This Much I Know

We’ve updated our National Rail Enquiries app ready for iPhone 4, and have converted all of the app’s assets into beautiful high-definition format. We’re really pleased with the results, so I thought I’d post some screenshots as a sneak preview of how the app will look.

Even though the BBC’s planned iPhone apps have been postponed for a review, it’s still possible to get full-screen iPlayer video on your iPad, thanks to a neat web app workaround by the BBC. Here’s how to do so.

I run an iPhone development company.  We’re currently making our UK train times app fully compatible with VoiceOver. We’re being helped by users of the ViPhone Google Group, which is a forum for discussing the iPhone 3GS and its support for visually-impaired users.
I saw a comment from a member of the group the other day, [...]

We’re just putting the finishing touches to VoiceOver accessibility support for our National Rail Enquiries iPhone app. When adapting the app for VoiceOver, we found that Apple’s developer documentation for accessibility was pretty good, but there were still several questions we couldn’t answer. After some help from Apple, and some experimentation and research, we’ve managed to [...]

Apple is the world leader in digital music sales, and is making big inroads into digital video and TV.  The iPad completes the deal, bringing Apple’s magic to the world of eBook sales.

Lots of suggested iPad downsides on the Internet this morning. Thought I’d tackle a few.

One of the more interesting additions to the updated iTunes 9 Store is a new “Top Grossing Apps” view.  This is displayed bottom right on the main App Store screen in iTunes, and has also been added to the Mobile App Store in iPhone OS 3.1, under the Top 25 tab.

I’ve struggled to find a way to deduce if an iPhone OS device has the ability to make phone calls or not. There is a way to do so in iPhone OS 3.0, but I want to compile my code against the OS 2.0 SDK to enable it to run on as many devices [...]

Apple’s Ad Hoc distribution process is a godsend for iPhone beta-testing, but a right pain to use in practice.  I’ve tried several different approaches for creating and managing Ad Hoc testing; this article describes the one I now use for my National Rail Enquiries for iPhone application.

Whether it’s Shazam’s grey-on-black background on the App Store, arsenal.com’s subtle top bar, or the new Messages, iPod and Phone icons in iPhone OS 3.0, there can be no denying it: 45-degree-diagonal-one-pixel-stripes are this year’s curvy-cornered-box.  You heard it here first.

I’ve just launched a new web site, called devkits.net.  The site is all about a couple of iPhone development kits I’ve been working on. Each kit is a self-contained, fully documented set of classes to kick-start an iPhone development project. The kits have been fully tested in my own commercial software projects, and each kit comes with [...]

As part of a recent iPhone project, I needed to find a point at a certain distance from one location in the direction of a second location.  I found the formulas I needed on Movable Type Ltd’s scripts page, and converted these into the appropriate Obj-C code to run on an iPhone using the iPhone SDK.
I’m [...]

Sometimes it is useful to run different code when your iPhone application is being tested in the iPhone Simulator rather than on a real iPhone or iPod Touch device. For example, if you are testing CoreLocation functionality in the Simulator, all of CoreLocation’s returned locations will be for somewhere in Cupertino – not much [...]

I’m developing a new iPhone application. Part of the application needs a “filter a list of things” view. I’ve been looking at Apple’s approach for inspiration, most notably the Contacts application. I’ve come to the conclusion that the Contacts approach absolutely sucks, and so I’ve developed my own custom interface instead. [...]

Cocoa’s NSString doesn’t have great support for search and replace at the best of times. But the absence of the NSPredicate class from the iPhone SDK means that there is no quick way to strip a whole range of characters out of an NSString in one go on the iPhone. This article shows [...]

As part of an iPhone SDK project, I have an sqlite database with a table full of geographic locations, each stored as a latitude and longitude value in degrees. I wanted to be able to perform an SQL SELECT on this table and ORDER BY each row’s distance from an arbitrary point. I’ve [...]

A queue at the O2 store thirty people deep, at 7.40am in a small provincial town? Sod that for a lark.
Did I really bother to get up early?

Following on from my earlier grumble, I’ve decided that there’s quite a bit more to dislike about the iTunes App Store.

Subcategories For Games Are Rubbish
Developers Are Flooding The Store With Apps
The Icons Are Ugly (And It’s All Apple’s Fault)
The Top Apps Are The Top Apps

Read on to find out why…

So iTunes 7.7 is available, and with it the App Store. There are (by my reckoning) about 500 apps on there, of which iDrops, our puzzle game, is one. Though you wouldn’t know it.
Unfortunately, Apple have taken the approach of only listing eight games in each game category. If you are one [...]

This is shameless self-promotion, but I’ve created an iPhone / iPod Touch game, called “iDrops”, with my good friend Tim Down, and it’s available now on the iTunes App Store. It costs $0.99 (that’s £0.59, or €0,79), and it’s fiendishly addictive.
What’s more, you can play it for free (on your Mac or PC) before [...]