Okay so Trivial has been out for a couple of weeks now, but incase anyone is just watching my feed I thought I should mention it.
On top of that my website has seen yet another redesign. I am very happy with how everything looks now so hopefully I will be able to keep it around for more then a year.
You may have also noticed a coming soon teaser on my software page as well as a few tweets about it. More about that should be available soon as development on it is finishing up.
Okay, admittedly I have been doing a terrible job at running a developer’s blog. I am really going to try and start giving back to the community. This is my first attempt at sharing code and tricks that I have developed for various projects.
Today I will be showing everyone how to make a delete button like we see in Mail App.
First off you will need two resources one for the background one for the icon.
You then simply create a button.
/*Set your button size*/
deleteButton.frame = CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 95, 33);
/*Set button background and scale it to fit the frame we set*/
[deleteButton setBackgroundImage: [[UIImage imageNamed: @"redButton.png"] stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:7.0 topCapHeight:0.0] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
/*Set the icon*/
[deleteButton setImage:[UIImage imageNamed: @"trashIcon.png"] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
/*Then when the user has items selected to be deleted you can set the title*/
[deleteButton setTitle: [NSString stringWithFormat @"Delete (%i), numObjectsSelected] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
/*When the user has nothing selected you can disable the button with*/
deleteButton.enabled = FALSE;
/*Don’t forget to enable it when the user has selected a file!*/
And this is what our final product looks like, the button adjust and centers just like the Mail App button.
You are free to use this code or modify it in anyway that you want, I only ask that if you plan using it that you send me an email or a comment with what it is being used in. If you plan on republishing this tutorial please give me credit somewhere.
@kylerichter
‘Nuff Said
The iPhone is an amazing platform for both an end user as well as a software developer. For the benefit of this post I will be talking about the iPhone strictly from a developer standpoint, although I hope that end users will benefit from some of my insights.
Programming on the Mac has greatly improved over the last several years. The tools have gotten better, the support is unmatched, and the users are amazing. Many developers will notice more Mac sales then PC sales for the same product even with the much smaller market share. This can be caused by several factors such as less programs available, but it is true nonetheless.
When talking about areas like NYC, LA, Seattle, Phoenix, and Chicago you could easily fit all the Mac shareware developers from each area into a single room. It has become a very tight knit community over the last few years and it is not uncommon to have heard of developers before meeting them.
Even with all these great benefits of programming on the Mac one of the hardest things to do is let people know about your software. It is hard to target only Mac users on the internet unless you are going to a mac specific site. Even then the majority of Apple users do not regularly visit sites like MacUpdate, TUAW, and VersionTracker. Apple downloads section is a bit better but still not great. In the Apple Menu on every Mac there is a link for “Mac OS X Software…” which takes you to Apple’s Downloads section, but how many of you have ever clicked it?
Well before I start to get even more off topic, I better explain what this has to do with the iPhone. The iPhone and the “App Store” that will be included with it is what we call a captive market. What this means is that every single person who owns an iPhone will have access to your software. Not only will they have access but they will have access wherever they go. This is something that really has never been available to shareware developers before.
Let me shed some light on how vital this is. You are in a bar and want to look up some new drinks, hop onto your iPhone and grab a drink mixer application. You are waiting to see a doctor, hop on the iPhone and purchase a $2 game to pass the time. You are lost in NYC’s Subway system and can’t find a map, again onto the App Store. The ability to purchase software when you want it anywhere in the country (world) is priceless. It will create a whole new type of software consumer.
Plus the market is much wider then only people with Macs, iPhones are very popular and with the upcoming introduction of the iPhone 3G even more people will be buying them. Apple is handling all credit card and billing processing so that even eliminates a good deal of the support arm of the software. All in all it is a tremendous opportunity for a platform. It would appear that tons of non-mac developers are realizing this as well and starting to write software for the iPhone. This is where the problem (for me) starts.
There is currently an iPhone NDA, which basically states you are not allowed to talk about any code or anything you are writing for the iPhone. Add that to the surge of people making iPhone software and what you have is thousands of people coding applications with no idea what anyone else is doing. This creates several issues.
• There will very likely be several of the same kind of application available. How many people do you think are working on things like tic-tac-toe right now?
• There will very likely be a wide price range for similar products, since no one has any idea what to price their software at.
• As a developer you have no idea what the requirements will be needed for software to be accepted, I would like to think that through Apple’s screening process it will be hard to get software into the App Store. Otherwise we could be completely buried by hundreds of “Hello World” applications.
• As a developer I have no idea what anyone else is working on, whenever I come up with a good iPhone idea I convince myself that 10 other people are already writing it and plan to release it as freeware.
• Navigating on the iPhone is as easy as it can get but it is still a small screen it will be very difficult to search through 10,000 applications.
In light of these issues I have taken a wait and see approach. Seeing what is in the App Store on launch and what the prices are will give me a good idea of what projects I can work on for the iPhone. It is going to be a very exciting year when it comes to iPhone development and I hope to be able to have enough time to write some software and contribute to a historic era.
Late last night I released Renew. Renew is a new application based off the time tested Looking Glass engine. A couple of months ago while handling some Looking Glass related business it occurred to me that the engine itself could be used to virtually download anything as a desktop image. The exact time that the idea for Renew occurred to me has unfortunately been lost to the ages.
With Looking Glass the user selects a webcam and displays the feed from that camera, one of the tradeoffs of using live images is the quality is normally very poor. What Renew does is scour the web for desktop images and adds them to a giant randomized list. Renew at a set interval downloads an image from this list and uses it as your desktop picture. The result is thousands of full quality images from all over the internet.
There was some hesitation to ever program Renew because the images it was finding and downloading did in no way belong to Dragon Forged Software. All the images it finds are on publicly accessible free desktop websites. Since the license for the images is typically for private and personal use we would be unable to bundle them with Renew in anyway, without contacting thousands of artist and photographers. This would also swell the size of renew to a couple of gigabytes. To keep everything on the up and up Renew downloads these images in exactly the same way that you would with a web browser, it does not store the images locally or on our servers at all. As a benefit this also means the Renew is constantly evolving and finding new images as well as removing images that are no longer available. This creates a constantly new and fresh desktop.
Renew was released in what we call a cold release. It is a technique that I have used for the last three software releases I have done. The software is released but we do not tell anyone. Only people who stumble across the website are aware that there is new software available. In the event that the software has a major bug the amount of effected users is much lower then would be with a typically full scale launch. Tuesday I will send out my normal press releases, thursday when initial demand has cooled I will publish to the update sites, and next week I will look into promotional ads on mac related websites. The software is slowly released over a period of about a week, which also greatly reduces the surge on our website as well.
I hope everyone enjoys Renew and I look forward to hearing back from our users with suggestions for future releases.
With the SDK(Software Development Kit) for the iPhone now available and the increase market share of OS X the need for companies to integrate the Macintosh platform into their work flow is greater then ever. Many companies have begun seeking independent contract programmers to code Mac software for them.
Dragon Forged Software is pleased to bring consulting and programming services into its mainstream product line. With over five years of Macintosh development experience and previous contracting experience Dragon Forged Software is the perfect solution to your Mac software needs. We are available to work on both the iPhone and OS X projects and look forward to diving into this blossoming market.
As some of the frequent visitors of the site may have noticed the blog has recently been revamped. I migrated from Moveable Type to WordPress and removed all the personal blog post. My personal blog has been moved to weirdinternets.com and this blog is now strictly a Dragon Forged development blog. If you are looking for my old blog here it is achieved at www.dragonforged.com/blog.
Well it is kind of a moot point since I won’t update the links to the new Blog until Renew is released in the next couple of weeks and I add the product links for it.
Yes this blog will remain ad supported for the time being, it takes a slight load off the company and allows us to absorb the hosting fees for the entire site. So in the end it saves everyone a couple of cents on the software. I have tried to keep the ads as unobtrusive as possible, hopefully they won’t get in the way.