or view can communicate with model but in COCOA MVC this does not happen. Model and View interacts with each other through controller.

cocoa MVC

Now if we look at traditional MVC

Traditional MVC

Final OutPut :

 Note: Above are the basic concepts that you should refresh before looking into source code. I will soon upload video which will explain the code.

Download Source Code

Today i am starting a new series of posts related to code snippets on my blog and i would like to share some interesting and very useful WordPress code snippets in today’s post. You will certainly find these code snippets useful during WordPress theme development.

 1.Getting Menu items

The following code snippet will help you to get Menu items one by one.It allows you  to perform filtering and styling on each item.

$menuname='Main Menu';

$menu = wp_get_nav_menu_items($menuname);
foreach($menu as $item)
{

echo ''.$item->title.''; 
}

2.Custom Paging Based on Taxonomy

You can use the following code to implement your own custom paging of posts based on taxonomy types.It will even help you to just implement your own custom paging for WordPress Custom post types.

$menuname='Main Menu';

query_vars['paged'])) ? 3 : $wp_query->query_vars['paged'];
$var=$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; $pieces = explode("/", $var); $paged=$pieces[count($pieces)-2]; 

query_posts(array(
'post_type' => 'blog', // can be custom post type
'paged' => $paged, // set the current page
'posts_per_page' => 5,
'taxonomy'=>'blog-categories',
'term'=>$_GET['cat']

));

function pagination($prev = '«', $next = '»') {
    global $wp_query, $wp_rewrite;
    $wp_query->query_vars['paged'] > 1 ? $current = $wp_query->query_vars['paged'] : $current = 1;
    $pagination = array(
        'base' => @add_query_arg('paged','%#%'),
        'format' => '',
        'total' => $wp_query->max_num_pages,
        'current' => $current,
        'prev_text' => __($prev),
        'next_text' => __($next),
        'type' => 'plain'
);
    if( $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() )
        $pagination['base'] = user_trailingslashit( trailingslashit( remove_query_arg( 's', get_pagenum_link( 1 ) ) ) . 'page/%#%/', 'paged' );

    if( !empty($wp_query->query_vars['s']) )
        $pagination['add_args'] = array( 's' => get_query_var( 's' ) );

    echo paginate_links( $pagination );
};

?>

3.Display Latest Custom Post Only

The following code can be used to display the latest custom post type only. You can tweak this code to display one ,two or more than two custom post types.

 1, 'post_type'=> 'introductions', 'order' => 'DESC' ,'orderby'=> 'post_date' );
					$postslist = get_posts($args);
					foreach ($postslist as $post) :
						setup_postdata($post);
					?>
  

4.Change Login and Admin page Logo

You can copy and paste the following code in functions.php file inside your theme folder to change logo of Login and Admin page

add_action('admin_head', 'my_custom_logo');
function my_custom_logo() {
echo '';

}

function my_login_logo() {
 echo '';
}

add_action('login_head', 'my_login_logo');

5.Display Archives

You can display archive of your posts by just putting the following code in your desired page.

', '

‘); ?> /* you can change the parameter to get monthy,quarterly or yearly archives */

6.Display Facebook Like Box

You can go to the following page to generate code of your facebook page like box.
Source

7.Showing Popular Posts in your page

You can use the following code to Show popular posts with thumbnails in your page.

have_posts()) : $my_q->the_post(); ?>
• Posted on with

Source

9.Display Random Posts

You can use the following code to display random posts in your page.

 

$rand_posts = get_posts(‘numberposts=5&orderby=rand’);
foreach( $rand_posts as $post ) :
?>

9.Adding Option Panel for your WordPress Theme

You can easily add and use Option panel to your WordPress theme.OptionTree is a free plugin that allows you to add and use different option panels in your page. You can refer to my following post to configure option tree easily.
Source

10.Embed a page inside a page

You can use the following to code to embed a page inside a page.

have_posts()) : $post->the_post();?>

OptionTree is one of the best available option panel for WordPress and is also used in most of Premium WordPress themes.With its wonderful user interface and special features including Drag Drop and Order Items makes it a versatile  theme options UI builder.You can install it as a plugin but this tutorial will help you to integrate it in your  WordPress Theme without having to download and activate it via plugin page.The tutorial also covers how to make option pages through code instead of using UI builder page provided by the plugin.

So Here are the steps

Step 1

Download and extract the plugin zipped file into the theme folder.e.g if your theme folder name is onepager then there will be a folder name option-tree inside it.

Step 2

Cope and paste the following code into functions.php

/**
 * Optional: set 'ot_show_pages' filter to false.
 * This will hide the settings & documentation pages.
 */
add_filter( 'ot_show_pages', '__return_false' );

/**
 * Required: set 'ot_theme_mode' filter to true.
 */
add_filter( 'ot_theme_mode', '__return_true' );

/**
 * Required: include OptionTree.
 */
include_once( 'option-tree/ot-loader.php' );
/**
 * Theme Options
 */
include_once( 'includes/theme-options.php' );

Step 3

Go to option-tree folder inside theme folder and open the ot-loader.php file.Search the following line of code and set the ot_theme_mode value to true

 

define( 'OT_THEME_MODE', apply_filters( 'ot_theme_mode', true ) );

Step 4

Create a folder named ‘includes’ inside theme folder and create a file name theme-options.php inside it and copy the code from  theme-options inside it. This is the where you will write code to add different pages and menu for your option tree panel.

Optional :

Download Integrated option tree Sample theme from  here

NeoArts  is another word press theme developed by Umair Ashraf .This is the inspiration of the popular (NeoArts Theme) freebie. Its free to download

Special Features :

• Integrated Optiontree administrative panel
• Animated main navigation of website on accordion style
• Full Size Dynamic Page Background
• Image Gallery/Slide Show (2 styles)
• Scrollable Content Placeholders
• Multi-column Content Layout
• Contact Form
• Animated Effects using CSS (no Flash required)
• Browser Compatibility (all modern browsers)
• SEO-friendly Content Design

Demo 

Download Theme