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Design by a Friend

May 26, 2011

Apple tells us that apps are 60% design and only 30% code. So you want to have an experienced designer at your side that has some experience in designing iPhone UI and UX. But at the same time professionals can easily charge $100 per hour or more. A typical iOS app icon would cost you $500. All these price tags make professional looking apps seem out of reach …

Meet Christian Pfandler!

Christian, or CP how we call him, is doing his designing mostly out of passion, but contrary to established designers he has retained the flexibility of a one-man shop. Flexibility that reduces your cost as he is willing to scale his efforts for you from an eye-catching app icon all the way to fully designing an app.

It’s great to call Christian Pfandler a friend of mine worth thousands of dollars normally needed when you hire a designer. So all of our recent design work was done by Christian Pfandler who is frankly a total graphics geek and artisan. He will also start his own UI & UX design related blog soon at www.cp.tv.

3 Comments

What Impact will new Web-Technologies have on iOS Developers?

May 25, 2011

Jamar Parris asks:

I’ve really been contemplating whether to focus my efforts on one versus the other as I’m still new to both technologies. What impact do you think will HTML5, CSS3, WebGL, etc have on Objective-C iOS developers?

The question web versus native is one that makes waves every once in a while when there is support for a new formerly native technology in browsers or when Apple rejects an app. Let me expand my answer a bit, as there were a couple of recent experiences that serve well to underline my opinion on this question.

1 Comment

And Now Lazy Loading with NSURLConnection

May 23, 2011

In my previous post I demonstrated how to quickly whip up some lazy loading for a UIImageView. Today I revamped it to use NSURLConnection instead, because this would allow for cancelling the request. It also gives us the option of specifying if we want to make use of the cache and also how long we’re actually willing to wait for an answer.

That sounds more straightforward than it actually is. If you simply use an NSURLConnection with its delegate methods then you might not see anything wrong, unless you are using this lazy image view as subview of a UIScrollView. The problem there is that the scroll view blocks the run loop and so your connection events will not get delivered until you lift the finger.

But I found a solution for that. Let me know in the comments if you think something could be done in a more elegant way. The code for this is available in the NSAttributedString+HTML project.

5 Comments

A Quick Lazy-Loading UIImageView

May 20, 2011

In case you ever need to enhance UIImageView to load it’s image lazily… like if it’s coming from a web URL.

I used this on my NSAttributedStrings+HTML open source project to improve performance and also be able to have images that are not available locally. But you don’t want to do a synchronous call over the web, that would block your UI.

I admit, it’s a quickie, but hey, sometimes those are also fun!

4 Comments

Functions as Parameters – Old & New

May 19, 2011

This topic is not for the faint of heart because it requires that you permit an additional level of abstraction in your brain to be able to grasp it. Until know all my ivars and properties where either scalar values (like an NSInteger) or pointers to Objective-C instances (like NSString *). But there are cases when you actually want to be able to store more complex functionality yet not have the overhead of object creation and messaging.

From the C days we have a mechanism called “function pointers” and today I’ll show you how you can pass a function itself to an Obj-C class and store it in an instance variable. There are a couple of SDK functions that make use of that.

The we’ll explore the modern-day equivalent of providing this sort of “plug in” dynamic functionality: doing the same thing with blocks. If you’re lucky to have iOS 4.x as minimum requirement for your project then those blocks might be nicer to work with than function pointers.

5 Comments

To Universal or Not

May 18, 2011

Daniel Wood asked:

Considering making a Blockees universal. What are people’s thoughts on universal apps? Good for users, but splits sales between devices.

My first gut response was, that IMHO users love universal apps, whereas marketeers and financiers hate them. HD or “for iPad” versions can generally be sold for a higher price.

Daniel then voiced his fear that if you have an universal app you might “dilute” your download rank on iTunes. Again I responded from my feeling that I don’t think that this is right. Daniel challenged me to prove it. And so I will.

8 Comments

What’s your Poison?

May 18, 2011

I asked the Twitterverse the following question:

iOS Developers: Coffee or Green Tea?

I was only half-expecting useful responses. But since I got 23 answers, I figured I might as well tabulate them.

3 Comments

iWoman Featured

May 18, 2011

René Lindhorst attended the MobileTech Conference in Munich in April. He snapped this picture of a slide stating “we use our phones to manage every aspect of our lifes”. You can tell that this conference was in Germany due to the misspelling of “lives”. 🙂

I still love that they chose our new 2.0 iWoman icon top left, as indeed my wife (and many other humans of the female persuasion) use iWoman to manage a very important part of their lives. And thanks for putting it in good company: I see Pages, Evernote, Carcassonne and Angry Birds there, all apps that I also have installed, too.

1 Comment

What Does it Cost To Advertise Your Product/Site?

May 15, 2011

When you are looking for ways to increase exposure to your site or apps you have a plethora of options of holes that you can pour money in to. I found that milage varies enormously.

Google AdWords wanted me to have another look at their offering and gave me a credit for 100 Euros to spend on their ad network. At the same time I put exactly the same banner ad on 3 sites that I found when browsing the BuySellAds list of publishers. Also I’ve had several customers for putting ads on the Cocoanetics site, one app, and three ads for two components.

Let’s have a look at the numbers to see if we cannot figure out some feel for the varying effectiveness.
Read more

5 Comments

iOS Jobs Rundown

May 13, 2011

When I saw this creative job advert I figured, why not pull together the most interesting iOS jobs into an article. I keep telling you that more companies are hiring than there are iOS software engineers looking to be hired. Now here’s the proof.

I was contemplating several forms of establishing a platform that you could refer to. Should I put it on a dedicated Jobs page on Cocoapedia? Make a jobs page on this here blog? Write about it?

All of the above. So far 7 companies have sent me links to their job specifications. Since this is a large enough first sample to call that “many companies” here’s a quick rundown and commentary on the jobs.

4 Comments

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