I was recently asked how to rate a purchased iPhone app and it’s a bit of a process so I thought I would list the steps here.

1. Open the App Store app on your iPhone.
2. Tap the Updates button on the tab bar at the bottom of the screen.
3. Tap the “Purchased” row at the top of the table.
4. Scroll down to find the app you want to rate.  For example Solitaire Poker.
5. Scroll down and tap the Ratings button.  It might be labeled “No Ratings” or “155 Ratings” or something similar.
6. Finally, tap “Write a Review”

If you have audio that you would like the user to manually control with a button, this is the quick How To for you. The end result will allow you to play and stop audio with the same button. In future posts, I will show how to reroute that played audio from speaker to headset using the proximity sensor and bluetooth headset. Read More…

When we created our games Memory Gizmo Words, Memory Gizmo Math and Solitaire Poker, we needed to layout the game board into a grid of rows and columns. It was fairly simple and we’ll tell you how we did it. 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…

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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I recently created a custom dialog box for two separate projects, and I figured that since I was going to use the same code on both, I wanted it to be the best code I could do.  To determine what the best method was for creating a dialog box, I decided to create a few versions of it and to see which one would work for these two projects and any future projects I may have.  In this post, I’ll go over some of the code and decisions I made while creating the design I eventually chose to use. Read More…

One of the easiest ways to improve the performance of a website is to compress the JavaScript and CSS files. When compressing these files, there are three steps that should be taken in order to get the fastest possible response from your website. You should start by merging similar files to reduce http requests. Next, Compress the code by removing any unnecessary characters such as spaces, tabs, return characters, and comments. Finally, you should gzip the file to reduce the file size even further. Read More…