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Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

Smarter Browser Cache

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Designers, Developers, System Administrators and companies spend a lot of time trying to optimize their networks and content delivery systems to achieve optimal performance with the minimum resources possible. At first, there was a simple browser/proxy cache schema, then the “If-Modified-Since” and ETags HTTP headers where introduced. Nowadays CDNs seem to blooming and all the […]


Adding In-App-Purchase Support: Avoid AppId Troubles

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

So, I’ve decided to add In-App-Purchase support for one of my apps. I’ve researched about the subject a few times but it always seemed quite a bit of code for a lazy-driven project until I found a quite nice tutorial that at the bottom included a utility library that packaged everything you need to do […]


libanim: animated textures and images for iPhone/iOS

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

I recently started a new project called libanim (home page) which aims at providing support for animated file formats on the iOS and perhaps Android at a later stage. The problem doesn’t seem to be limited to any one platform, support for animated file formats is usually limited to gif files but on some places (e.g. […]


Disabling multitasking on iOS 4 apps

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

If you’re using the iOS 4 SDK then by default your app will be assumed to support multitasking even though you actually need to add support for it and you might not have done that (e.g. updating an old application). While multitasking seems nice it isn’t always the best scenario for your app, specially when […]


The little evilness of @property

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

One of the special enhancements Objective C adds to basic C/C++ is the ability to declare and use properties with a simple and straightforward usage. To new comers or even veteran programmers used to properties in C# or Java this is a very nice concept that saves a lot of time while keeping the code […]


And Apple does it again – Opera Mini iPhone App Approved

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Apple just approved the Opera Mini iPhone app, which should be available on iTunes during the next 24 hours. This is excellent news specially taking into account the recent events. In you’ve missed the demo go check it now. Edit: Some users pointed it out to me something I couldn’t believe but it’s true. The […]


Unity3D, MonoTouch and Flash CS5 to be banned from iPhone/iPad’s Ecosystem

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Up until now a few solutions existed if you wanted to avoid C/Objective C to code for the iPhone and specially to achieve some code portability/compatibility with other platforms. Examples of those solutions are Unity3D, Flash CS5, MonoTouch, HaXe and other static-compiters or trans-compilers like XMLVM. As reported by several sources (e.g. this Engadget article) […]


Anonymous Functions in C/C++?

Friday, November 13th, 2009

I was reading my fair share of feeds for the day and I found some links for a nice site that translates C gibberish to English like this: int (*(*foo)(void ))[3] gets translated to “declare foo as pointer to function (void) returning pointer to array 3 of int” – pretty cool on itself but what […]


Expand and collapse UITableViewCells

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Displaying a details view to show data after the user selects something from a table on the iPhone is pretty much the standard and it sure is useful in many cases. Fact is that it’s not always the fastest or correct way of showing details, specially if the amount of details left to show is […]


Google to Acquire AdMob

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Today when I checked my mail I received the not so surprising news that Google was about gobble up AdMob. It’s not surprising because most Google advertising products were acquired from someone else and I was seeing a serious hole in Google’s mobile advertisement solutions. I think, as a publisher and occasional AdMob advertiser, that […]


AdSense reports in a Gadget (iGoogle and Wave)

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I got tired of visiting the AdSense page all the time, well from time to time. I already have done an iPhone app so now I created a iGoogle gadget to display the most important stats and also a chart! So, with the help of Mono I was able to have everything setup and tested […]


UISearchBar Tricks – Showing The Cancel And The Scope Bar Only When Editing

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

While working on a particular UISearchBar I ran into 2 little problems, both easy to fix but I thought of posting them in case someone is stuck. What I needed was to make the cancel button and the scope bar to be displayed only while editing. I believe that this should be a pretty common […]


Mac OS X Tip – Type Or Edit Path In Finder

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Sometimes I just want to type a path in Finder, or maybe paste it from somewhere. It can be painful slow to track the right folders 1 by 1. Surprisingly, its difficult to find this little trick via a web search, it seems everyone if focused of displaying the current path at the finder windows […]


Wolfram|Alpha

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Nowadays there are little news related to new (and really exciting) developments in search engines, natural language parsing and similar stuff. For most people, the only news related to those subjects come from new Google features or one or another project that eventually fails, like that search engine by the Wikipedia founder that was so […]


An introduction to game physics with Chipmunk

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

During the past week I’ve been writing a tutorial about Chipmunk, a physics engine very popular among 2D games. The article’s focus is mainly for the iPhone but the Chipmunk code itself is portable to any platform because it’s pure C. I’m thinking about giving the new preview of Monodevelop for OS X release a […]


Adding Navigation/Table View/Image Picker Controller(s) Into A Tab Bar Controller

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Adding a Navigation/Table View/Image Picker Controller into a UITabBarController seems to be subject of many new iPhone developers frustrations. I did have a lot of trouble figuring it out myself, but I finally did it. Here’s the correct way, fool proof I believe! To start with, add a new file, using the UIViewController template. Change […]


Calling Code In A Different Controller With Objective-C

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

I’m fairly new to the Objective-C and it might not come as a surprise that I’m only learning it because it’s the default iPhone programming language. What geek owns an iPhone and didn’t at some point want to create its own application? Well for me it’s not just for the personal pleasure, it also my […]