Available on the wiki you will find documentation on how to start using the latest 1.6 beta to develop for iPhone, Android, and Palm with the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.  I hope this helps you creating the apps that you want.

I’m still working on getting Blackberry development to work the same way as the others but I’m close to having something that works.

I’m also uploading 1.6 beta6.  It makes some small fixes related to the Images directory in the project.  If you are using beta5 you should upgrade.

So, nkreipke ist in Zukunft wieder privat

Alle neuen Fortschrittsmeldungen über TubeFlect werdet ihr ab sofort unter dem neuen Blog The TubeFlect Project finden.

Eigentlich hab ich WordPress gesagt dass er auf nkreipke einen RSS-Reader in der Sidebar anzeigen soll… er tuts aber nicht. Aber naja, wir wollen die Server ja nicht überanstrengen, bei den WordPress-Servern ist es ja schon ein Wunder wenn ich überhaupt einen Blog sehen kann… und das klappt ja schon ganz gut, meistens jedenfalls.

Jedenfalls gibt es hier wieder nur noch (wie früher in den guten alten Zeiten) die normalen Artikel. Ist eigentlich auch besser, schließlich interessiert sich nicht jeder für die Programmierung. Und die, die es interessiert, abonnieren einfach auch den neuen Blog. Einfach, oder?

After a long pause in my writing these posts, I am back with a goal. I would like to have at least 3 posts a week (thats a 7 day week of course). I currently a college student, working  full time ( 8-5 Mon – Fri) while attempting to learn how to program for the iPhone, Android (thats another story, maybe ill blog that eventually) and general C++. All in all, I am quite busy, BUT, this blog is still a very strong interest of mine. SO, with that said, lets see how it goes!

Moving on, I am currently working on 2 application idea’s, both novelty and not TOO important. However, before I can sell anything, I must submit my banking and ::cringe:: tax information. I glanced at the required info and it actually looked pretty simple, which scares me. Taxes are not simple. With that said, we shall see what happens when I actually begin filling the forms out. I will post a walk through/review of my experience once I am ready. Expect this in a week or so.

Also, feedback would be great! Ask me questions, give info, tell me to go away, I dont care, as long as there is a form of communication! I will answer all questions with a new post, even if it is one question per post. Anyone who would like to share a story or there own advice, email me at iphonedev4me@gmail.com and I will gladly create a new post with credit to you!

On a final note, happy Thanksgiving!

TubeFlect kann ab heute doch tatsächlich schon mal das Grundlegende, was es können muss: YouTube-Videos abspielen. Das soll vorerst nur als Test laufen, weshalb das Layout auch noch nicht perfekt aussieht. Wie es funktioniert: Man nehme einen handelsüblichen YouTube-Link, kopiere ihn in das Textfeld und klickt auf “Load Video”. TubeFlect schnappt sich daraufhin den Flashplayer aus der YouTube-Seite und lädt ihn im Fenster. Das beste daran: Da er die Elemente rund um den Flash-Player nicht laden muss, geht der Ladeprozess schneller als auf konventionelle Methode – ein Pluspunkt für Leute mit schwachen Internetleitungen.

Somit haben wir schon mal einen Grundstein gelegt für eines der Prioritäten von TubeFlect: Das schnelle Laden von Videos. Den Text und vor allen Dingen die Werbung drumherum, die immer zuerst geladen werden, werden jetzt elegant übersprungen.

Zum ersten Mal kann man jetzt schon die Grundidee von TubeFlect sehen: Das Video im Mittelpunkt. Wie gesagt, alles erstmal nur ein Test, das Layout des Videobrowsers gefällt uns auch nicht Zum Screenshot: Die YouTube-Suche funktioniert noch nicht, die Buttons in der Menüleiste auch nicht. Die letzten Probleme mit der Navigationsleiste sind behoben, so wird sie vorerst bleiben. Der Vollbildmodus vom VouTube-Video funktioniert selbstverständlich und auch maximieren kann man die Geschichte schon. Die 4 Favoritenordner hab ich mit dem Plusbutton hinzugefügt, das funktioniert also auch schon gut.

Wir haben heute zusätzlich zum Browser auch unter der Haube ein paar Sachen geändert. Der Quelltext ist insgesamt kleiner geworden, es wird nicht mehr durch unnötige Variablen Speicher verbraucht. Auf dem Screenshot seht ihr übrigens FileMerger, ein Hilfsprogramm mit dem man 2 Dateien miteinander vergleichen kann. Rechts ist die alte Version des FolderListControllers, links die neue Version.

Zum Schluss noch 2 Sachen: Erstens sieht man, dass wir wirklich nur träge weiterkommen. Das liegt daran, dass wir täglich wegen dem Schulstress momentan nur maximal 2 Stunden pro Tag Zeit für TubeFlect haben. Außerdem bin ich noch nicht gerade der Profi in Sachen Cocoa-Programmierung und Obi versteht nur Bahnhof vom Quelltext

Außerdem möchte ich demnächst einen zweiten Blog eröffnen, der sich nur um TubeFlect kümmert. Ich möchte diesen Blog weiterhin als Privatblog behandeln und nicht mit Changelogs vollstopfen. Ich sage euch bezüglich der Änderung rechtzeitig bescheid.

iPhone Coding – Learning About UIWebViews by Creating a Web Browser | iCodeBlog.

YouTube - XCode Tutorial: Programming A UIWebView.

Wie es der Teufel so wollte, habe ich gemeinsam mit Obi das Grundgerüst von TubeFlect neugeschrieben. Also kompletter Neustart mit neuer, leerer Projektdatei. Durch das Recoding haben wir einige Probleme behoben und solche, die noch kommen sollten, direkt verhindert:

• Alle Controls wurden getaggt und ausreichend mit Identifiers versehen.
• Copy-Paste ist wieder möglich.
• Wir haben direkt mit 2 TableViews angefangen, und so konnten wir das bestehende Problem mit dem Löschen und Editieren der Hauptkategorien beheben.

Ansonsten sind wir eigentlich auf dem Stand von gestern. Dafür gibbet auch noch mal eine größere Auswahl von momentanen Screenshots:

I just got an app rejected from the AppStore, because of the use of a call to a private API. I called “setReuseIdentifier” on an UITableViewCell object. My bad

But how does one make sure that your custom tableview cell, created in IB, actually WILL be reused ? I thought the right way, was to do the above. Not …

If you create a UITableViewCell in code, you’ll normally set an reuseIdentifier :

- (id)initWithStyle:(UITableViewCellStyle)style reuseIdentifier:(NSString *)reuseIdentifier

But what if you’re loading your custom cell from a NIB file ? Then the little simple trick is to fill out “Identifier” field in the “Attributes Inspector” :

This way your can reuse the cell in your tableview, as you normally do by calling :

static NSString *CustomCellIdentifier = @"CurrencyCell";

CurrencyCell *cell = (CurrencyCell *)[tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier: CustomCellIdentifier];

I hope this post will be useful for you and save you some time

130 icons for iPhone applications

Designed and carefully optimized for use on toolbars and tab bars in iPhone apps, they're also perfect for Android apps, websites, t-shirts, tattoos and more.

via Glyphish – Great icons for great iPhone applications.

When ever you create a new file in XCode, you will see the comment block in a file like this:


//
// Object.h
// ObjectSample
//
// Created by Sung Lee on 11/21/09.
// Copyright 2009 __MyCompanyName__. All rights reserved.
//


It would be nice if you could put “Your Company Name” other than __MyCompanyName__. You can do this by typing this code in your terminal app.


defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions '{"ORGANIZATIONNAME" = "Change_this_to_your_name";}'


Now after restarting XCode, you can see your name when add new file in your project.

For those of you not afraid to get your hands dirty with Apple’s XCode, you can use PhoneGap to wrap your website in a iPhone compatible format.

Make Your Site An iPhone App – Webmonkey

You can get most of the benefits of an iPhone application without writing a single line of Objective C. An open source project called PhoneGap lets your wrap your website in iPhone App goodness. And you can even charge for your creation.

I’ve sunk probably 16 hours into this problem, with no results. Today I finally bit the bullet and went to plan-C. Thankfully plan-C worked, plan-D would have involved gasoline, matches, and my MacBook. The problem as best I can explain it is this. It started when I was building a simple domain object, simple properties with an initWithDictionary:(NSDictionary *)dictionary method. I had created the object, wrote the unit test, and ran the test to be sure that my setup worked but my test should fail. Then I implemented the method, and ran my test hoping for a hole-in-one. What I got was about as useful as a hole-in-the-head. The compile failed with a vague error about my .octest bundle being linked to a file that was not available at runtime. I’ve tried everything, cleaning all targets, deleting the build directory, double-checking all of the linked frameworks and paths, and even removing and adding one-by-one my test files. Still no joy. The funny part was that when I changed the active target to my application target, the app would compile fine. To make a 16 hour story short, I created a new project and copied all of my resources and files into the new project. It took about 20 min. and worked great. I’m now ready to continue until the next inexplicable error. Who knew unit testing was this difficult.

This tutorial should explain briefly how to include and use the Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) in a C++ Xcode Project in OSX. Intel has put together an excellent tutorial that explains the basics, but it assumes that you have the libraries already included in your project.

1) Download the source code from a stable TBB release (e.g. tbb22_20090809oss_src.tgz).

2) Unpack it and run “make”.

3) Create a new project in Xcode, e.g. Command Line Tool from type C++ stdc++. The project in this example is called “tbbWorkbench”.

4) Open Finder and copy the tbb folder into your project’s folder:

5) Go back into Xcode and link the libraries “libtbb.dylib” and “libtbbmalloc.dylib” from the tbb22_20090809oss/build/macos_intel64_gcc_cc4.2.1_os10.6.2_release/ folder that is inside your project folder to your target.

6) Add the “Header Search Path” (tbb22_20090809oss/include) and make sure that you always search user paths.

7) Now, add a “New Copy Files Build Phase” where you copy the both TBB .dylib files to your “Products Directory”. This is needed as otherwise the libraries won’t be found during runtime and you’ll face a “Error from Debugger: Cannot access memory at address 0×0″.

8 ) As a final step, you can now e.g. insert the first sample code from the Intel Tutorial and you’re ready to go !

- Christian

I’ve been developing for the iPhone for about a month now, and the differences between Mac and PC are starting to sink in more and more. I’ve had some wonderful ‘eureka’ moments where something just clicked and I realized the Apple way of doing things ™. The most memorable epiphamy came to me during a rather dull meeting, while I was playing with the touchpad of the Macbook Pro that I’m using. For some reason I swiped some dust off the pad with two fingers, and suddenly I noticed the window beginning to scroll. Something clicked in my mind, which resulted in an audible ‘AH!’, after which everyone in the meeting looked in my general direction with looks of surprise on their face. Score one for multitouch. It’s awesome.

This anecdote, however, is by no means related to the title of this post. In fact, it’s rather the opposite of the main feeling I wish to convey. While the Apple way is getting to me, there are still things that don’t make sense to me even if I lived to be a hundred years (which I will). The Interface Builder is one of those things. At first glance it seems completely counter-intuitive, then I spent some time learning it and I thought it was brilliant. Then I actually used it and I realized that it’s pretty much useless. There’s never been a GUI builder that can replace good old-fashioned code, and this one is no exception. Perhaps I was expecting too much though, so I’ve been trying to use it as a supplement to the actual code, trying to design generic UI components that I can re-use later on. Well, no, not really. It doesn’t really let you. If you want to use the interface builder, you’d better damn well define all your UI components inside it, otherwise you’re screwed. Any form of nesting and you’re back to coding it yourself. Oh, and don’t get me started on the mystifying ways of figuring out in which initialization method you’re supposed to link your buttons to your actions…

Pardon me for ranting. I am coming from a windows background, and it’s a background that, remarkably,  I’ve grown to appreciate over time. I’ll move on to the good stuff in a minute, but I’d like to end my rant first with a little code snippet, not of objective-C, but of Java, that demonstrates the incredible versatility and immensely powerful syntax of the language. Here it is:

button.setBackground(Color.red);

Rather anticlimactic, wasn’t it? Does anyone want to guess how to set the background color of a button on the iPhone platform? I’ll let you in on a little secret: you can set a background color, but it doesn’t actually change the color of the button. It just changes the color in the four tiny rounded corners that the button covers. Without going into details about how to actually accomplish this in Objective-C (which involves images and stretchabilities), I’d just like to say that the solution is just plain stupid. It’s another example that shows that Apple is clearly catering to their users, but not to their programmers.

Ok, enough ranting, let’s talk about the good parts. I’ve been developing on the macbook for quite some time now, and it’s a pretty awesome machine. With a few drawbacks though. In particular, I’m not too happy about the keyboard. And the display. And the development software. And the touchpad. And the external mouse. Ok, basically it sucks. I’ll list the stuff here that annoyed me and how I fixed it.

• Japanese keyboard layout –> switched to external US English keyboard: productivity +500%
• Mac function keys that I’m not used to –> switched external keyboard’s control key and windows key function in system config: productivity +400%
• Changed XCode key mappings to correspond to Windows/Eclipse equivalent. Just fixing the Home and End key increased productivity by 6000% (more or less)
• Mouse fix one: added external mouse for extra speed: productivity +10% – no matter how you configure the mac’s mouse settings, the mouse is either too sluggish or apeshit crazy.
• Mouse fix two: using Synergy to use my Windows mouse instead –> productivity increase: 5000%
• Damn glossy screen that reflects the ceiling lights above my desk no matter in which position I put the laptop –> connected to external monitor (with higher resolution): productivity +1000%
• Completely unrelated to all of the above but GOD WHY aren’t there namespaces in Objective-C?!?!

Summarizing what I’ve done, I’ve basically thrown away as much Mac as possible and replaced it with the PC equivalent. You can hate me if you want, but in my professional opinion as a programmer it was just slowing me down. After enduring it for a month I think I have a right to say that. If possible I’d rather ditch the xcode playmobil programming environment too, but the integration with the iPhone is still too convenient to consider such a thing. I wish that Eclipse can somehow support the iPhone, because I think Eclipse is better than xcode in every other way. Well, except memory usage of course. Eclipse has a bit of a fat butt, but it’ll satisfy you in many ways!

Well now, this turned out to be a huge troll. I do feel slightly sorry about that. I’m still learning new stuff about the platform every day, and I’m sure that I’ll become happier and more efficient the more I use it. But just to annoy you guys I will troll a bit more by saying that I get the impression that developing on the mac will be enjoyed the most by people who enjoy getting a fresh cup of coffee after every line of code. There.

Despite this post I am quite happy actually. After setting up the macbook to behave like a PC as much as possible I feel that I’ve got my productivity back. I got a lot of work done today not in the least thanks to the English keyboard and the quicker mouse. There are those days where you just have to keep your down and churn out code as much as you can. It might not be the most exciting aspect of programming, but sometimes it’s necessary. And thanks to the new keyboard, mouse, screen and key mappings I’ve managed to do my job in less time, and in a better mood. Don’t neglect your quality of job-life, guys!

This is the standard of sending email in Objective-C iPhone App.

Use a mailto url + stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding + HTML.

Simple Email without any sentences or any HTML formatting:

NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString;@”mailto:myname@gmail.com?subject=Hello&body=Hi”];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];

Email with HTML formatting:

NSString *emailBody = @”<table>
<tr><td style=’text-align:right’><b>FirstName</b>:</td>
<td>Michael</td></tr><tr>
<td style=’text-align:right’><b>LastName</b>:</td><td>Jackson</td></tr>
<tr><td style=’text-align:right’>
<b>Job<b/>:</td><td>Artist</td></tr></table>”;
NSString *encodedBody =
[emailBody stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSString *urlString =
[NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto:myname@gmail.com?subject=Hello&body=%@", encodedBody];
NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:urlString];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];

iPhone simulator does not have a Mail.app. You can only email url in device. However, you can consider to use compiler statements to create specific simulator/device code. You can use UIAlertView to preview the email string. Consider using UITextView to preview the text and UIWebView to preview HTML in the simulator.

#if TARGETIPHONESIMULATOR
    //compiler specific code
#else
    // device specific code
#endif

When you consider putting url into a string that contains mailto:, you would have to url-encode the string in Objective-C in iphone app.

iPhone Mail app expects & supports HTML in the email body of mailto:. If you use text formats such as /t /r /n, it won’t support text format in the email body.

[NSString stringWithFormat:@"mailto"me@gmail.com?subject=hellow&body=urlencode];

How to url-encode the string
Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/ref_urlencode.asp
1) replace space to %20
2) replace & with %26
3) replace < with %3C
4) replace > with %3E
5) replace ! with %21
6) replace ( with %28
7) replace ) with %29
8 ) replace ; with %3B
9) replace : with %3A
10) replace / with %2F
11) replace = with %3D
12) replace ” with %22
13) . remain the same single dot .
14) – remain the same as single dash -

To display “<” & “>” symbol inside HTML you must use &lt; and &gt;
&lt; => %26lt%3B
&gt; => %26gt%3B

Instruction:
1) url-encode the string
2) escape any entities

Examples
From HTML url:
&lt;http://www.google.com/&gt;
After url-encoding:
%26lt%3Bhttp%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%26gt%3B

From HTML url:
&lt;http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0545010225/karelsofwa-20&gt;
After url-encoding:
%26lt%3Bhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fo%2FASIN%2F0545010225%2Fkarelsofwa-20%26gt%3B

Example of HTML:

Check this out!<br><br>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)
by J. K. Rowling.<br><br>&lt;http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0545010225/
karelsofwa-20&gt;<br><br>… or from your iPhone, &lt;http://
TeleMoose.com/d_0545010225&gt;

becomes….:

Check%20this%20out%21%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3EHarry%20Potter%20and%20the%
20Deathly%20Hallows%20%28Book%207%29%20by%20J.%20K.%20Rowling.%3Cbr%3E
%3Cbr%3E%26lt%3Bhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fo%2FASIN%2F0545010225%
2Fkarelsofwa-20%26gt%3B%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E…%20or%20from%20your%20iPhone
%2C%20%26lt%3Bhttp%3A%2F%2FTeleMoose.com%2Fd_0545010225%26gt%3B

Embedded image is the only way to include image within Mail App inside iPhone App.

No API is allowed to access Mail attachments
Mail URL does not support attachments

Other Email Image Options:
1) Create your build-in SMTP client
2) Send image to a 3rd party server and send the email from web server
3) Save image to Photo library where you can email your photo

Use <b> before and after <img> tag to avoid Gmail or Hotmail to strip your <img> image tag after sending email out from iphone

System/Library/Frameworks/AudioToolbox.framework

via Use Relative Paths When Adding Frameworks | iPhone Development Blog.

isEqualToString: method should be used to compare values of the string objects.

if([myString isEqualToString:@"1"] || [myString isEqualToString:@"2"] || [myString isEqualToString:@"3"])
action = @”showDifferences”;

If you use the == operator on strings, you are comparing the strings’ addresses (allocated memory) rather than the values of the string objects.

if(myString==@”1″ || myString ==@”2″ || myString ==@”3″)
action = @”showDifferences”;

This is a simple approach to draw a UITextView, insert content from a text file within Xcode project, disable editing, and customize font style during loading app.

- (void)viewDidLoad {

[super viewDidLoad];
CGRect viewRect = CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 320.0, 420.0);
myTextView = [[UITextView alloc] initWithFrame:viewRect];
NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *filename = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"sample.txt"];
NSString *filenameString = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:filename];
myTextView.text = filenameString;
myTextView.editable = NO;
myTextView.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentCenter;
UIFont *myFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Helvetica" size:10.0];
// add Font color
myTextView.font = myFont;
[self.view addSubview:myTextView];
}

Method 1:
// Declare URL parameters
NSString *URL = @”http://www.xyz.com/api?”;
NSString *latitudeURL = @”latitude=”;
NSString *longitudeURL = @”&longitude=”;
NSString *altitudeURL = @”&altitude=”;
// Concatenate all the strings
NSString *entireURL = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@%@%@%@%@%@", URL, latitudeURL, latitudeString, longitudeURL, longitudeString, altitudeURL, altitudeString];
NSLog(@”show:%@”, entireURL);

Method 2:

// Shortcut to concatenate all the strings
NSString *apiString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://www.xyz.com/api?latitude=%@&longitude=%@&altitude=%@", latitudeString, longitudeString, altitudeString];
NSLog(@”show:%@”, apiString);