At times you may find that you need a control that has not yet been provided for you. In my case I needed a star rating control for iWoman. Ladies will be able to star their love encounters. And the way how such a thing is done nowadays is via selecting between 0 and 5 stars. (If you now ask me to rig it such that your girl can only rate you with 5 stars, then I’ll bitch-slap you)

So I decided to make a UIView that would take UIImages for empty, half-full and full stars. Also I wanted to have some customizability like different numbers of stars and to be able to turn half-full stars on and off. That’s where I created multiple properties so that these values can be set from outside the instance. The steps are always: instance variable (“IVAR”), @property, @synthesize and if the property is a retained object then a line in dealloc.

I made this YouTube video to give you a demonstration and guided tour of DTStarRatingView.

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I’m adding note taking to iWoman 2.0 and so I was thinking which metaphor would be one that users would understand and like. So I decided to mimic the look and feel of the built-in Notes app.

There where quite a few interesting things I had to learn and figure out and in this article I am going to share them with you. These are techniques that you can use in many other scenarios besides of making your own Notes view controller.

I was clear from the start that I needed to use a UITextView for the editing itself. Notes.app has several specialities that we have to figure out if we want to capture the look.

• Font is Marker Felt Thin, Size 19.
• each line sits on top of a grayish blue horizontal line
• the text view has a padding at all sides, something that the standard UITextView does not give us
• There is padding at the top, but still the text goes up to the corner
• the horizontal lines move together with the text and never end towards the bottom
• two static vertical brown lines line up with markings at the top and the bottom
• the body of the notes is not just a yellow gradient, but has some structure and speckles
• scrolled text disappears behind the images for the top and bottom edge
• The text view needs to be dynamically resized when the keyboard appears or disappears to prevent hiding of text.

Those where the challenges, in this YouTube video you see my solution and an overview of how I achieved it. More in-depth reasoning you find below.

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Being present longer than iPhone OS exists on the Mac platform NSPredicate was only introduced to us iPhone developers in Version 3.0 of the SDK. They have multiple interesting uses, some of which I am going to explore in this article.

You will see how you can filter an array of dictionaries, learn that the same also works for your own custom classes. Then we’ll see how to replace convoluted IF trees with simple predicates. We’ll explore how to use predicates to filter entries of a table view and finally peek into the inner workings of predicates.

Being simple and powerful at the same time it took me 3 hours to write this article. I hope you don’t give up halfway through it, because I promise it will be a great addition to your skillset as iPhone developer.

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The first thing to learn when starting to persist data onto the iPhones solid state drive is that all apps have their own sandbox. Contrary to other operating systems where you have a shared documents folder, you have several directories for each individual apps. Now on the iPhone these sandbox directories all get a GUID in their name, so you have no way to hardcode or guess the real path they will end up on.

Luckily there is a method of getting the path for those directory, which I wrote about about a year ago: Getting Standard Paths. Today I will elaborate a bit on what I learned since then, it turns out that this is only half the story and as intermediate programmer you will want to use the correct kind of folder for each task.

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