Posted on August 18, 2011 by William Welbes
HP announced today that they will end operations of it’s webOS - the operating system for the HP Touchpad tablet - and cease selling the Touchpad. Stunning. The device was released just back in June… about 6 weeks ago. Earlier reports from retailers such as Best Buy were indicating that sales of the Touchpad were very slow - something like 10% of the stock ordered.
Read MorePosted on August 02, 2011 by William Welbes
A coworker of mine passed along an excellent blog posting on an iOS developer’s perspective on Android development. Take a look at Nick Farina’s article here: An iOS Developer Takes on Andriod
Read MorePosted on April 01, 2011 by William Welbes
At Centare, I’ve recently developed a color picker for iOS (iPhone and iPad). It’s a set of UIViews that allows a user to pick a color via a Hue, Saturation, Value (HSV) interface. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like inside a test application.
Read MorePosted on March 18, 2011 by William Welbes
Looks like Google just released an iOS version of the remote control app for Google TV. As a Google TV user, I’ve been waiting for this to come out. While others with Android phones have been able to connect to and control my TV with their devices, I’ve been left in the dark with the iPhone for months now. I’ve installed the app but I’ll have to wait until I get home in front of my set to give it a run and offer my review. I was close to breaking out a network sniffer to check out the protocol the Android devices were using and the write my own solution…. but I guess Google has now made that effort pointless. (I’m glad they did)
Read MorePosted on March 16, 2011 by William Welbes
Following my presentation on iOS here at Centare last night, my coworker Dean passed along a link to a set of iPhone stencils for Visio. In my presentation, I demonstrated some wireframes created in Balsamiq, but clearly Visio would be able to do the job if there was a set of stencils available. Jonathan Abbett of Beacon 16 created these templates and posted them online for others to use. This makes it easier for those living in the Windows world to do some rapid wireframing for iOS… to tide them over until they make the plunge into the Apple eco system.
Read MorePosted on March 16, 2011 by William Welbes
In Xcode 4, there’s no option click menu item to provide for adding a new framework to your project like there was in Xcode 3. After hunting around in Xcode 4, I was able to figure out how to add a new framework in:
Read MorePosted on March 15, 2011 by William Welbes
Over the past several weeks, I’ve encountered Balsamiq Mocups as a tool for creating wireframes of iPhone apps. This week, I downloaded a trial version to do some mock ups of my own. Balsamiq offers a fully functional 7 day trial that requires a license to save designs after the trial period is complete.
Read MorePosted on February 11, 2011 by William Welbes
Apple released a new version of Xcode 4 - the GM seed - that can now be used to develop and submit apps for the app store. Previously, the previews that they had available could not be used for building apps for app store submission. This made it somewhat useless for me at the time. With the ability to build and submit apps to the app store, I decided it was time to install the Xcode 4 GM seed and start using it with real projects being built for enterprise and the app store.
Read MorePosted on January 18, 2011 by William Welbes
Since the release of iOS 4, first on the iPhone 4 and now on the iPad with 4.2, you can distribute your app wirelessly - allowing users to install the app directly on their device without using iTunes or the iPhone configuration utility. This makes it very easy to publish a build to a web location and allow users to browse to a website in safari on the device and simply click a link to install the app. For Ad-Hoc distributions, the install still requires the mobile provisioning profile to be installed on the device, but the install is very much simplified following this process. This also allows apps to be installed onto remote devices that are not located near the developer or without having to email the ipa file with detailed instructions. I’m a big fan of making the install process as simple as possible.
Read MorePosted on January 11, 2011 by William Welbes
Given an NSManagedObject subclass that has several attributes defined as properties - a class file created from the CoreData model - how can one determine if the NSString attributes are “empty”?
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