Category Archive for ‘Recipes’

You probably have seen it hundreds of times, it’s become so natural to you that you probably don’t consciously notice it any more. I’m speaking of the bouncing of icons on the dock in OS X. The method how those pesky little critters (aka “Icons”) try to win your attention. Me! Me! ME!

This animation is probably the one you see the most in your day-to-day business working on code on a Mac. Yet I have never seen anybody using it in an iOS app. Why? It’s not that this animation is the sort of Clippy that everybody hopes to forget about some day. It’s something that well established and we know what it means.

When I asked around (on Twitter) and looked around (on Google) was only found a couple of “spring loaded” formulas, but nothing concrete that would enable me to get this animation added to my app. So I researched it and now I’m happy to present to you … 3 Methods of bouncing.

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I have this idea for an app that I would totally use myself. You know I started XcodeJobs.com and the @XcodeJobs twitter feed to go with it to have a channel to retweet all the iOS-related job offerings that flow before my very eyes. For the site I’ve been talking to people to create a login for themselves and post their jobs self-servingly. For the twitter feed I’ve been using the Twitter search features with a variety of search terms to find tweets where company owners of the developers themselves are tweeting about job postings.

Now the reality of the matter is that most of all Tweets are from recruiters, agencies, job sites and other kinds of services that a self-respecting iOS developer does not want anything to do with. So right now I’m manually filtering tweets. There are a variety of criteria that I want to be able to combine to end up at the real good retweet-worthy tweets.

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When shrink-wrapping your code for later reuse you inadvertenly will come into the situation that you have some resources (strings, XIBs, images et al) in your project that you also want to be reused. So what do you do?

If only we had frameworks on iOS … then we could bundle the resources together with the code in a framework. But Apple does not want us to compile frameworks in Xcode since these could potentially contain code downloaded after the app review process.

Popular projects like ShareKit or the Facebook iOS SDK have approached this dilemma by simply putting all resources into a folder, giving it the “.bundle” extension and instruct users of their SDK to also add this bundle to the “Copy Bundle Resources” step of their respective apps.

In this here blog post I will show you a smarter way.

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I’m working on my own file and image cache that uses CoreData for storage. The same way that NSURLCache is doing it, but with some optimizations that I know and understand. So I created DTDownloadCache and got it all working, but there was one minor thing that I didn’t like: The usual method of creating a CoreData entity model is by the entity editor built into Xcode.

This meant that I had to include the .datamodeld file in apps using this. But I didn’t want to have to create a resource bundle just for this single file as you would have to do if you keep your reusable code in static libraries. Ugh!

Fortunately there is a way how you can create a static model entirely in code so that you can make use of CoreData without having to ship an XML description of the model.

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The experts are still out as to the motivations behind Facebook’s iOS SDK strategy. But it is rather clear that if Facebook has their way then everybody is to be using their Single Sign-On (SSO) technique. Besides all potential advantages of having this SSO in place it has to leave your app for signing on.

Not exactly something that is useful for all use cases. We have one case (involving ShareKit) which works better with the old style of signing into Facebook. This “traditional approach” shows the login dialog in a web pop up instead of leaving the app.

In this post I’m sharing the 3 methods how to hack the Facebook class and bend it to our will.

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For a project that I am currently working on I needed to implement a custom container view controller. I was feeling my way forward in the dark for the most part because this does not seem to be a widely used technique. Developers – understandably – favor reusing and skinning existing view controllers over creating new containers.

However there are some scenarios where you should prefer to make your own container because it greatly simplifies your code over trying to bend a UINavigationController or UITabBarController to your will. Do you remember the times when those two where the only two containers available?

I distinctly remember using a UINavigationController with hidden nav bar as a view controller to contain multiple full views. And you probably had do do your own view juggling and animations because for the most part the standard transitions would be useless. Fortunately we can no file this as a fond memory of the past and move on to implementing our own containers.

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Inspired by the Gmail Tap April Fools joke by Google I felt inspired to program the same thing for iOS. There we have custom input views as well as the UIKeyInput protocol and so I figured it should be an easy undertaking.

The whole affair took slightly more than one hour and I was hoping to record it in 1 second intervals with ScreenNinja. Unfortunately it seems that this otherwise fabulous app crapped out on me. I later discovered that the MOV file had actually finished before the crash, so to my delight (and hopefully yours too) you can follow this tutorial on YouTube.

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The file systems of iOS and Mac both use HFS+ as file system, with only one small difference. iOS uses case-sensitive file names, Mac doesn’t by default. Both have a feature called “Extended File Attributes” that allow you to set custom values by key.

Apple generally ignored this functionality and it was only briefly – in 5.0.1 – that they actually used an extended attributed for something. The “com.apple.MobileBackup” extended attribute served as a stop-gap-measure to mark files that should not be backed up. Though this was very short lived.

I was facing the problem myself that I needed to save the ETag for an image that I downloaded from the web somewhere. And I wanted to do that elegantly, somehow together with the file itself and in a way that would simply work.

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On my iCatalog project I have more than 40 targets (FOURTY!), all with individual info.plist. Let me share a quick command line script that lets me simultaneously bump the software version to a different value for all targets at the same time. This has proven extremely helpful.

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