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Category Archive for ‘Parts’ rss

Dr. Touch's Purchase Button

Feb 03, 2010

When you get around to adding In App Purchases (IAP) to your app you will find that Apple does not provide anything to help you with the UI. StoreKit only takes care of the buying backend. Therefore I sat down and spent many hours to construct a customizable purchase button to be the latest addition to the Dr. Touch Parts Store.

DTPurchaseButton

This is a button that has three states you need for In App Purchases: Neutral, Confirm and Purchased. For each of these states you can set a text and a title and the button does all the rest. It will send a message to your delegate when the button resizes so that you can move UI elements out of the way. It informs your app if a purchase should be made via StoreKit or whether it was cancelled. DTPurchase Button transmits an especially high value of your IAPs by  using a custom gloss finish.

Have a look at this video demonstration of the part in action:

Price: 100 EUR

You can order this part for use in your own projects via e-mail. See the terms and conditions at the bottom of my store page for the fine print.

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Dr. Touch's incredible POI Weight Loss Formula

Jan 22, 2010

I’ve been busily hacking away on this for the past week and now I have reached the level where I can formally announce this new addition to Dr. Touch’s Parts Store.

I was approached a week ago by somebody who suggest this to be sold as an inexpensive component and I immediately was intrigued by the problem. Imagine that you have an iPhone app which displays lots of PINs in a very restricted area. Naturally shops would be very close to each other causing the resulting annotation PINs to overlap. DTClusterMaker, the new component, aims to address this problem.

Without it your screen might look like this:

After a quick optimization with DTClusterMaker this mess turns into something much ligther, much nicer to look at:

I hope that you agree that the second view would be the preferred variant. This way you can still see the name of the city in question: München (= Munich).

DTClusterMaker employs a very efficient method to spatially sort and cluster closeby POIs. In the presented demonstration app you can explode any of the purple pins into it’s original POIs. You get two different algorithms to choose from: The perfect one, that tends to slow down if you feed it hundrets of POIs. And it’s ultra-fast cousin which works by “boxing” the POIs. It’s so fast in fact, that I am thinking of letting it run multiple times with a shifted grid and then choose the output that gives me the smallest number of POIs. If you have hundreds of POIs then you won’t see a difference.

DTClusterMaker is available now for you to purchase at an introductory price of 100 Euros. It still needs a bit of work in getting the interface to your code ironed out, but as with all components your access to the SVN repository where it is being developed insures that you get all those improvements for free. Also I am depending on your requirements to figure out the most elegant way to interact with the ultimate POI weight loss formula. 🙂

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Dr. Touch's Parts Store

Jan 03, 2010

UPDATE: This article was split into the announcement and the information about individual parts. The annoucement stayed in this article, but the individual parts’ description was moved to the Parts Store page.

I like to reverse-engineer stuff because I learn much from how somebody else (like Apple) solved a UI problem. Most of the solutions I am coming up with are too big for a blog article, instead they found a home on my SVN. Generally when I demo my demos the reactions are entirely positive and I get flooded with requests to license those technologies.

I am not yet entirely certain on how to best organize such an endeavor, but spontaneously I had a title for it spring up from the back of my head:  Dr. Touch’s Parts Store.

Dr. Touch being my online brand, Parts referring to the components that I build to easy integration into a multitude of projects and Store as in “show me the money”. iPhone Development is my livelyhood and passion. So as much I would like to give away all, that’s not the reality I live in. My bank does not yet accept pro bono as legal payment.

So, if you see something on this site or in my YouTube videos that you like to be able to use in your own apps, you can!

By purchasing a source-level license to any of Dr. Touch’s Parts you gain access to my Subversion Repository where I am continuing development on parts as I am fixing bugs or implementing requested features.

Here’s what I have to offer right off the bat. All these components are readily available to license. To order your access please contact me via e-mail. You will receive access and free implementation support.

Go To Parts Store page.

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