Cocoanetics

Applyzer

Jun 02, 2009

While I was concentrating on being newly wed, Michael Dorn launched his app ranking service Applyzer.com into an open BETA phase. Because he is no putting all his development efforts into this site he has deprecated AppRanking for FREE which has been available for download from the Dr. Touch blog.

Applyzer is now looking for about 100 people to help test the new server and database. Participation will be for free during the BETA phase, after this time free apps’ data will stay free, paid apps data be available for a small monthly fee.

The BETA phase is scheduled to run until June 30th.

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Honeymoon

May 31, 2009

Mr. and Mrs. Touch are away on a short honeymoon in Bad Blumau Thermal Spa.

Thank You for all your happy wishes and congratulations. I believe that most of them belong to my wife Britta for becoming more important to me than all my Apple devices. (At least long enough to say my vows)

I’ll see you all when I get back to Cocoa surgery, training and frantic coding now with always-on Wedding ring.

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Advanced Sorting of NSArray with Functions

May 27, 2009

I’ve already discussed previously how to sort NSArray with descriptors and selectors. Even how to unsort it i.e. shuffle it. You can use descriptors to sort by KVC-compliant properties. Selectors you would use if the objects contained in the array have a comparison method themselves.

For those special cases where you neither have properties nor a suitable sort method built into the objects to be sorted you have to resort to the third and last method of sorting an NSArray: with a specialized sort function.

For two projects I need to sort an array of NSDictionaries. Here I’ll show you how I did it.

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State of the Art in App Cracking

May 26, 2009

ARTeam, a group of hackers who – according to their homepage – specialize in reverse engineering released a 29 page report titled “Patching Applications from Apple AppStore with additional protection” that shows the state of the art on iPhone app cracking.

This report was released in partial secrecy on May 16th on the ARTeam download page. No blog article. No announcement. It was only stumbled upon by a German blogger who on condition on anonymity provided it to me after I asked nicely. The report even has a section about “licensing”.

All code included with this tutorial is free to use and modify; we only ask that you mention where you found it.

Ok, I told you where I got it. Now let’s see what goodies it unearths.

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Target-specific Headers

May 25, 2009

Often you will add multiple targets to your project file to build variants of the same app. For example if you have a Lite version or Ad-sponsored variant using the same source code you would definitely save yourself a lot of work having a single project and then multiple targets.

While I was helping a colleague merging three projects into one we found it impossible to assign headers to single targets. You can assign source code, images and lots of other file types, but why oh why no headers? How would we make sure that from 3 Constants.h files always the correct one would be used?

There are of course methods out there which propose to either have a script replace the headers or use an ugly contruct like this:

#if defined(TARGET_1)
#import
#elif defined(TARGET_2)
#import
#else
#error Must define a TARGET macro!
#end

I you you too are cringing from seeing such code. Surely there must be a more elegant solution. I searched, and I found not one but TWO.
Read more

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Custom Back Button on Navigation View

May 24, 2009

When you push a view controller onto a navigation stack, the back button will always show the title of the previous view controller. This can lead to ugly effects if the title is too long. But then again, you want long titles on your view controllers because you don’t want to let the title bar space go to waste.

The method of how you can customize the back button is a little bit counterintuitive, but it was shown on episode 13 of the Standford lectures. [Here my I came to a screetching halt]

When I went to search my Blog for the link to the Standford stuff, I also found that I had already posted exactly the same recipe already one month ago. And It’s still valid, even though I did not remember posting it. This serves to show that you might not be as productive at 5 am in the morning as you would assume. Memory is lacking then.

Well, just to put in at least something new, here is a before and after visual illustration:

Before:

After:

Go to the previous article “Shorter Back Buttons“

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GeoCorder 1.0.3

May 23, 2009

The customer crash reports that Apple now makes available showed me a problem with GeoCorder that I had missed.

Removed redundant code that would load and save tracks in a seperate file in addition to the trackpoints written directly to a SQLite database while recording. This could cause timouts on program exit and long loading times at program start for people with lots of recorded trackpoints.
Thus program start and exit are now much faster for people with lots of recorded tracks.

It’s embarrassing I know, but how can you spot such a thing? When you test your app you don’t think to record so many tracks that applicationWillTerminate will time out and be aborted by the iPhone OS. But thanks to the crash reports I was immediately steered in the right direction of what to fix.

I’ve submitted this quick fix release to Apple, more usability enhancements are in the works.

UPDATE May 16th:

Apple rejected the update claiming that without network connectivity the screen stays black. That’s not possible because GeoCorder has a Default.png image and there is no network activity unless the user sends a track via e-mail. I tested the app on my iPhone 3G on 2.2.1 and iTouch 3.0b5, with and without network. No black screen.

But to be safe I ran Clang Static Analyzer over the code for 2.0 and even 3.0 and found a couple of unused variables, a mismatch between unsigned and signed and one code file that was not even used. So I cleaned those up and resubmitted.

UPDATE May 21st:

Apple rejected it again this time with an even more annoying message. But this time is the first time that they actually provide some information how I can fix it.

Your application, GeoCorder, cannot be posted to the App Store at this time because it does not adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.5.

When the device is not connected to a network, GeoCorder does not load its contents. When the user is on the “Record GPS Tack” screen the App fails to load location (please refer to screen shot). This behavior might lead to user confusion. It would be appropriate to display either a notification or an alert stating that internet connectivity is required.

Please take a look at the Reachability iPhone program sample which demonstrates the use of the System Configuration Reachability API to detect the absence of WiFi and Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN) services. Your application can then take appropriate action at the first point where network services are required.

Translation from convoluted to plain English: In Airplane Mode the iPhone does not get Core Location updates. Now why do they think of this NOW on the THIRD version I submitted to them for review?!

SECOND UPDATE MAY 21st:

I finished the app (once again) and submitted it to Apple with these enhancements:

I revamped the inner workings of the blip graph so that it can show recieving of Core Location updates independently from whether the user chooses to record them or not. Non-recorded blips are grey, recorded ones are red.
Position updates are now active as soon as the recording modal screen is opened and are deactivated as soon as the screen is exited.
Implemented connectivity sensing according to Apple’s suggestion. If you enter the recording screen without internet connectivity you get an alert to that effect.
I made a nicer splash screen, because having it look like the final recording table view would anger users because it would look like for the time of loading that the app does not react to user input.
Also I submitted a new free version of GeoCorder which will be sponsored by AdMob. It’s technologically identical to original GeoCorder.

I’ll update as soon as they get through.

UPDATE May 24th:

I received a crashing bug rejection (for a change *G*) for GeoCorder [FREE].

Thanks to the attached crash report and detailed instructions on how to reproduce the crash I quickly found the problem and fixed it. I had a dangling object reference to previously released memory. This would show if you recorded a track, removed it and tried to record another. Since both GeoCorders share the same code I had to replace the binary for regular GeoCorder as well.

Apple is getting faster, at least with newly submitted apps. I’m glad Apple Reviewers are working on Saturdays as well to work through new apps. That can only mean that they have multiple shifts, because Saturday is not a regular work day in the USA.

UPDATE June 16th

Apple had approved the free version rather quickly but the regular version was stuck “in review” even though it contains exactle the same code and functionality minus the ads. I wrote to Apple two days again and now finally the regular version became available as well.

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This Certificate Has Expired

May 23, 2009

Has it been 6 months already?

My development and distribution certificates expired much to my surprise while I was sitting on the train. Well actually it had expired the previous night, but it only transpired to me the first time I wanted to Build&Go while en route to Vienna. Which mildly annoyed me at first, but then I found that I can backdate my computers clock two days and restart XCode to allow for temporary continuation of some on-device testing.

To renew my certificates I logged into the program portal which already knew that I “currently do not have a valid certificate”. I used the keychain’s certificate assistant to generate the requests saved to disk and submitted them to apple for countersigning.

One thing that confused me was that now the name of the development certificate contains some additional string. I thought that maybe that was appended because I did not remove the expired certificates first, but even when I redid the whole process I did not get rid of it. Another surprise courtesy of Apple.

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The Death of Global Variables

May 22, 2009

c0der asks:

I currently implement global variables by defining them within the AppDelegate.h file (outside of class definition) and then include this file in each ViewController.m that needs access to these variables.

This works just fine but I’ve noticed that after saving/restoring these variables as persistent data (NSUserDefaults), their values seem to change over time.

My question: is this approach the right way to handle globals without encapsulation? I use a lot of ‘C’ data types — int, char, etc. for my global variables (rather than NSInterger, etc.) so I’m not sure if there’s a better approach.

My short answer: DON’T. Globals are EEEEVILLLLLL. Why not create an engine class for your app that you use as shared instance. Define all your “globals” there.

29 Comments

Should I Release Outlets?

May 20, 2009

bqbqhaha asks:

Let me ask you something as below.

A variable declared as IBOutlet could be released?

A variable declared as IBOutlet should be released?

I search for this issue many times, but still the answer is not found.
plz help me , plz

He is asking a question that most of us have when beginning with Interface Builder and Outlets. In plain English his question is “Should I release instance variables declared as IBOutlet?”

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UPDATE May 16th:

UPDATE May 21st:

SECOND UPDATE MAY 21st:

UPDATE May 24th:

UPDATE June 16th

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