iPhone

There have been some things I have wanted in the iPhone for ages. I might be dreaming, but here’s a list of things I want to see, don’t want to see and things that I am not too fussed over (it would be great if they appeared but it wouldn’t change much for me).

In a project I’m currently working on I needed to generate a PDF based on a bunch of information the user had entered. The PDF needed to be very fancy and have images and graphics all over the place to make it look really nice. Instead of drawing everything from scratch I used to some of the PDF libraries on iOS that allowed me to create a new PDF based on an existing one, then draw the dynamic content over the top. This even preserves the nice vectors and crisp text inside the original so it remains perfect when printing. This saved me a lot of time and kept the PDF exactly how the client wanted it.

When the standard keyboard is not enough a keyboard accessory is often a good solution. I am talking of the one commonly seen in web apps, allowing the user to go between fields and drop the keyboard. These are extremely easy to add, and require very little code. In your UITextField you need to set the inputAccessoryView. This can take any UIView subclass and will display just like a regular keyboard, all animations are handled for you.

There have been a few very rare scenarios where I have actually required a dynamic header in a project. I mention Xcode in the title however this technique really applies to nearly any IDE or command line project.

If you’re an iOS developer you have probably seen the number 44 all over the place. The size of buttons, the size of navigation bars, the size of cells etc etc. But why are so many sizes 44 pixels?

A few months ago when the iPhone 5 came out I was going through a project I was working on at that time to make sure everything would work fine on the new screen. I didn’t need to change any code… everything just magically worked. The people in the office seemed to think this was amazing, but there’s not much to it, you just need to make your interfaces fluid so when things chance the interface will adjust and change with it

Often I see programmers hardcode keyboard animations into their apps. This will work fine when they test it out but will fail on a non-English keyboard (such as the Chinese keyboard), landscape keyboard, or if the standard keyboard size changes in a future version of iOS. They always assume the keyboard is 216 pixels high, which is not always the case.

For the most part iOS will let you code anything you want, however occasionally you will find the need to do something out of the ordinary, or reuse an existing class. Trying to do this with public APIs can be a headache, and often requires tons of code. You may heave heard of private APIs, and also may have heard about how apps get rejected from the AppStore for using them. This is often true, but if you know how to safely and properly use private APIs then you can harness their power.

A quick review on Facebook’s latest iPhone app called Poke. Spolier alert: it sucks.

When you get a new iPhone or iPad, often the Testflight app will not appear on your device anymore. Here’s how to fix this, and register your new device so you can once again install beta apps: 1. Open Safari and go to testflightapp.com/login. Enter your username and password to sign in   2. Now tap