Normally, I target developers in my posts, but today I had a special message that I wanted to send out to the user community. I’ve noticed a trend over the past year that troubles me some about the way users are using their reviewing power in places like the App Store or the Android Market.
Users, [...]
Mar
06
2010
Editorial: Your Reviews May Be Hurting You
Mar
04
2010
App Released: Ohm’s Best
Today Wireless Designs released Ohm’s Best for the iPhone, available for download on the App Store.
Ohm’s Best is an electronics calculator application that allows electronics technicians and electrical engineers to do circuit calculations using real component values that one can actually find and purchase. This functionality puts reduced design time and frustration right into your [...]
Mar
01
2010
What’s awakeFromNib for?
Sometimes traversing through the life-cycle callbacks of view loading on the iPhone still gives me a headache. Especially when using Interface Builder (IB) as part of the UI development, finding the right method to override in order to get your custom drawing/init/etc. done can be more difficult than it may seem. Recently, I was lost [...]
Feb
22
2010
Don’t Get Lost! Tag your Comments!
Project Management, like version control, is something every developer should always be doing at some level in their work…period. Regardless of the size and scope of a project, basic task management keeps things moving in the right direction. However, I’m not saying that this should require some elaborate process either. Oftentimes, a complex process can [...]
Feb
12
2010
iPhone Tip: Info Button Woes
Today’s tip is a simple solution to a common problem. The fix for this problem is all over the internet, but none of the places I visited seemed to give the whole story, they only revealed a piece of the puzzle (sorry for the cliché). All of us who use the iPhone with any [...]
Jan
25
2010
Android Dialog, or is it?
We’re all familiar with the concept of providing a temporary modal view to the user in an application for the purposes of notification or basic data entry. In the Android framework (as in many computer systems) a class is provided to the developer to create and maintain these views called a Dialog. This [...]
Jan
20
2010
Editorial: Why Android Deserves Your Attention
I’ve read an increasing number of articles on the web recently from people who fervently believe that the Android platform is dead before it ever really got started. The common mantra going along with this is that Android is late to the party, and they didn’t bring anything new with them. First of [...]
Dec
30
2009
Android Layouts Supporting Orientation
It’s been my experience that most developers don’t want to deal with screen rotation in their applications. They will either specifically code the app not to respond to rotation events (which can look weird when you have to slide the screen and use the keyboard), or they will forget that there are instances where [...]
Dec
28
2009
Adding Core Data Existing iPhone Projects
Core Data is a very powerful framework that Apple provides to developers for persisting data in their applications. The primary advantage that is provided by Core Data is the ability to leverage efficient data storage technologies like SQLite, without forcing the developer to think in terms of query language; Core Data allows a developer to [...]