Archive for April, 2010
Finding Apps
Blinders on a horse keep distractions at bay and help the horse to focus on the direction of movement. Blinders on an app developer, however, aren’t such a good idea.
As an app developer, I want to monitor many sources of information that’ll help me as a developer. Staying hunkered down in my home office as I pound out code might get me some success. If I know what’s going on in the iPhone world around me, however, I’ll be able to direct my energies better. That’ll probably lead to more success. I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds by both other iPhone developers and also by iPhone news sites. I like to know what developers are thinking, and I like to know what users are thinking. Plus the coding tips I get from developers are great. One of my favourite developer blogs is iPhone Development.
There was a hole in my vision, though, that I only recently filled. Even though I subscribed to news sites, I still wasn’t getting a taste for the apps out there. I used the apps I had, and only rarely did I find new ones. This had to change. So I got myself an iPhone app called Chomp. It puts a set of apps in front of your face to review, and you can review, ignore them, or dismiss them forever (among other things). While I do review apps every once in a while, I mainly use this app just to see what’s out there. I quickly look at each app and usually I dismiss it forever. Sometimes I bookmark it and sometime I get it. It’s nice that the app has a feature to get the app right then. I’ve found several apps I like using Chomp, and when I get a spare minute or two in the day, I often boot up Chomp and go through a couple dozen apps quickly. The Chomp interface is good for that. While Chomp does allow you to select a category of apps to review, I also wish I could select a category of apps not to review. I’d like to be able to look at all app types except games. I don’t really care about iPhone games.
Custom Button in NavBar
Just a quick snippet of code for you guys today.
Ever wanted to know how to put a custom image into the navigation bar? It’s actually pretty easy. Create a UIButton object, and stick that into the UIBarButtonItem object. The trick is to remember to set the size:
UIButton *add = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeCustom];
image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"button_plus.png"];
[add setImage:image forState:UIControlStateNormal];
image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"button_plus_selected.png"];
[add setImage:image forState:UIControlStateSelected];
add.bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, image.size.width, image.size.height);
[add addTarget:self action:@selector(onAdd) forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside];
addButton = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithCustomView:add];
self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = addButton;
And Bob’s your uncle!
iPhone QRCode Integration
For one of my jobs I had to integrate QRCodes into the app. A QRCode is a 2 dimensional barcode, like you see here:
There are several ways of generating QRCodes online, including this one for generating MeCards, and this one for generating text, URL, SMS, and phone number ones.
Integrating QRCodes into an iPhone app is pretty easy, because there’s already an open source project that does it. It’s called ZXing (or Zebra Crossing).. It’s cross platform and includes Android and other versions too. We just need to concern ourselves with the iPhone version.
Included in the project is a bunch of actions too, depending on what is encoded in the QRCode. It’ll attempt to parse the code and generate an email address or a MeCard or one of several others things as well. All the action happens in the DecoderViewController class, and presentResultForString is the method you want to look at to see what it does with the results of the image scan.
You can actually use your iPhone to take snapshots of QRCodes right from your computer’s monitor. I’ve used this method to test my app, but frankly it’s not always reliable. As well, it works a lot better with the 3GS camera than the 3G camera, because it’s just better. 
iPad Killer App
Many platforms only start to become really popular and gain traction when it gets a killer app. An app that is so compelling, it is worth investing in the platform just in order to be able to use that app. A killer app can also be an app that takes an existing platform to a whole new level, like what Grand Theft Auto did for the PlayStation 2. A boatload of PS2′s were sold just to play GTA.
I’ve been playing around with the iPad for a couple days now, and I really miss my apps. There is no Read It Later, no Reeder, and no Tweetie. So I still found myself pulling out my iPhone for many things, while the iPad was more of a novelty to play with every once in a while.
Not anymore! I think I found my iPad killer app. YouTube! Disappointed, aren’t you? You thought I was going to reveal some hidden gem that nobody knew about, right? Well, just hear me out.
Watching YouTube on my iPhone is alright, but everything is SO SMALL. Watching YouTube on my computer is great, but then I had to lug out my computer just to watch a small little video. Using a laptop to watch a video is alright, but you can’t curl up with a laptop.
The iPad, on the other hand, lets me curl up in a stuffy chair or lounge on my leather couch. I call up my subscriptions and check out any new videos that come up, and the videos look big because I’m holding the screen right there in my hands. Plenty big! It’s just a pleasant experience, and I’ve found my new YouTube watching methodology.
If you have an iPad, and haven’t used YouTube much, check it out. If you don’t have an iPad, well that’s too bad.
Killer App Two?
The iPad is also becoming my blogging tool of choice. It’s just handy for that. I started typing this article on the virtual keyboard, but partway through I grabbed the physical keyboard and sat down at the kitchen table with it. Now I’m typing happily away. Too bad there’s no lap solution for typing on a physical keyboard. I tried it with this dock thing, but the iPad kept losing the connection with the dock because of my shifting around.
The WordPress iPad app is decent, though not the most intuitive thing I’ve used. (Figuring out how to publish a post you’ve written is not an easy task.) I’ll continue to use it to post articles. Good stuff.
iPad Hands On
I’m one of the few Canadians to actually have an iPad in my house. The iPad started selling in the United States a week and a half ago, but is not available here yet. Luckily my boss ordered one for our company, and today I got to try it out.
First impression? It is heavy. I’ve seen some bloggers complain that it’s heavy, and other bloggers complain about the complaining. Maybe it’s because of my atrophying arm muscles, but I think this thing is meant to be held on your lap. It’s not something you can easily wave around.
Second impression: it’s a well made device. The glass is nice, and the aluminum back is nice. The software works as you expect it to. I tried the ABC Player app, but of course Canadians can’t see the content. I’ve tried several news apps – AP, Bloomberg, USA Today, WSJ, BBC News, and NPR. Some were better than others, but on the whole I enjoyed them. Twitterrific was nice, and made good use of popups. The Marvel Comics app doesn’t even include a free comic, which I would have expected. How am I supposed to know reading comics is a good experience or not? I tried an RSS Reader app to read my Google Reader RSS feeds, and had to say I was disappointed in the app and deleted it.
Which brings me to my next point.
The iPad still doesn’t have the exalted trinity of apps I use on my iPhone: Tweetie, Reeder, and Read It Later. (The only reason I use Tweetie instead of Twitterific is because it has Read It Later support. Otherwise I’d be using Twitterific.) So because the iPad doesn’t have these three apps that I so rely on, I still need to pull out my iPhone to get my serious usage accomplished. I hope that iPad versions of my favourite apps come out for my iPad soon.
Oh and one last thing: I really like landscape mode a lot better, and usually have the iPad locked in landscape mode.
I like the iPad, but can’t see myself using it a lot until I get my favourite apps.
UPDATE: You can’t open multiple tabs in Safari on the iPad and have everything stay in memory. Just like on the iPhone, it loads the page up when you switch tabs. This was disappointing – the iPad really needs more than 256MB of RAM.