Category Archives: iPhone

Preferred iPad Apps

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FlipBoard, Reeder, iA Writer, 1Password, Echofon, iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), The Economist, OmniGraffle, InkPad, Adobe Ideas, iBooks, Kindle, Instagram, Instapaper, swissinfo, digital 2.0, Unzip, Typefaces, Prompt, FaceTime, Mirror, NYPL Biblion, iMovie, GarageBand, Keynote Remote, Zattoo HD, Aelios, TuneIn Radio, Planetary, VinylLove, Shazam, iDisk, Dropbox, Digits, GoodReader, DocsToGo, Articles, France24, CNN, La Nación Digital, OffMaps 2, Google Earth, Dictation, SBB Mobile, Penultimate, Elements, PCalc, Skype, Skype wifi, Hipmunk, Deep Green, Real Racing HD, ArtRage, Photoshop Express, HP Print.

Boom.

Why the iPad is Better than an Inflight Entertainment System

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After all my trouble with air travel, I thought I should add some positive views here. And they all turned to be around the iPad, so here they go.

The iPad is a better inflight entertainment system because…

  • The touchscreen actually works. And when you touch it, you don’t disturb the person sleeping in the seat in front of yours.
  • It’s lightweight.
  • The captain cannot interrupt your movie or your picture to tell you some useless facts about the temperature outside or the altitude.
  • You get to choose the music and the videos that you want to watch. You should just remember to get them prior to boarding, of course.
  • You also get to choose the games you want to play. The choice of games is much larger, and it’s called App Store.
  • You can even read newspapers, books, magazines, in the same screen. Reading the latest issue of the Economist on my iPad is priceless. It’s good to avoid being limited to the “in-flight” magazine provided by the airline (“your free copy!”), which tends to be quite lame, no matter which airline we’re talking about.
  • You can answer e-mails while you fly (for the moment you cannot sent them, unless you fly in some airline that has a wifi network, and as far as I know, there are only a few with such a feature.)
  • You could write a novel in iA Writer or Ommwriter for iPad, for that matter, all while you listen to Liszt’s “Evening Harmony in D Flat Major”. Or you could prepare a blog post, like this one.
  • Coupled with noise-cancelling headphones, the quality of sound is years-light ahead of what those crummy airline headphones are able to provide.
  • The battery. A whole 10-hour flight on a single charge is absolutely possible.

‘Nuff said.

Tweeting without Twitter

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During my flight to WWDC this year I could not really sleep, and the 12 hour flight was the source of memorable tweets that will never make it to Twitter. Because of timing and context, and also because of the inexcusable lack of wifi network in some major airlines.

Anyway.

I used Pages during the flight to keep track of all those insomniac, bilingual tweets, while the plane was a going through the Atlantic and Canada towards San Francisco. Some are about the flight itself, others about the Argentine film “El Secreto de sus Ojos”, and finally some about the Football World Cup. Project yourself in the situation, and enjoy the rants. I certainly did :) Continue reading →

HTTP Headers, Web Apps and Mobile Safari

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I found today that Mobile Safari, the browser bundled with the iPhone, has a very strange and annoying behaviour when it comes to web apps. In fact, when you “install” web applications with the <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" /> tag in the “Home Screen”, the USER_AGENT header sent to the server is different to the one sent when you access the same app manually using Safari..

Here’s a test that proves this assertion: Continue reading →

iPhone Apps without Objective-C

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Yes, it’s possible. Even if Objective-C is one of my preferred programming languages, in any case I think it’s worth mentioning that, 2 years after the official iPhone SDK has been announced, the iPhone development landscape has really grown up, and many, many different options are available today. This article provides a very high-level enumeration of some options I’ve found on the web, but I’m sure there are even more alternatives around.

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Here it goes: Continue reading →

Roundup of iPhone App Sketchbooks

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Nailing down the idea, the navigation and the UI of your next killer iPhone application is as important (if not more) as writing good code. This is why this post will showcase some recent iPhone designer products, all providing a paper-based, iPhone-shaped and iPhone-sized support for sketching out iPhone apps with your client (or just for your own creative pleasure).

Here we go:

App Sketchbook by Square Position, LLC (USA), @appsketchbook on Twitter, sold via PayPal for USD 12.99, in both a perforated and non-perforated version.

sketchbook1

Continue reading →

JAOO iPhone Dev Days 2009 Zürich

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Last week’s JAOO iPhone Dev Day was a big success. Featuring Raven Zachary, Alex Cone, Jonas Schnelli, Patrick Bönzli and Patrick Linskey and yours truly, the event gathered many attendees interested in the capabilities of the iPhone for their businesses.

This is a small review of the event, organized by the incredible teams of Trifork and Keynode with links to the material I’ve provided in my own presentations.

Reception booth for the iPhone Dev Day

Continue reading →

iPhone and Mac OS X Developer Conference Roundup

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Here’s a quick review of the most important iPhone and Mac OS X developer conferences I’ve found on the web (in no particular order). Definitely, there’s no shortage of conferences when you need information about the latest Cocoa, Mac OS X and iPhone technologies; check this out!

  • Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference or WWDC, held every year in San Francisco, CA (USA), usually around June, and featuring presentations from Apple employees; if you’ve never been to one, believe me, you should;
  • Voices That Matter iPhone Developer Conference to be held in Boston, MA (USA) next October 17th and 18th, with (among others) Erica Sadun, Aaron Hillegass, Stephen Kochan and Marcus Zarra;
  • NSConference, to be held from January 31st to February 3rd next year near Reading (UK), and from February 21st to February 24th in the Georgia Tech Institute, GA (USA), featuring (among others) Matt Gemmell, Marcus Zarra and Aaron Hillegass;
  • The 360|iDev conference that just finished in Denver, CO (USA), which featured (among many others) Bill Dudney, Brent Simmons, and Marcus Zarra (definitely, Marcus Zarra is everywhere!);
  • The iPhone Developer Summit in Santa Clara, CA (USA) next November 3rd;
  • The iGames Summit, a conference targeted to iPhone game developers, held last March in San Francisco, CA (USA), featuring (among many others) Neil Young (from ngmoco), Andrew Lacy (from Tapulous) and Mike Mettler (from AdMob);
  • The Macoun Entwicklerkonferenz which happened last September 26th in Frankfurt (Germany);
  • The iPhone developer conference in Köln (Germany), in December 1st and 2nd;
  • And finally, the JAOO iPhone Dev Day in Zürich (Switzerland) next October 8th, featuring Raven Zachary, Alex Cone and… many others ;)

Also noteworthy, but not so much about software development I think, is the Mobile Enterprise Conference in Amsterdam (Netherlands) on November 3rd, which has a couple of tracks about the iPhone in enterprise.

Feel free to add links to other similar events elsewhere in the world!

Update, 2009-10-02: Here’s the link to Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s C4 Independent Developers Conference.

Update, 2009-10-03: The Øredev 2009 Developer Conference in Malmö (Sweden) next November has iPhone / Mobile tracks too. And so will the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010 in Göteborg (also in Sweden).

Using Multiple Twitter Clients from your iPhone Application

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I love playing with iPhone URL schemes. And if you ask me, just like for Mail.app and Safari, I think there should be a “default” Twitter client URL scheme in the iPhone, with an interface in the Settings application allowing you to set the application that you prefer to tweet. Alas, this is not the case, and each application must manually allow users to select their preferred client, from a list of known ones.

Having documented iPhone URL schemes for TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Tweetie and Twittelator, I’ve created a project, available in Github, called TwitThis, which helps users choose their preferred Twitter client, and makes it easy to remember the user choice, and to launch the associated application with a single command:

TwitThis

This application has the following features:

  • The class TwitterClientManager loads a list list of supported Twitter clients is loaded from a plist file, which can be extended to support more clients in the future;
  • Each Twitter client is represented by an instance of the TwitterClient class;
  • The user can choose his preferred Twitter client at any time, and launch the application by a simple touch; the TwitterClientManager class stores the selected value in the user settings.

If you have to support several different Twitter clients, feel free to use these classes in your own project! The project, as usual, is available in Github with a liberal BSD license. Enjoy! I’d love to hear your comments below.

Slides, slides, slides

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I’ve been doing presentations for a while now, so I decided to open a SlideShare account to publish all the slides I’ve created over the past 5 years. SlideShare has a great Flash-based viewer that you can embed in web pages, so I’ll be using it a lot now. Check out my presentations, feel free to download them and also to use them if you find the contents useful for you (they are distributed with Creative Commons licenses).

Having said that, I’m also announcing that the slides (and sample application) of yesterday’s JAOO geek night presentation in Zürich are also available in the Projects section of this blog, and here goes the SlideShare player with those slides:

iPhone App Development Tips & Tricks (Zürich)