Perform Basic Web Tasks And Interact With RESTful Services
Found this great guide to performing some basic web tasks such as submitting forms, uploading files, and interacting with RESTful services.
The tutorial is from Core Animation book co-writer Matt Long, and can be found here: Accessing The Cloud From Cocoa Touch
In the tutorial Matt goes through using the Cocoa libraries to perform basic web tasks, and also talks a little bit about the excellent ASIHTTPrequest library. He also goes through some principles that you will want to follow when creating RESTful web services. This is a great read on the absolute basics of interacting with the web using Cocoa.
Please post any comments below, thanks.
Getting Subclasses in Objective-C
One of the things that makes the Objective-C language “different” from most other object oriented programming languages is that there is no simple command that allows you to print the subclasses of a class. I noticed this early on when using the language, and had to work around this. I don’t know why Objective-C doesn’t have a simple command for doing this (to be honest I never thought about it until this moment), but recently I saw an article on exactly this, and found a few ways to print out those subclasses.
The article I saw was on Cocoa With Love, and entitled Getting Subclasses of Objective-C Class that explains Matt Gallagher’s approach to getting the subclasses. Overall this isn’t the most complex task in the world, but as he explains there are considerations to be made as to why you would choose his first approach over the obvious “hackers” approach which he also explains.
It’s a great read if you ever need subclasses, but as said in this Stackoverflow discussion on getting subclasses you may want to change things up if you are in need of this functionality.
PR: My Top 10 Favorite iPhone Developer Blogs
I’m often asked how I keep up with all the new API’s available for an iPhone developer at each OS patch, and really the secret is just keeping up with some blogs. I use Google Reader, place the blogs in there, and skim over them. There’s alot of great blogs out there, these are the 10 that I currently keep in my Google Reader. You’ll go nuts trying to keep up with everything, I tried for awhile, but now I find I can get up to speed just with these resources.
iCodeBlog – Tremendous source of iPhone tutorials types. These guys have been coming out with tutorials since the very beginning, and they’ve got all sorts of Cocoa Touch tutorials here on popular topics like games, and twitter clients.
Cocoa With Love – An excellent Cocoa blog that also has severly terrific iPhone specific posts. This site occasionally gets into more advanced topics, and is an extremely high quality blog that has been around forever.
Jeff Lamarche’s Blog – A lot of great tutorials here from one of the co-authors of Beginning iPhone 3 Development. Use the search to get to the meat as there’s just so much here.
How To Make An iPhone App – Probably the best written iPhone specific blog out there, hasn’t t really gotten into advanced topics, but is updated frequently. Excellent for the beginner and created by the writer of How To Make an iPhone App downloadable ebook.
iPhone Development Bits – These guys go out and find the best iPhone development articles out there to put on their page. There’s lots of good resources to be found through here.
Cocos2D iPhone – Official Blog for the Cocos2D iPhone open source game engine, and future home of the programming guide (currently being written). If you’re interested in getting started with games on the iPhone this is a must bookmark.
Cocoa Is My Girlfriend – Cocoa is my girlfriend has been writing about Cocoa development for an extremely long time, and includes a large number of tutorials on Cocoa topics, although not specifically iPhone there is a lot of useful stuff here.
iPhone Incubator – Some excellent tutorials and tip for iPhone developers here. Assorted beginner->intermediate topics.
Adeem Basraa’s Blog – Some pretty good beginner focused tutorials out here.
Mobile Orchard – Has some good tutorials. They are somewhat hidden, and you’ll need to search to find them.
That’s it for my top 10 favorite iPhone developer blogs. If there’s any great, and active, ones out there that I’ve missed please mention them below.
iPhone Objective-C Programming NSTimer
In the course of your iPhone Objective-C programming you will likely have the need for an NSTimer at some point so it’s good to have an understanding of how they work.
I found this good example here on timers: NSTimer the Poor Man’s Threading Code Snapshot
While it’s foolishly titled a Poor Man’s Threading which may give you the impression that timer and thread are synonymous it shows a nice flashy example of NSTimer’s in action. If you’re looking for the Cocoa threading class you will want to look up NSThread which I will be featuring in an upcoming tutorial.
Something to take note of with timers is that they can be highly inaccurate so if you end up having multiple timers firing in sequence you may want to check the time index and adjust the length of your timer approperiately to produce more consistent results.
Check it out, and if you’re having trouble with timer’s you might want to play around with it.
[Source: iCodeBlog]
Online Cocoa/Objective-C Quiz
A fun Online Cocoa/Objective-C quiz for beginners has been put up by Olver Drobnik.
The quiz is called "Are you a Cocoa Crack?" and provides a surprising challenging test for Cocoa programmers. I think it’s a fun little test because it’s very short, and easy, but tests beginners on a few concepts that are easily overlooked.
Make sure you understand your NSStrings, NSIntegers, IBoutlet, and the ternary conditional operator or you could be in for a suprise. If you find the test challenging… well you should probably hit up these Objective-C books.
Check it out here: Are you a Cocoa Crack?
[Source: Dr. Touch]