- prepareToRecord was the method that was failing
- AVAudioRecorder initialization wasn't throwing any errors
Back in April I wrote a blog post discussing my concept of having a dynamic site using the Zend Framework. In addition, I posted an some example code of how everything works. I am a firm believer that one should practice what they preach and two different sites are now in production using the framework that I wrote and so far it works beautifully. I had to make a few changes to the route to allow for module exceptions.
Towards the end of the project there was a request to have a search functionality and also custom forms. Normally this wouldn't be an issue what so ever, but the way that the custom route is setup all requests are send to the default module/index controller/index action. I modified the route to ignore any request that started with search or forms and route those requests to the search or forms module. The regex is easily modified to allow for other exceptions. Custom Regex:I also setup the ability to add in meta keywords and meta description tags in the content.xml file. Finally, both sites use the EXACT same doc root and dynamic site framework. Since both sites use the same layouts, just different menus and different background images, I didn't want to duplicate a lot of code. So in the setup page display plugin I am able to transverse the content mapping file based upon not only the request, but the url host name to display the proper layout.
When presenting an app to user with a large list of information, most developers will add in the ability to search the list inside of the table view. To further increase usability it is a good practice to include different filters. For example, a scope button that allows the user to filter by name, address, phone number, etc. Implementing these features is pretty straight forward. However, one of the filter options that was needed for a particular app that I am working on was to filter by department.
The complexity to this problem came in the fact that the search term couldn't be the department name, but the code. Obviously, most users don't know the corresponding codes for a given department. So I needed a way to present a list of "friendly" department names to the user to pick from, and once a given department was chosen then the corresponding department code would be populate the search bar field. The first attempt was to use a UIPickerView. Unfortunately, this wasn't the best solution mainly because you can't use key/value pairs with the UIPickerView. Well...not in a very straight forward manner. My second solution attempt was to use a modalViewController and then pass the selected object back to the parent controller. Everything worked out just fine, but the parent object property wasn't being updated. To solve this problem there are a couple of schools of thought.- Set the parent controller as the delegate and setup a new protocol that the child controller implements.
- Use the NSNotificationCenter which uses the Observer Pattern to update another object based upon some action/method.
Most of the time I would say that the second option is overkill since it is designed for a one-to-many object broadcasts, but in this use case it is the preferred approach because "you would otherwise have to pass instances around of delegates just to connect objects". - http://alexvollmer.com/index.php/2009/06/24/cocoas-ways-of-talking/
After a user selects the appropriate department, the child controller is dismissed and the search bar text is updated with appropriate department code.
I read a very interesting article yesterday that ranked the usability between Apple's website and Microsoft's website. Granted, I am a little biased toward Apple, but I do feel that the author did a great job in their comparison. *spoiler: Apple won. To add to the critique the Microsoft website does something that is a HUGE pet peeve of mine.
If a company claims to be in the "web" business then they need to create websites that look the same in all browsers. Microsoft has a HORRIBLE reputation on releasing browsers that are not standards compliant, but are constantly giving non-IE users who visit their websites a second rate experience. Case in point...their own website. If you go their website with anything other than Internet Explorer, the visitor is presented with this ANNOYING alert in the upper left hand corner that is asks if you want to "Upgrade your Internet experience". After few seconds it does minimize, but if you don't click the "Don't show me this EVER again link" the next page you navigate to will show it. The fact is that I do want to upgrade my internet experience, but not by installing Silverlight, or IE7 or IE8 for that matter. All of the before mentioned pieces of software are horrible, lack innovation, and do nothing but dumb down the web. I want to upgrade my internet experience by not being harassed by Microsoft.Adding followers to a user one at a time is sometimes a VERY lengthy process. Last night the question was posed to me if there was a way to automate adding followers from users who follow someone else.
Example scenario:John Doe follows Jane Doe
John Doe wants to follow at 600 followers of Jane DoeUnfortunately, the Zend_Service_Twitter class doesn't offer any functionality to retrieve a list of followers from another user, but I was able to extend the class and add the functionality. The particular user that I chose to test has roughly 6,000 users. My client didn't want all 6,000, but the first 200. Within 10 minutes the new custom class was written, the script ran, and now my client was now following 200 new people of like mind. :) I plan on submitting the feature request to the Zend Framework gurus to have the ability to find followers from other users so that it can be apart of the main service.Until then here is the class and script: