Category Archives: iPhone

I’ve been working on porting Taipan! to the iPad, so I recently installed a UISplitViewController as the root of my controller hierarchy. There was a somewhat non-obvious trick to getting it working (spoiler warning: orientations), so I thought I’d write … Continue reading →

A reader writes (in reference to CATiledLayer Part 2): I have a simple pdf that has a couple of graphics on it. For example a circle and a square. This pdf is within a UIView that “has-a” CATiledLayer like yours. … Continue reading →

Not too much to say about this: It’s an OpenGL ES 1.1 demo. It draws and animates the Platonic solids (tap the screen to cycle through them). If you look at the code (most of the interesting stuff is in … Continue reading →

Here’s a brief, non-technical, but practical pointer for the iPhone developer: Don’t use the word “trial” to describe your freemium app. It’s perfectly ok to deploy a freemium model (give away a limited application with unlockable-for-a-fee upgrades) and it’s perfectly … Continue reading →

The “OpenGL ES Application” template in Xcode is quite illuminating. You can generate it from the Xcode menu: “File” -> “New Project” -> “OpenGL ES Application”. It will build and run as is, and draw an oscillating colored square in … Continue reading →

A reader writes: When calling dismissModalViewControllerAnimated: in 4.2, the viewWillAppear method of the view about to appear will fire before the viewWillDisappear method of the view you are dismissing. He’s right. In fact, I’ve tested this back to iOS 3.1.3 … Continue reading →

There’s an illuminating bug in Friday’s Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) directory monitoring demo which serves as a cautionary tale for anyone interested in using GCD (or blocks in general). It’s sort of a circular reference problem, triggered by the fact … Continue reading →

A reader (@ramsch) writes to call my attention to his post on AAPL’s developer forums (unfortunately you need to log in as a developer to see it … scroll to the bottom of page 2 — reply #38 — if … Continue reading →