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With Just 3 Lines Of Code Add Twitter/Facebook Into Your iOS App

John — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:09:48 +0000

Social sharing is something that many people look to put into their apps because it increases the chances of an app going viral and getting more sales.

However, with so many features to add — and so little time — it’s often one of those things that ends up being tossed out.

Fortunately for us Nate Weiner has created a slick library that allows you to add in a multitude of social sharing features into an app with just a few lines of code. Check out the video:

The ability to use many different services is included such as Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook, Read It Later and others. You can also share different types of content such as URLs, pictures and files.

Best of all the entire library is open source with an MIT license and easily customizable.

The Github Is Here:
ShareKit Github

Check out the homepage and documentation here:
ShareKit Drop In Share Library

Hope you like it, I’m playing with it right now, and so far it looks exactly as described.

[Source: iOS Dev Goodies]

Btw, if you’ve created an open source library and would like some exposure (along with a backlink) submit information about it here and I’ll be glad to check it out, and put it in front of the 2,000+ daily visitors to this site.

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Easy Guide For Proper Objective-C Memory Management

John — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:49:52 +0000

Memory management can be tricky in Objective-C.

If you don’t follow some solid principles for memory management it’s easy to get lazy, and then you can quickly find yourself getting stuck for hours checking every retain and release statement.

Even worse is if you’re going through someone else’s code, and they messed things up. Going through to fix memory management in someone else’s code can take forever.

A great tool that I’ve found for making this easier is Clang which works well with an interface such as this one: Clang GUI For Mac OS X. You can also use SHIFT-CMD-A (build & analyze) in Xcode to bring up clang alerts. Clang will notify you of any reference count problems, and syntactical mistakes that could lead to messed up memory management. Even with Clang you can still run into problems.

Fortunately, Brent Simmon has written a great easy to follow guide on some simple principles to follow to alleviate memory problems before they start: How I Manage Memory. It’s a good read and will help you to eliminate problems before they start.

[Source: Brent Simmon]
[Via: @rwenderlich]

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How One Developer Went From 40 To 1000 Downloads In A Day

John — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:29:12 +0000

Let’s face it.. getting app downloads is tough. There are over 200,000 apps out there, and it is very easy for an app to fade into obscurity.

Even free apps can suffer from this, you really have to get the word out there, and there are many different approaches.

One approach that has worked for one developer was to take their app, and release the source code. With so many people interested in iPhone development the app was able to go from 40 to about 1000 downloads in a day.

The app is SpaceBubble from Nick Vellios for which the iTunes link can be found here along with the source code.

The source code will be added to the Open Source iPhone App Store Apps listing.

[Source: Vellios.com]

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Creating Custom Shaped UIButtons

John — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:45:55 +0000

Creating custom shaped buttons is something done in many iPhone apps. Often times this is done through using a completely custom button class, however, it can be done through subclassing UIButton allowing for much easier implementation.

Jeff Lamarche illustrates this technique here: Irregularly Shaped UIButtons

Ole Begemann has also created a custom button class which he talks about here: OBShapedButton: Non-rectangular buttons on the iPhone.

[Source: Jeff LaMarche's Blog, Ole Begemann's Blog]

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Great Library For Custom Controls And Easy Memory Management

John — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:23:47 +0000

I’ve found out about a terrific library that allows you to easily implement useful functionality into your apps such as easier memory management, multi-line segmented controls, a special view allowing users to enter ratings, custom progress bars, and many other utility functions with more being added over time.

Check it out here on Github: TouchCustoms

[Via: Under The Bridge]

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Easier Threading With NSOperation For Better Performance

John — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:40:09 +0000

Creating multi-threaded programs is one of the more complex issues for newer programmers. When looking through the app store you can see many apps that freeze or jitter because the developers try to do everything in a single thread.

There is a Cocoa Touch class called NSOperation which makes this much simpler.

A new tutorial has been created called Turbo Charging Your Apps With NSOperation which illustrates some of the details of using the NSOperation classes and provides some iPhone sample code.

Probably the simplest tutorial on this topic is NSOperation and NSQueue, and while the demo runs on Mac, and not iPhone, the tutorial illustrates the principles of NSOperation in a very straightforward manner.

NSOperation is a much easier, higher level method for multi-threading your applications, and while you won’t avoid most of the usual problems that occur from creating threaded applications it is usually much easier to implement an NSOperation than a pthread or NSThread.

[Source: iCodeBlog, Cocoa Is My Girlfriend]

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Save A UIImage Outside Of The Photo Album

John — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:54:26 +0000

In an earlier post I pointed out a tutorial on how to save pictures taken with the camera to a photo album.

John Muchow has written a new tutorial this time showing how to save PNG or JPG images to the documents directory.

This is done by using the UIImageJPEGRepresentation or UIImagePNGRepresentation functions to save the images, and writing to the documents directory.

The full code snippet can be found here: Save UIImage Object As A PNG or JPEG File

If you have a tutorial, or some news that you think would be useful for iPhone developers you can submit it here.

[Source: iPhone Developer Tips]

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iPhone XML Parser Performance Guide

John — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:35:07 +0000

Parsing XML on the iPhone is a somewhat tedious task because the NSXMLDocument class available on the Mac is not available on the iPhone. Fortunately, there are several different iphone XML parsing libraries now available on the iPhone.

There is wide variation in the performance of these XML parsers, fortunately Ray Wenderlich has written an excellent guide comparing the efficiency of these libraries in both time and memory space.

The guide can be found here: How To Choose The Best XML Parser For Your iPhone Project.

Please post whether you would like to see more or less content on this topic, or any other thoughts below.

[Source: Ray Wenderlich]

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UITextField Validation That Also Handles Copy/Paste

John — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:54:19 +0000

A nifty little code snippet has been posted by John Muchow.

What it does, by simply dropping in the given snippet into the delegate for the text field, is apply simple validation using an NSCharacterSet in which you define the unacceptable characters, and apply that on a string using the componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet. A very nice and quick way for doing simple validation, and it will validate characters that you try pasting in the UITextField from the clipboard.

You can check out the code here at: Validate User Inputs In UITextField, With Smarts To Properly Manage Copy and Paste

Please post any comments below, Thanks.

[Source: iPhone Developer Tips]

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2 Approaches To Twitpic Integration

John — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:26:44 +0000

I recently came across a couple of different tutorials on integrating TwitPic into your iPhone apps.

The first tutorial takes the approach of using the ASIHttpRequest library which allows for easier communication with web applications, and the second goes through each step using only Cocoa libraries for those that are looking for those who want to learn how it’s done using Apple’s URL loading system.

The first tutorial can be found here and the second can be found here.

Please post any comments below, thanks.

[Sources: iCodeBlog, Dr.Touch]

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