Coding Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Manage secret preferences with Secrets

by Dave Caolo (Mar 1st, 2008)

Here's a clever utility from the creator of Quicksilver. Secrets (no, not the Van Halen song) is a preference pane that lets you fiddle with the hidden defaults of nearly all your applications. For instance, show the iPhoto toobar in full screen mode and make those iTunes arrows link to your library ...

Trism matches the iPhone's accelerometer with puzzle gameplay

by Mike Schramm (Feb 29th, 2008)

One more reason why we can't wait for the iPhone SDK to drop. GameSetWatch has a short interview up with developer Steve D of Demiforce about his new iPhone game, Trism. It's a Bejeweled-like gem matching puzzle game, but the twist is that after getting matched, the gems fall in the direction that ...

TUAW Responds: Reader requests 1.1.2 Header Bundle

by Erica Sadun (Nov 16th, 2007)

TUAW Reader scw wrote in asking if I could put together the headers for the 1.1.2 Frameworks in a downloadable format. Scw, your wish is our...um...command Number 1 Priority request. I took out some time and zipped up a complete 1.1.2 header bundle for you. TUAW hopes this helps you update your ...

iPhone Coding: Use NSBundle and avoid hard-coded paths

by Erica Sadun (Nov 13th, 2007)

Listen up, iPhone coders, NSBundle is your friend. It lets you look in your main .app bundle and retrieve files without hardcoding paths. Avoid "/Application/MyProg.app/foo.png" and replace your absolute references with relative ones. This lets your users install your applications wherever they ...

iPhone Coding: iPhone Developer Docs updated to 1.1.2

by Erica Sadun (Nov 13th, 2007)

A few weeks ago, our Mike Rose posted about my 1.1.1 iPhone header documentation. I'm pleased to say that after a huge amount of work, I've updated those docs up to version 1.1.2. The new documents cover all the Objective-C headers for the iPhone and iPod touch 1.1.2 frameworks including updated ...

iPhone Coding: Bonjour wrapper simplifies iPhone implementation

by Erica Sadun (Nov 7th, 2007)

Man, I wish this Bonjour class wrapper had been around a few weeks ago. The CFBonjour Cocoa class simplifies mDNS/Bonjour programming for the iPhone and iPod touch. iPhone developer Ecume pointed me towards this simple class that allows you to publish and subscribe to Bonjour network services with a ...

iPhone Coding: Build your Leopard toolchain from scratch

by Erica Sadun (Oct 31st, 2007)

Why settle for out-of-date toolchains when you can build the latest and greatest from scratch. Nicholas "Drudge" Penree put together this handy how-to that walks you through the process. Be aware that you'll need to be running the gold master version of Leopard with the latest XCode release. These ...

iPhone Coding: Leopard-compatible Binary Toolchain Installer

by Erica Sadun (Oct 31st, 2007)

Looking to compile software for the iPhone and iPod touch under Leopard? There are two approaches: You can download the latest toolchain svn from Google Code or you can use a legacy toolchain installer that just happens to work under Leopard. Last night, Nicholas "Drudge" Penree pointed me towards a ...

iPhone Coding: Using the Accelerometer

by Erica Sadun (Sep 10th, 2007)

You don't need to use a lot of fancy routines to subscribe to data generated by the iPhone's built in accelerometer. A single UIApplication delegate lets you know whenever the iPhone has updated its tilt data. When you add a method for (void)acceleratedInX:(float)xx Y:(float)yy Z:(float)zz to any ...

Push-to-Talk developer pack

by Erica Sadun (Sep 6th, 2007)

The barriers to iPhone-to-iPhone communication are quickly dropping away. Yesterday I put together a push-to-talk developer pack in the spirit of "just add water", or in this case, "just add point-to-point data transfer". It includes a sample app and code for recording and playing back audio as well ...

iPhone Coding: Using the Slider

by Erica Sadun (Sep 4th, 2007)

In terms of application development, the iPhone's UISlider is pretty standard. It works like nearly every other slider you've ever programmed. It offers a drag-able thumb control that moves between a minimum and maximum value. As its dragged, the slider produces events that you can redirect to your ...

Found Footage: $2 multitouch screen, made with iSight

by Mike Schramm (Aug 28th, 2007)

Multitouch is all the rage lately, but one of the drawbacks is that it's still pretty expensive. Enter this ingenious device-- it's a bag with dye colored water in it. That bag is then laid flat on a glass table, an iSight camera is placed underneath, the computer is coded (it appears, anyway) to ...

iPhone MAME project launched

by Mike Schramm (Aug 20th, 2007)

I'm pretty sure that, with this link, we've hit all the basic retrogaming points for the iPhone (wait-- can I play Nethack on it yet?). Yes, iphone-sdl-mame aims to bring all of your MAME favorites to Apple's latest endeavor. Like all of the other projects we've covered, it's open source, unofficial ...

iPhone Coding: NSLog on the iPhone

by Erica Sadun (Aug 17th, 2007)

NSLog provides one of the most important debugging tools for your iPhone arsenal. Unlike its Cocoa equivalent, the iPhone NSLog sends information to the command line. It's basically a printf for NS and UI objects. To print an NSString, for example, you might use NSLog(@"String is %@", mystring);. ...

iPhone Coding: Working with the Navigation Bar

by Erica Sadun (Aug 16th, 2007)

The iPhone Navigation Bar offers a simple way to add button-based navigation to your iPhone applications. Defined in UIKit/UINavigationBar.h, this class allows you to add one or two buttons to the kind of blue iPhone-looking bar shown here. Use these buttons to move between program screens or to ...