Posts Tagged 'Programming'

Here’s a nice-looking abstraction of retrieving pictures from probably all the online services you’ll want to support:

pierrotsmnrd / grabKit

In your iPhone/iPad applications, you may want to let your users access their photo albums hosted on various social networks like Facebook or FlickR, or stored in the device. Unfortunately, the websites hosting these images offer different APIs and different libraries to authentify a user, grab its photo albums, etc.

GrabKit is made to wrap these differences into a simple library. Retrieve photo albums the same way for Facebook, FlickR, or any other implemented service !

So far, GrabKit supports :

• Facebook
• Flickr
• Instagram
• Picasa
• iPhone/iPad

Compare to Photo Picker+ we mentioned before; similar functionality, but doesn’t require an account with any third party, just the appropriate services directly.

h/t: ManiacDev!

So, you really really want to get inside your users’ UX flow? Or feel like putting together a Greatest User Epic Fail demo reel? Either way, here’s a new SDK for you to check out:

UserVOD: Watch how people use your app

UserVOD is a mobile SDK that helps developers gain insights on how people use their app.

Our SDK records videos of user sessions and captures their actions and gestures…

… Screen recording is done without impacting user experience. Videos are uploaded when users are idle and on WiFi only.

You can take a look at some samples or try it out for yourself before integrating it into your own apps, which is pretty much simple as simple gets, whether you’re running a UIKit or OpenGL or even a Unity app.

Also check out this TechCrunch article on them for references to other session recording options!

Got some artists in your asset workflow who just won’t let go of that antiquated Flash thingy? This could be of help:

musictheory / SwiffCore

SwiffCore is a Mac OS X and iOS framework that renders vector shapes and animations stored in the SWF format. It also provides basic support for bitmaps, fonts, text, and MP3 streams.

It isn’t a Flash runtime. It doesn’t enable you to run your interactive Flash games on iOS. It will, however, accurately render your existing vector graphics and animations…

Had a particularly good chuckle at this bit:

… Ultimately, performance depends on the source movie. If SwiffCore has to redraw several objects per frame, and those frames contain gradients and/or complex paths, it’s easy to saturate the CPU and drop frames (even on A5 devices). After a few migraine-inducing Instruments sessions, I am very grateful that Apple never allowed Flash on the original iPhone …

Indeed. Of course it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, but it can be rather amusing at times, can’t it? Any-ways, although we certainly wouldn’t give the impression that we actually recommend these days any kind of canned animation producer other than the HTML 5 options we touched on a few days back, there definitely have been instances where something that dealt with Flash would have been expedient. And hey, expedience can be its own form of elegance when getting something out the door profitably is the order of the day!

h/t: ManiacDev!

So no doubt if you even vaguely follow computer vision type stuff you’ve heard of the OpenCV library, and as we’ve mentioned occasionally people have been using it on iOS with some degree of effort for a while now; but as of the latest release (2.4.2) it’s officially supported:

…. opencv2.framework for iOS has been created. You can either download the binary from SourceForge or build it yourself using the simple guide. Also, you may be interested to look at some OpenCV on iOS samples, created by our GSoC 2012 students Eduard and Charu and read the slides of the tutorial…

Speaking of tutorials, here’s a series just updated (h/t @romainbriche) for iOS to get you started nice and easy processing both video frames and saved photos:

OpenCV Tutorial – a collection of OpenCV samples for iPhone/iPad – Part 1

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 2

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 3

OpenCV Tutorial – Part 4

Code for these is on github at BloodAxe / OpenCV-Tutorial if you’re in a hurry.

And of course there’s the regular docs and the wiki and the code site and all that, but if you have any more up to date iOS-focused resources, please let us all know!

Here’s a good library to start with if you have some document import needs for your app:

DZen-Interaktiv / DZDocumentsPickerController

iPhone/iPad controller to import file from multiple sources, such as Image Library, iTunes shared folder, and cloud services like Dropbox, Cloud App, iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, SugarSync, BOX, and many more.

Until now, only Dropbox and Cloud App are operational, and Microsoft SkyDrive is half-way in.

This idea was born because of a common need to all iOS users of importing documents regardless the source. I am sharing this controller so you can enjoy it in your own apps and collaborate with the development. You are very welcome to fork it or help me out with the debugging!

Sounds like a good project to contribute to if you’ve got some cloud needs of your own!

h/t: ManiacDev!

Here’s a new option to be aware of if you’ve got some lightweight OpenGL needs:

Introducing Rend – A lightweight Objective-C OpenGL ES 2.0 framework for iOS

When looking for a framework to use for upcoming projects I looked at three existing options, Cocos2D, Cocos3D and Unity. None of those seemed perfect for my needs. Cocos2D obviously doesn’t have very good 3D support, Cocos3D didn’t have shader support, and Unity seemed to bloated and hard to integrate with UIKit.

So on my summer vacation last year I decided to start creating my own framework …

… My focus has been to create a framework that focuses on rendering and that could easily be integrated with UIKit. Unlike Cocos and Unity, it doesn’t have any support for actions, physics or sound, but it’s can do pure rendering very well. I’ve spent quite some time profiling my projects trying to get rid of the worst bottlenecks in the framework, so it should be quite fast when used in a good way.

If that looks like something that might suit your project, check it out at antonholmquist / rend-ios!

h/t: @romainbriche!

Oooh, here’s a good tip for dealing with the layout issues you’ve very likely noticed if you embed fonts hunted down from the wild Internet into your app:

Custom iOS fonts and how to fix the vertical position problem

Most of the custom fonts i’ve used usually have some issue with their vertical alignment. Either they sit too low or too high when compared to the default fonts. This poses a lot of problems and makes it quite difficult to get things aligned properly. The cause of this is that your custom font has an ascender and descender settings which are not being rendered properly by iOS…

… To edit these in the font you will need to download the Apple Font Tool Suite. Once you’ve installed this you need to open Terminal and navigate to the directory that contains your font. After that enter the following command:

Managed to completely overlook the existence of these until now, though they’ve apparently been around for over a decade. Look pretty handy for mucking around with oddly behaving fonts, they do!

h/t: ‏@romainbriche!

Here’s an interesting strategy for adding some narrative content into your app, specifically game tutorials:

Hype – How To Play

We wanted something that would accomplish the following goals:

• Quickly teach the players the basics of game play
• Look integrated into the app
• No download or streamed content
• Measurable
• We don’t want to inflate the App size too much
• Something we can create without too much custom programming

What we ended up with was a how to play integrated tutorial that was implemented with an imbedded WebView that plays back HTML 5 generated via Hype…

Hadn’t noticed the delightfully named Hype before, but it seems more or less along the lines of Sencha Animator or Adobe Edge, bringing Flash-style authoring to the HTML/CSS world. (What’s your tool of choice for that kind of thing, Dear Reader?)

Also of interest is the bit about setting up the player to track events with Flurry — it uses an iframe strategy we hadn’t seen before, derived from

UIWebView Secrets – Part3 – How to Properly Call ObjectiveC From Javascript

which if you haven’t stumbled across it already, describes an approach to communicating between JavaScript and real code which you might want to check out at ochameau / NativeBridge for your UIWebView communication needs!

Now this is a pretty sweet addition to your debugging tricks – how to easily see what controllers are part of a view hierarchy:

Pimping recursiveDescription

While working on PSPDFKit, I more and more embrace viewController containment to better distribute responsibilities between different view controllers. One thing that always annoyed me about that is that po [[UIWindow keyWindow] recursiveDescription] is less and less useful if you just see a big bunch of UIView’s. I asked some engineers at WWDC if there’s something like recursiveDescription, just for UIViewControllers, but they didn’t had a answer on that, so I finally wrote my own … As a bonus, this also lists attached childViewControllers if you run iOS5 or above, and it will show you if a childViewController has a greater frame than it’s parentViewController (this is usually a easy to miss bug)…

Cool beans, yep. Unfortunately, for those of you immediately thinking that would be some handy introspection ability for your production code too, note carefully

For those if you that are curious, I use a private API call (_viewDelegate), but that’s obfuscated (it would pass a AppStore review) and you really only should compile that function in DEBUG mode anyway.

so you probably don’t want to risk that. But if you do have a really good reason for needing to do that, check out this Stack Overflow question for ideas!

h/t: ‏@steipete!

Here’s a convenient option for those of us who figure an app’s support website should be as easy to throw up as possible:

AppifyWP: A WordPress Theme for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac App Developers

Drive app downloads

Designed and optimized to promote your app.

Save time & money

Dont bother with designers and HTML, just get it out there.

Yep, they’ve got marketing to trolls down perfectly. Pretty impressive list of features for $49 (single) or $149 (unlimited), strongly recommend you check that out if you want to throw up an app website easily.

And even if you don’t, just register anyways and you can download AppifyWP Launchpad for free which provides a coming soon landing page with email address capture and other appropriate goodies!

h/t: MobileOrchard!

UPDATES:

Here’s another: Get A Slick Free WordPress Theme For App Promotion

Or maybe you just want a quick flyer? Smore has an instant splash page service!