ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) is great addition to Xcode 4. It saves you time and aggravation of releasing objects from memory. However, there may be several libraries out there that have not been converted to ARC that you would like to inclue in your project. Rather than going through each file an converting it yourself, there is a way to exclude those file from ARC. Read More…

iOS5 came with several shortcuts to parse JSON without the need of third-party libraries. It’s called NSJsonSerialization, and here’s how it works.

Let’s say you’ve received JSON data (we’ll call it responseData) from a url and you would like to convert the JSON to an NSDictionary  (dictJSON). Just put in the following code: Read More…

This morning I was working on an iOS app that required saving various files to the device.  I wanted to track these files while running the iPhone Simulator to make sure my code was handling the files as it was supposed to.  To do this I could dig through the folder structure in Terminal or output a bunch of NSLogs with the data I wanted, but the easiest method would be to open Finder and watch the directory as changes were made.  Since I know this will come up again in the future, I decided to make an AppleScript that will help me Quickly navigate to the iPhone Simulator path. Below are the steps I used to create the script. Read More…

When working with Core Data or SQLite, you never know if what your saving to your database is actually saving. Well if you’re testing with iPhone Simulator you can. Run your test that is supposed to be saving data then do the following:
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Have you ever wanted to know when your app entered the background or came back into the foreground? But you don’t want to have to hassle with trying to run methods in your current view from the App Delegate? I can ease your pain. Add the following code to the viewDidLoad method of the class you like to handle these events: Read More…

It’s always nice to know how well a method in your app is performing. Well here’s a quick tip on timing said methods. The result will output how long a method took from start to finish down to the millisecond. Read More…

There is a quick and easy way to stretch an image inside an object without it distorting any curves or diagonal lines. The following method will stretch an image at a given X and/or Y position of the image file. So you’ll want to find a spots that are straight horizontal or vertical lines. The code below will move in 20 pixels from the left and stretch the image at that point. So now you can include the buttonImage as the background image for any other object and it will stretch the image to look correctly no matter what the width. Read More…

When we started our humble little company nearly 3 years ago, we were primarily a web development and database management company. For the past year, however, we’ve added iPhone development to our skill set.

We started out with our own first app, Checklyst. Shortly after that, we’ve released Memory Gizmo Words and Math. Our most popular app, Solitaire Poker, was created in one week. There are several more exciting, full-featured apps currently in the pipeline. Read More…

Did you know you could modify your website’s form input fields so that when viewed on an iOS device, it will bring up certain types of keyboards or other input elements?
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One thing iPhone designers love to do these days is add texture to the navigation bar.  Leather and wood grain texures are very popular.  Luckily for iPhone developers, it’s actually a very simple task to incorporate these images into our Apps.  In this iOS Quick Tip.  I’m going to show you how add textures to your iPhone app Navigation Bar.

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