Coding Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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Why settle for out-of-date toolchains when you can build the latest and greatest from scratch.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 ...

iPhone Coding: Recording Audio

by Erica Sadun (Aug 6th, 2007)

Yesterday, I figured out how to record audio on the iPhone. Today, by popular request, I'll go through the how-to part. And, for those of you paying close attention, I've updated the application with lots of nice new features. For those of you playing along at home, here are the basics you'll need ...

Learn Cocoa, Part II

by Mat Lu (Feb 18th, 2007)

When we posted about Part I of Scott Stevenson's Learn Cocoa tutorial, some people complained that there wasn't actually any coding involved. Well Part II at least introduces what Scott calls "Thinking in Code" and begins to dig a little deeper into what is required to actually use Xcode to write a ...

Ruby + AppleScript = RubyOSA

by David Chartier (Oct 26th, 2006)

Our friends at Download Squad have discovered a melding of two scripting worlds: AppleScript and Ruby. RubyOSA is the darling scriptenstein of these two languages, and while I don't know a lick of either, I'm willing to bet this could be a popular amongst the code ninjas in the audience. Ruby is a ...

BBEdit 8.5 released with new UI, code folding, clippings - 160 total improvements

by David Chartier (Sep 7th, 2006)

Bare Bones Software really knows how to deliver a .5 release, as the have just announced v8.5 of BBEdit, their powerful and professional HTML and code editor. Amongst the total 160 new and updated features is a revamped UI for both the app and its now-searchable preferences, 'code folding' for ...

How to ask development questions 101

by David Chartier (Jul 21st, 2006)

If you are a budding developer, there are a few different ways to seek help from your peers. Whether you send an email off to your hero developer or jump into a chat room, it's not just what you ask, but how you ask the question that can make all the difference. Mike Ash, a programmer for Rogue ...