What we didn’t get from iPhone OS 4

The new SDK 3.1.2, which now includes Xcode 3.2.1, is available in versions that are compatible with Leopard and Snow Leopard for iPhone and iPod Touch developers.

The update contains general bug fixes for the SDK and Xcode. Dashcode is reported to now support the creation of Web applications that are optimized for Safari on the iPhone, PC, and Mac.

If you’ve used this new update, please tell us about your experiences with it in the comments.

Titanium Developer Meet, Bangalore

The first Titanium User Group meeting took place in Bangalore on 4th September 2009. The event was organized by Mohammad Khan (The guy in the blue T-Shirt in the snap)and others Of Esberi. The event started at 6:00PM and close to 15 people attended the event. It all began with an introduction to Titanium SDK and how to use the Titanium Developer tool to create applications for both iPhone and Android mobile platform. Since I already had played around using Titanium Developer tool, most of the stuff I heard there about using the tool was already known.

The meet was useful in that I got to learn what are the features and API’s provided by Titanium SDK to write applications for mobile. Some of the code samples shown at the meet were encouraging and I would say the code would be familiar to a person who had already worked on say Adobe Flex. Even for beginners, it’s not so tough to learn it.

There was an application demo by Chinmay, college graduate who had built an application using Titanium Developer tool for both iPhone and Android mobile. The application was basically interacting with a social networking website called brightkite (http://brightkite.com/) The application looked pretty good both in terms of its UI design and functionality. It showcased how users can use the GPS data from iPhone and Android mobiles to interact with BrightKite social networking website. Chinmay also explained us the problems that he faced developing his application and how he over came it to win an honour from Appcelerator. Congrats Chinmay for the award..!

Over all it was a great learning experience and got to meet lots of new people especially Mohammad Khan. Wish to see more of the user group meeting in the coming days.

“Code Strong” with Titanium Developer tool

About Titanium Mobile

You Can Build a Native App for That

With Titanium, you get native access to device features like geo-location, local file system / database, photos, and touch / accelerometer controls. Your apps look great because they use native UI elements, styling, transitions, and they run great because we compile Titanium to native code for peak performance.

At Web Dev Speed

Your friends may talk about ‘provisioning this’ and ‘memory allocation that’ but meanwhile you’ve got 5 apps in the store to their 1. That’s because you’re building in Javascript, HTML, and CSS, so you’re running circles around the competition.

Delivered Across Two Platforms

The last thing you want worry about is cross-platform compatibility. That’s why we give you one platform for developing both iPhone and Android apps. The Titanium framework shares common APIs across devices and provides extensibility for each device’s unique capabilities.

More details at:   http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile/

- (BOOL)textField: (UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange: (NSRange)range replacementString: (NSString *)string

to set the maximum character length.

This can be done by doing the following:

#define MAX_LENGTH 10

- (BOOL)textField: (UITextField *)textField shouldChangeCharactersInRange: (NSRange)range replacementString: (NSString *)string
{
    if (textField.text.length >= MAX_LENGTH && range.length == 0)
    {
        return NO; 
    }
    else
    {
        return YES;
    }
}

UIView *myView = [[UIView alloc] init];
myView.layer.zPosition = X;

For now I am setting GDATA_SKIP_LOG_XMLFORMAT = 1 for my project to compile without any error.

NSTask Missing In iPhone OS 3.0

UIPrerenderedIcon

If you would like to render your iPhone application icon without any sheen and bevel effects added by iPhone OS, then add the boolean value

UIPrerenderedIcon=YES

in your application’s info.plist. Adding this key will instruct iPhone OS not to add the additonal effect around the icon and leave it as it is. On the left is a screenshot of one of the application’s – BubbleWrap(marked in red square)available on the Apple App store which use UIPrerenderedIcon= YES.

 <key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key>
 <true/>

myApplication.networkActivityIndicatorVisible = YES;

Network Activity Indicator

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-sdk-programming-book-code-samples/

I have pasted the extract of it here for a quick reference…

iPhone SDK

iPhone SDK Programming: Developing Mobile Applications for Apple iPhone and iPod touch, Maher Ali.

Paperback: 416 pages Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (March 30, 2009) Language: English ISBN-10: 0470742828 ISBN-13: 978-0470742822

Product Description With iPhone SDK Programming, developers have the expert guidance they need to begin building native applications for Apple’s new iPhone 3G as well as the iPod touch. Inside, veteran mobile developer and Bell Labs scientist Maher Ali begins with a foundational introduction to Objective C and Cocoa programming, and then guides readers through the building programs with Apple’s iPhone SDK.

iPhone SDK Programming covers a wide range of topics, including:

• The Objective-C programming language
• Collections
• Cocoa Touch
• Building advanced mobile user interfaces
• Core Animation and Quartz 2D
• Model-View-Controller (MVC) designs
• Table Views
• File management
• Parsing XML documents using SAX and DOM
• Working with Google Maps API
• Consuming REST Web Services
• Building advanced location-based applications
• Developing database applications using the SQLite engine
• Building Multimedia applications
• Making use of the camera and video
• Working with the accelerometer

TOC: Preface

1 Objective-C and Cocoa

1.1 Classes

1.2 Memory Management

1.3 Protocols

1.4 Properties

1.5 Categories

1.6 Posing

1.7 Exceptions and errors

1.8 Key-Value Coding (KVC)

1.9 Multithreading

1.10 Summary

References

2 Collections

2.1 Arrays

2.2 Sets

2.3 Dictionaries

2.4 Summary

References

3 Anatomy of an iPhone Application

3.1 Hello World Application

3.2 Building the Hello World Application

4 The View

4.1 View Geometry

4.2 The View Hierarchy

4.3 The Multi-Touch Interface

4.4 Animation

4.5 Drawing

5 Controls

5.1 The Foundation of All Controls

5.2 UITextField

5.3 Sliders

5.4 Switches

5.5 Buttons

5.6 Segmented Controls

5.7 Page Controls

5.8 Date Pickers

5.9 Summary

6 View Controllers

6.1 The Simplest View Controller

6.2 Radio Interfaces

6.3 Navigation Controllers

6.4 Modal View Controllers

6.5 Summary

7 Special-Purpose Views

7.1 Picker View

7.2 Progress Views

7.3 Text View

7.4 Alert View

7.5 Action Sheet

7.6 Web View

8 Table View

8.1 Overview

8.2 The Simplest Table View Application

8.3 A Table View With Both Images and Text

8.4 A Table View With Sections Headers and Footers

8.5 A Table View With The Ability to Delete Rows

8.6 A Table View With The Ability to Insert Rows

8.7 Reordering Table Rows

8.8 Presenting Hierarchical Information

8.9 Grouped Table Views

8.10 Indexed Table Views

8.11 Summary

9 File Management

9.1 The Home Directory

9.2 Enumerating A Directory

9.3 Creating and Deleting a Directory

9.4 Creating Files

9.5 Retrieving and Changing Attributes

9.6 Working With Resources and Low-Level File Access

9.7 Summary

10 Working with Databases

10.1 Basic Database Operations

10.2 Processing Row Results

10.3 Prepared Statements

10.4 User-Defined Functions

10.5 Storing Blobs

10.6 Retrieving Blobs

10.7 Summary

References

11 XML Processing

11.1 XML and RSS

11.2 Document Object Model (DOM)

11.3 Simple API for XML (SAX)

11.4 An RSS Reader Application

11.5 Summary

References

12 Location Awareness

12.1 The Core Location Framework

12.2 A Simple Location-Aware Application

12.3 Google Maps API

12.4 A Tracking Application With Maps

12.5 Working With ZIP Codes

12.6 Summary

References

13 Working with Devices

13.1 Working with the Accelerometer

13.2 Audio

13.3 Video

13.4 Device Information

13.5 Taking and Selecting Pictures

13.6 Summary

A Saving and Restoring App State

B Invoking External Applications