Tag ‘iphone sdk’

How to get 5 star reviews from your iPhone app's happy users

Radu Cojocaru

iphone_app_reviews Analyzing how users are prompted to review iPhone apps,  it seems that our apps are more likely to get negative reviews. Here’s why: a user is prompted to rate an app when he deletes it. When the app is deleted, it is pretty safe to say that the user was not satisfied with it, so the review will be a negative one. That’s ok, if the app is not good enough, other users should know that. But what about the good/great apps, the ones that you use successfully and don’t delete. Shouldn’t you be encouraged to leave a review in this case too? That review would probably be a positive one, or at least constructiv (you might say what you would like to see improved).

Read on to learn how we solved this and get the full source code to add this feature to your own app!

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Core Data Story: an introduction to iPhone SDK database abstraction technology

Ivan Kalaica

iphone-sdk-core-dataSo, what’s Core Data anyway? :)
Core Data helps you to save model objects (in the sense of the model-view-controller design pattern) to a file and get them back again. This is similar to archiving technology but Core Data offers much more than that. Amongst other things it…

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How to intercept navigation in a UIWebView

UIWebView is a great control to display formatted text (using HTML language). That text might contain links that you want to intercept in Objective-C and do a specific action (push a new view for example).

You can do this by implementing UIWebViewDelegate protocol…

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How to build a 3D tag cloud on iPhone — challenges and solutions

how-to-3D-tagcloud-iphone-sdkSince the iPhone tocuhscreen is quite small and has great support for interactivity a 3D tag cloud looks an ideal choice for an iPhone application user interface. Neither iPhone SDK classes nor 3rd party libraries have 3D tag cloud classes, at least no libraries I heard of, so I implemented it from scratch.

You can see the final result in the Toneaphone Ringtones iPhone App we developed last year.

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Apple Tablet and iPhone SDK 4.0: the slate fever builds up with e-readers announcements

Mauro Dalu

islate-feverThe CES in Las Vegas saw the debut of three new e-reader devices, while Dell and Microsoft have demonstrated prototypes of tablet devices (slate PCs).

During his keynote at CES, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled a touchscreen tablet from HP running Windows 7, that was dubbed a “slate PC.” The touchscreen HP device that was shown was just one of many new products and services revealed by Ballmer. A YouTube video is available here.

Dell has briefly demoed a 5-inch device — which is reminiscent of larger Apple iPhone or iPod touch — also referring to it as a “slate.”

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How to implement shadows with OpenGL ES on iPhone SDK — an overview

shadows-open-gl-es-iphone-ipod-touchOne of our projects currently under development is a 3D puzzle game where player will manipulate a number of cubic blocks. Those blocks can be moved above the board so to look realistic they need to cast shadows onto the board. Despite shadows are used in many 3D games and OpenGL ES does have all necessary things to implement them there is no support for shadows in API itself so the implementation is not straightforward at all. The task requires some smart coding. Let’s see how it can be done.

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How to implement resumable file downloads on iPhone SDK

iphone_sdk_codeFile downloading is a feature used very often in various applications. You may need to get an update from the server, to provide optional resources to the user or to get a copy of a shared document — all this functionality deals with file downloads. And as long as downloads go over network they can be interrupted which is very frustrating, especially if you are downloading something big that takes a lot of time.

Modern applications can’t afford forcing users to start interrupted downloads from the beginning. In Mac OS X SDK we have a very nice NSURLDownload class that supports download resuming functionality. This class is not a part of iPhone SDK though. That’s why we have to descend one level lower and look into what HTTP protocol provides.

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iPhone Apps scanned for private API use during App Store approval process

Mauro Dalu

iphone-app-storeApple recently began using computers to automatically scan for the use of private application programming interfaces. The new “static analysis tools” aim to catch those who might have snuck by the approval process before, with software that bends or breaks the rules established by Apple.

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