I thought it was time to change the look and feel of this blog. Well, it’s done. And I’ve gone as minimalistic as possible.
By the way, no more comments. At all. Ever again. I’ve had enough of spam, hatred, flame wars, and idiots of any kind. For those who played the game, thanks for reading and commenting in a constructive way.
A happy life to all of you.
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.
(Somehow this project seems to me so simple, that I’m sure someone has done this before. Anyway). This is my feeble attempt to bring an answer to the eternal dichotomy between those arguing about the relative benefits of creating user interfaces via Interface Builder or via pure Objective-C code: let me introduce nib2objc.
Unbeknown to most of us, the ibtool utility bundled with Interface Builder and Xcode allows us to inspect the contents of NIB files (or XIBs, for that matter) and get from them nice property lists XML streams, which I transform in NSDictionary instances, which I loop over and over util I get something that looks like this:
[source:c] UIView *view6 = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 320.0, 460.0)]; view6.frame = CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 320.0, 460.0); view6.alpha = 1.000; view6.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight; view6.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithWhite:0.750 alpha:1.000]; view6.clearsContextBeforeDrawing = NO; // …
UIButton *view9 = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeRoundedRect]; view9.frame = CGRectMake(167.0, 65.0, 72.0, 37.0); view9.adjustsImageWhenDisabled = YES; view9.adjustsImageWhenHighlighted = YES; view9.alpha = 1.000; view9.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin; view9.clearsContextBeforeDrawing = NO; view9.clipsToBounds = NO; view9.contentHorizontalAlignment = UIControlContentHorizontalAlignmentCenter; // … [view9 setTitleShadowColor:[UIColor colorWithWhite:0.000 alpha:1.000] forState:UIControlStateSelected];
// … [view6 addSubview:view9]; // … [/source]
Using this tool, I can now use IB for design, and then generate the code for those designs, in case I prefer to use a code-only approach (usually for UITableViewCells, as I explained before). For the moment it only works with UIKit classes, but I don’t think it might be a problem to extend it to AppKit classes as well.
I hope this project is useful to all of you! As usual, open source, public domain and on Github.
Update, 2009-04-09: This project has been featured in an article in Ars Technica by Erica Sadun!
(Highly geeky post ahead. You’ve been warned!)
I have found the very message that summarizes the beauty of Cocoa in a single word; see by yourselves, hereunder in line 47:
[source:c]
// The interface of a person @interface Person : NSObject { NSString* firstName; NSString* lastName; int age; } @end
// The implementation of the Person @implementation Person -(id)init { if (self = [super init]) { firstName = @”"; lastName = @”"; age = 0; } return self; }
-(void)dealloc { [firstName release]; [lastName release]; [super dealloc]; }
-(NSString*)description { return [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@”Name: %@ %@, %d years old”, firstName, lastName, age]; } @end
// Some code using the Person class int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) { NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
NSMutableDictionary* dict = [[[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init] autorelease];
[dict setObject:@"Teto" forKey:@"firstName"];
[dict setObject:@"Rodriguez" forKey:@"lastName"];
[dict setObject:[[NSNumber alloc] initWithInt:34] forKey:@"age"];
Person* person = [[[Person alloc] init] autorelease];
// The beauty of Cocoa can be resumed to this very line:
[person setValuesForKeysWithDictionary:dict];
// Now sit back and relax:
NSLog([person description]);
[pool drain];
return 0;
} [/source]
In the series of highly boring posts ;) here’s another one; in this case, a simple explanation of two different authentication protocols available in the HTTP standard.
HTTP Basic Authentication Protocol
This is the simplest HTTP Authentication protocol available:
thanks .mick! :)
Just a few links to work with color; you might know them all, or not, but if you have more, don’t hesitate to post them in the comments!
Finally, a classic – even if it has nothing to do with color: typography.com.
Enjoy!
Update, 2008-01-28: You can add Mondrianum to this list :)
Incredible. I just came accross this blog called “One Month App”. The guys from Clear Function have been working on Pulse, a web-based application, more or less at the same time as I was working on Parking Friend (from the end of September to mid-October)! Their design is nicer than mine, though :)
It is also interesting to see that their toolset is more or less the same as mine (it’s a typical Rails stack, after all) but I’ve used Inkscape and Gimpshop instead of the Adobe Creative Suite applications (which I do not own). In any case, it is possible: you can create really complex applications in Rails, in a really small amount of time. This is not something that all development stacks allows you to do!
Congratulations for the release to the team of Clear Function!