Change keyboard appearance of UISearchBar

It's not built-in the API, so this piece of code will do. It makes your search bar display in black, and with transparency... enjoy! :)

Mapping UIWebview links to controller/delegate actions

In an iPhone application I'm developing, there are some views that are quite complex to code... and I find them much easier to code in HTML/CSS. Since the Webkit engine available on the iPhone is quite powerful, I find it a much easier way to create complex views...

Now if you want this view to interact with your application it is a bit tricky... but not THAT much. Here is a piece of code I have in my controller... well in my UIWebViewDelegate.

Basically we catch the click on a link, and if the link is of the form file://...#action we then look for the selector action in the controller and trigger it if it exists.

It's THAT simple. :)

New portfolio iPhone App released!

I've finally released my first iPhone app under the name Melion Design. This is a photographs portfolio for Andrew Hill. What I want with this app is to demonstrate the engine I've developed to manage your portfolio in your own iPhone application.

The application is free, it's called "The Frog Photos" and you can find it in the app store. Andrew can manage the photos available in the application through a web interface I've developed. It makes it easy to upload, and manage photos. The following features are available:

• Amazon S3 photos storage:  fast download of photos.
• Offline mode: user can still browse your photos when offline.
• Customize the description of each photo.
• Customize the perma-link of each photo.
• Provide a link to your own website.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you're interested in having your own portfolio available in the appstore for everyone to see! :)

Lotto Results for iPhone, version 1.2 released!

Yes, there it is! Version 1.2 has the following additional features:

• Systems - record up to 18 of your favorite winning numbers assisting System Players
• How to win - check what you require to win a division prize for each and every game
• Odds - check the odds of winning each division for each and every game

I'm now working on even more exciting content, but I can't tell you yet what it is!

I just enjoy a lot working on this project. :)

You can find Lotto Result in the app store.

Lotto Results for the iPhone

I'm proud to announce my first iPhone application I developped at Front Foot has been released!

Winning Numbers is a mobile website adapted to all phones in australia, but you can enjoy it now as a native application for your iPhone under the name Lotto Results.

It provides for now the latest results and dividends for all of the major australian lottery games: Oz Lotto, Powerball, Lotto, Tattslotto, Gold Lotto, and more... You can also save your winning numbers to quickly find them in the latest results, enjoy!

Asynchronous Tasks in your iPhone App

One thing that as made web applications much easier to use in the last few years is the integration of Ajax into web pages. Before that, each click of the user would block the application until the next page loads... not really a great user experience.

Now when you want to trigger a long task in the background, you can use Javascript to trigger asynchronous requests... that is just great!

Well in standard applications design, it is also very handy to be able to do such thing, and we usually do it using threads. The iPhone platform obviously provides everything you need to perform that, and that's pretty simple! Just awesome! Here is how it works...

The documentation you want to read is the NSOperation Class it provides the tools to trigger a task in the background. And as the documentation says, you will most of the time want to manage a queue of operations rather than just a single operation. So the best thing to do (in my opinion) is to create a Manager (singleton) which owns a queue of operations: NSOperationQueue Class.

This way you can add operations to the queue, and they will all be treated in order. A good example of this kind of manager is the ConnectionManager of the ObjectiveResource library.

You can use it this way:

- (void)fileDownloaded: (NSData *)data {
    // Do stuff here
}
- (void)downloadFile: (NSUrl *)url {
    // Download file here

    [self performSelectorOnMainThread: @selector(fileDownloaded:)
                           withObject: downloadedData
                        waitUntilDone: YES];
}

And somewhere in your code trigger the asynchronous download:

[[ConnectionManager sharedInstance] runJob: @selector(downloadFile:)
                                  onTarget: self
                              withArgument: url];

That's it! So when you call runJob on the connection manager, it queues the job in the operation queue... so if you need to download ten files, they will be processed asynchronously one-by-one while the user is still using your app, without interruption.

Hope this was helpful!

The iPhone application submission process

Last Friday I submitted for Front Foot our first iPhone application. It's quite exciting to arrive at this stage of the project. I have worked so much on this app, our creative designer Deena Baxter did a really good job! I can't wait to show you the result of that work. But I would first like to share with you different tips you may find useful tp submit your own application. The submission process, once you've understood it, is quite simple. But there some parts that are not very well documented. So here are a couple links you may be interested in reading:

• The brand new Apple Guide for Application Submission
• AdHoc distribution building

When you are compiling in Xcode make sure you use the good building profile and it refers correctly your entitlements for AdHoc distribution, also make sure to use the good provisioning profiles for Distribution and AdHoc distribution.

Now all my workmates have a version of the application on their iPhone, and the application is being reviewed by Apple. Tell you more when it's available!