Its been a while since our last tutorial. We’ve been rather busy developing apps. Hope this makes up for it. This is something nearly every app has.

Unless everything you wanted to do in your app is on one page, you’ll need to use either a push view or a modal view. There is a significant difference between the two.

A good example of a push view is the iPod (Music) app. When you tap on an artist, a push view slides in from the right to reveal that artist’s songs. A push view “pushes” the current view out of the way to reveal the new view. The new view usually has an arrow-shaped button in the top (navigation) bar, and the button title has the title of the page the new view pushed away.

Read More…

In part 1 of this 2 part tutorial we discussed how to create the image frames that are needed to put together an animation of a spinning tile. This tile was actually used in our new iPhone game called Memory Gizmo Words. In part 2 we’re going to open Xcode and write the code that will animate these images.

For this tutorial I’ll create a new project called Flip Tile and, I’ll be using the UIImageView to display the first frame. If you’ve never worked with Image Views you can check out our tutorial called iOS Tutorial – Creating an Image View (UIImageView) to get started. Read More…

We recently released a new iPhone game call Memory Gizmo Words and in this project we had to have an animated spinning tile.  Since I had never tried to animate anything before, this turned out to be quite a challenge.

I quickly realized the first thing I had to do was break the animation into pieces and draw each frame.  I started in Photoshop, but trying to get all the sizes, angles, and the perspective just right was a pain.  So I gave up on that idea pretty quick. Read More…

We apologize for the delay in any tutorials. We have been busily working on our first app, Checklyst. We have completed and posted it to the app store. Checklyst is a to-do app that instantly syncs with our website, Checklyst.com. Here is the official description of the app.

Checklyst is the todo app for professionals. It’s designed to organize your workflow and help you get things done. It’s a checklist app powerful enough for project management, yet simple enough for a shopping list. Read More…

This tutorial will be just about as simple as the Splash Screen tutorial a little while back. We are going to load an image that we add to our project, resize it, and color the background. This will be done with absolutely no code.

(Note: In future tutorials, we will be adding more functionality to our apps.)

Let’s begin.
Read More…

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…

Text fields, buttons and labels. You will find nearly all of these in almost every app. They are key elements for getting and displaying information to and from the user.

We’re going to use all three in this fun, geeky little tutorial.

(Note: In future tutorials, we will be adding more functionality to our apps.) 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…

If your app is dependent on web content, there are a couple ways you can go about outputting that content. XML Parsing and Web Views. We’ll be covering XML Parsing in a later tutorial as it is far more complex than a Web View…baby steps.

A web view displays a website on the device’s screen. Mobile Safari is a prime example. Safari uses all kinds of bars and buttons to interact with the view. We’re not going to go into that much detail…yet. For now, we’re just going to display a web page. Read More…

The first thing you see with a lot of iPhone apps, when they launch, is a splash screen.  So creating our own splash screen will be a great place to start off this series of tutorials.

Splash screens are the “title page” of your app. While, at times, it will display the name of the app, more often than not, it displays the company that created the app. Or it’ll do both. You may have also noticed that several splash screens will allow you to tap to skip ahead to the next screen. Unless, of course, the developer wants you to see their logo for a certain period of time, or the screen is being displayed as a “curtain” while the app gets loaded in the background. Read More…