Josh Schumacher: A PHP Developer » iPhone Development http://blog.joshschumacher.com The biggest and the best in the Northwest Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:54:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Advanced iPhone Web Development http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2009/05/06/advanced-iphone-web-development/ http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2009/05/06/advanced-iphone-web-development/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 19:06:06 +0000 Josh Schumacher http://blog.joshschumacher.com/?p=26 Yesterday (May 5th, 2009), I gave a presentation at the Seattle iPhone App Developers and Designers Meetup titled, “Advanced iPhone Web Development.” This presentation focused on the unique capabilities available in WebKit on the iPhone and on possibilities for utilizing UIWebViews inside of your native applications.

You can download a pdf version of the presentation here: Advanced iPhone Web Development [PDF]

Advanced iPhone Web Development Slideshow (Best Viewed In Fullscreen)
]]> http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2009/05/06/advanced-iphone-web-development/feed/ 3 The future of mobile web applications http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2009/03/18/the-future-of-mobile-web-applications/ http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2009/03/18/the-future-of-mobile-web-applications/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:07:26 +0000 Josh Schumacher http://blog.joshschumacher.com/?p=21 Thinking back three years ago, I was starting to play around with developing web applications for mobile devices.  The hot device of the time was the Palm Treo.  The default browser that came with the Treo, Blazer, really sucks.  It was rough trying to write pages that worked perfectly in Blazer.  Sure, simple, basic HTML rendered just fine but I had a background in developing for the traditional desktop web experience and I wanted to write awesome sites utilizing CSS and Javascript.  I wanted to write an AJAX application for mobile devices.  It would be icing on the cake if I could get it to work on lower end devices as well, but that seemed pretty pie in the sky at the time.

Webkit will be the future rendering engine of the mobile web (at least I hope it is).  It’s an amazing, full featured engine with bleeding edge web standards implementations of HTML 5 and CSS 3.  Webkit has been getting some great traction lately with some amazing devices implementing it as their default browser engine, Android, Palm Pre and of course the iPhone (and iPod Touch) have all fully embraced Webkit.  I want to see that list get a lot longer; I hope to start seeing Webkit on lower end mobile devices.

What makes Webkit so awesome?  How about CSS effects, blazing fast javascript execution (especially in their new Nitro engine in Safari 4), HTML offline support – including offline data storage and support for offline cache manifests, CSS gradients, CSS border radius and border images, CSS transforms, and a lot more.  On the iPhone, it now even has custom events to pass down gesture events to the DOM.  You can now do most things you could once only dream of doing in flash in straight HTML, CSS and Javascript on small devices stored in someone’s pocket.

The future of mobile web applications are social, location aware, providing a tailored experience based on user preferences.  Future mobile web applications will morph based on user behavior.  The will provide a graphically rich experience with beautiful design elements enhancing every aspect of the application.

]]> http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2009/03/18/the-future-of-mobile-web-applications/feed/ 1 Reading Common and Custom Values From Your Info.plist http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2009/02/19/reading-common-and-custom-values-from-your-infoplist/ http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2009/02/19/reading-common-and-custom-values-from-your-infoplist/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:35:21 +0000 Josh Schumacher http://blog.joshschumacher.com/?p=20 It seems like a pretty simple, common thing you would want to do in objective-c right?  All applications have an Info.plist (or a different plist file as defined in your "Info.plist File" property of your build target).  I've been pretty frustrated with the quality of google search results when trying to figure out how to do more or less mundane things with the iPhone SDK.  I'm going to start writting posts, especially when I have a hard time trying to find what I was looking for in search results.

Here's the quick and dirty: I have a game that we're building here at Treemo Labs, Tic A Tac Poker. We're working on getting a lite version out the door. I wanted to read a custom value out of the Info.plist to tell if it's the lite version or not. I couldn't figure out how to read a simple value from the default property list file. Here's some sample code to get the bundleIdentifier, bundle version and custom values from your Info.plist

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. // Create a new NSBundle pointer
  2. NSBundle* mainBundle;
  3.  
  4. // The Info.plist is considered the mainBundle.
  5. mainBundle = [NSBundle mainBundle]; 
  6.  
  7. // Reads the value of the custom key I added to the Info.plist
  8. [mainBundle objectForInfoDictionaryKey:@"myCustomKey"]
  9.  
  10. // Another handy thing I had to search around for a little
  11. // Get the value for the "Bundle version" from the Info.plist
  12. [mainBundle objectForInfoDictionaryKey:@"CFBundleVersion"]
  13.  
  14. // Need the bundle identifier? (probably something like com.mycorp.product)
  15. [mainBundle bundleIdentifier]

For more information about the NSBundle, view the NSBundle Reference Documentation.

To see an alphabetical list of the standard keys you can use in an information property list file, along with a brief description and the platforms to which they apply (Mac OS X or iPhone) check out the Property List Key Reference.

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