Category Archive for ‘Recipes’

Sub-Projects in Xcode

Dec 02, 2011

A very interesting yet very undocumented functionality of Xcode is that you can have sub-projects in your project tree. You can add an xcodeproj to your project and link to this project’s output.

This is exceptionally useful if you are developing some functionality in a contained project and now want to access this polished functionality from another project. Like for example you want to add to your app the capability of accepting HTML code copied from Safari and use my DTWebArchive classes for that. You could either copy all classes to your project, build two libraries (one for Simulator and one for Device, or lipo these two together), or build a static universal framework.

Or there is an option number 4 which I want to tell you about in this post. This option does neither copy source code nor does it involve building something upfront.

25 Comments

Submitting Your First Mac App Store App

Oct 31, 2011

I would say I have the process of submitting iOS apps down, I could probably do it blindfolded. Actually I HAVE done it blindfolded on several occasions guiding people over the phone on their very first submission.

But today I am doing it for the first time on an app for the Mac App Store (aka MAS). Let’s see if I can see this through to a successful conclusion, or at least until the ball is out of my court and with the app review team.

6 Comments

Avoiding Image Decompression Sickness

Oct 01, 2011

When starting to work on our iCatalog.framework I stumbled upon an annoying problem, the same that you will face if you ever need to work with large images. “Large” meaning of a resolution sufficient to cover the entire screen of an iPad or potentially double that (horizontally and vertically) when dealing with Retina Resolution on a future iPad.

Imagine you have a UIScrollView that displays UIImageViews for the individual pages of a catalog or magazine style app. As soon as even one pixel of the following page comes on screen you instantiate (or reuse) a UIImageView and pop it into the scroll view’s content area. That works quite well in Simulator, but when you test this on the device you find that every time you try to page to the next page, there is a noticeable delay. This delay results from the fact that images need to be decompressed from their file incarnation to be rendered on screen. Unfortunately UIImage does this decompression at the very latest possible moment, i.e. when it is to be displayed.

Since adding a new view to the view hierarchy has to occur on the main thread, so does the decompression and subsequent rendering of the image on screen. This is where this annoying stutter or pause is stemming from. You can see the same on app store apps where scrolling through something stutters whenever a new image appears on screen.

59 Comments

Taming HTML Parsing with libxml (1)

Sep 18, 2011

For the NSAttributedString+HTML Open Source project I chose to implement parsing of HTML with a set of NSScanner category methods. The resulting code is relatively easy to understand but has a couple of annoying drawbacks. You have to duplicate the NSData and convert it into an NSString effectively doubling the amount of memory needed. Then while parsing I am building an adhoc tree of DTHTMLElement instances adding yet another copy of the document in RAM.

When parsing HTML – and by extension XML – you have two kinds of operating mode available: you can have the Sequential Access Method (SAX) where walking through the document triggers events on the individual pieces of it. The second method is to build a tree of nodes, a Document Object Model (DOM). NSScanner lends itself to SAX, but in this case it is less than ideal because for CSS inheritance some sort of hierarchy is necessary to walk up on.

In this post we will begin to explore the industry-standard libxml library and see how we can thinly wrap it in Objective-C that it plays nicely with our code.

23 Comments

Calculating Area Covered by Keyboard

Jul 09, 2011

If you show something that contains scrollable content, i.e. UITableView, UIScrollView etc. then you want to make an adjustment when the keyboard shows so that the user can still scroll to the entire content. He wouldn’t be able to do so if you didn’t do anything.

I’ve seen several approaches to this so far, but they often hard code a certain position of the view or sizes. Like assuming that the covered view always reaches towards the bottom of the screen or always has a certain amount of space taken away from it by the status bar, navigation bar and possibly toolbar.

The whole thing gets even more complicated by the fact the the coordinate system of the app’s window is always in portrait even though your app rotates. So is the frame of the keyboard which you can get from an info dictionary in several notifications. I’ll show you the most universally working method I was able to come up with.

8 Comments

How to Simulate Cellular Connections on Your Mac

Jun 16, 2011

If you are making your application real-life-proof you will also have to deal with diminished or dropped connectivity. I already discussed how to detect the kind of connectivity your app is having at present.

But another real-life restriction stems from slower bandwidths available over cellular connections, especially if you have no 3G reception. Even Long of Scribd showed me this trick I am about to explain here. This enables you to artificially create a bottleneck on your connection so that you can test how the app behaves when only cellular bandwidth is available.

This helps you to see if your custom progress bar is showing nicely or possibly if your progressive image is indeed progressive. Also this might reveal synchronous URL loading operations that you should never ever do in production apps.

9 Comments

Free Range

May 31, 2011

You will often find yourself working with NSRange parameters and variables, especially when dealing with strings. I stumbled into a problem that I think is an SDK bug, that prompted me to look at the header and find out what kind of functions are provided to us for comfortably dealing with NSRange.

3 Comments

And Now Lazy Loading with NSURLConnection

May 23, 2011

In my previous post I demonstrated how to quickly whip up some lazy loading for a UIImageView. Today I revamped it to use NSURLConnection instead, because this would allow for cancelling the request. It also gives us the option of specifying if we want to make use of the cache and also how long we’re actually willing to wait for an answer.

That sounds more straightforward than it actually is. If you simply use an NSURLConnection with its delegate methods then you might not see anything wrong, unless you are using this lazy image view as subview of a UIScrollView. The problem there is that the scroll view blocks the run loop and so your connection events will not get delivered until you lift the finger.

But I found a solution for that. Let me know in the comments if you think something could be done in a more elegant way. The code for this is available in the NSAttributedString+HTML project.

5 Comments

A Quick Lazy-Loading UIImageView

May 20, 2011

In case you ever need to enhance UIImageView to load it’s image lazily… like if it’s coming from a web URL.

I used this on my NSAttributedStrings+HTML open source project to improve performance and also be able to have images that are not available locally. But you don’t want to do a synchronous call over the web, that would block your UI.

I admit, it’s a quickie, but hey, sometimes those are also fun!

4 Comments

Functions as Parameters – Old & New

May 19, 2011

This topic is not for the faint of heart because it requires that you permit an additional level of abstraction in your brain to be able to grasp it. Until know all my ivars and properties where either scalar values (like an NSInteger) or pointers to Objective-C instances (like NSString *). But there are cases when you actually want to be able to store more complex functionality yet not have the overhead of object creation and messaging.

From the C days we have a mechanism called “function pointers” and today I’ll show you how you can pass a function itself to an Obj-C class and store it in an instance variable. There are a couple of SDK functions that make use of that.

The we’ll explore the modern-day equivalent of providing this sort of “plug in” dynamic functionality: doing the same thing with blocks. If you’re lucky to have iOS 4.x as minimum requirement for your project then those blocks might be nicer to work with than function pointers.