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August 2, 2010
 

Creating a Universal iOS App Tutorial

Just when I thought I had a somewhat decent grasp on developing and deploying iOS apps Apple came out with the iPad and threw a whole new element in the mix when it comes to developing.  Thankfully, the iPad will allow iPhone apps to run on the device, but the user experience is definitely sub-par.  So what is the best approach to providing an native iPhone app and a native iPad app?  The first option is to duplicate your existing iPhone app code base and modify all your views and some of the controllers to take advantage of the features in the 3.2 SDK.  The problem with that is the massive DUPLICATION of code and to be honest it seems quite lazy.  I have seen lots of examples where developers use the idiom check for which device is being used, as well as, runtime checks for selectors in order to leverage the correct methods/classes for the given device.  While this is certainly a better approach then having two separate code bases with 90% of the same code you now have code that is sprinkled/littered with if/else checks.  Unfortunately, you are once again stuck with code that will be maintainable for long.  After reading the chapter on universal apps from the upcoming book from Pragmatic Programmers, iPad Programming, I found a much better design pattern of splitting out the app into Shared, iPhone and iPad resources, classes and delegates.

As a side note, due to the ever exponential growth of iOS device popularity developers are not going to have the bonus of just jumping straight into writing an app like we did when there was just the iPhone.  A lot more thought needs to be given to design patterns (especially regards to the quality of your MVC) and application flow.

In order to make life a little easier on myself since a few universal apps are coming in my near future I decided to create a basic "template" for a universal app.

Features
  • Compiled for 3.2 and 4.0
  • Utilizes navigation controller based app for iPhone device and SplitViewController for iPad
  • Shared "model" class and controller classes
  • Separate resources (classes/xibs) for the different devices

Comments and improvements are ALWAYS welcome.  One improvement that I know I want to make is having the "detail" controller from the SplitViewController to be a UINavigationController.

                 
Click here to download:
Creating_a_Universal_iOS_App_T.zip (1274 KB)

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Filed under  //   example   ios   ios4   ipad   iphone   tutorial   uinavigationcontroller   uisplitviewcontroller  

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June 19, 2010
 

How to Create SMS Ballon iPhone Table View

I was working on incorporating an "sms ballon" type view for a client and while doing some research on the best, and different, ways to implement the functionality I came across a great tutorial, but thought it could be cleaned up just a little bit which should make your FPS increase and I fixed some memory leaks.  I wasn't able to run any performance tests on it so I would welcome ANY feedback how to improve the code.

The key to making the "ballon" background grow and shrink based upon the amount of text is using:

UIImage *balloon = [[UIImage imageNamed:self.imgName] stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:24 topCapHeight:15];

If someone has any advice on how to make the font look better please let me know.

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Filed under  //   example   iphone   sms ballon   tutorial   uitableview  

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February 26, 2010
 

Displaying Data on the iPhone with Index UITableView

It is forgone conclusion that if you need to present a large amount of data with a UITableView then you should do so using an index and index sections.  As with most tutorials that I have read on this topic, the scenarios used got me 80% of the way.  In my humble opinion, the solutions where either over engineered or they didn't apply to my use case.  Hopefully this tutorial/sample project will bridge the gap.

The tutorial that I got the most from is: iPhone Development: Creating Native Contacts like screen.

One of the biggest hurdles that I had to over come, that was different from the contacts tutorial, was that I wasn't using a database and therefore didn't have a predefined sub-result set for each character.  I was having to do the opposite.  I had to iterate over my result set, array of states, grab the first letter from each item, check to see if there was already a dictionary key that existed for that letter and proceed accordingly.

Logic Flow
Iterate over states
Get the first letter of that particular state
Check to see if there is a key in the objectsForCharacter dictionary
   - YES: add the state string to the arrayOfNames array and then set the arrayOfNames to the objectsForCharacter dictionary for the appropriate key
  -  NO: remove all objects from the arrayOfNames array and add the firstLetter to the arrayOfCharacters.  Then proceed on to the above "YES" steps
Once all the states have been "proceed" then reload the table data

Final Model
Though it sounds some what complicated with all the arrays, dictionarys, etc. once you break it down to a visual model then the code is easier to comprehend.

[[objectsForCharacters objectForKey:@"A"] objectAtIndex:0]; // Alabama
[[objectsForCharacters objectForKey:@"A"] objectAtIndex:1]; // Alaska
[[objectsForCharacters objectForKey:@"A"] objectAtIndex:2]; // Arizona
[[objectsForCharacters objectForKey:@"A"] objectAtIndex:3]; // Arkansas

Download Example Project (comments/enhancements are welcomed)
IndexedTable.zip

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Filed under  //   example   iphone   tutorial   uitableview  

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