Category Archives: Programming

Drawing Text on an Arc in CocoaTouch

Posted on August 18, 2011 by alec

CoreText is available now in iOS, but it’s not an easy framework to use. After trying several other approaches to draw text on an arc at this Stack Overflow page,  I adapted Apple’s sample code  CoreTextArcCocoa for Mac …

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How to get the Return key to dismiss a UITextView

Posted on July 15, 2010 by alec

Need to dismiss they keyboard in a UITextView? Changing the Return key to read “Done” doesn’t make the iPhone keyboard to go away.  Put this code in the delegate for your UITextView and your return key can behave more like …

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plist > JSON > XML

Posted on July 12, 2010 by alec

Having developed 4 or 5 iPhone apps now that download remote XML data from servers and populate tables view and other content, I can tell you without reservation that it is the slowest way to go.

Performance using JSON is …

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How To Place a UIWebView inside a UIScrollView

Posted on July 9, 2010 by alec

To display several pieces of content on a screen, I needed several views. A scroll view (UIScrollView) was necessary to encompass the headline, photo and story text; I had the headline and photo at the top in a …

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Making annotations fit on a Map View.

Posted on March 16, 2010 by admin

After struggling with formulae that convert degrees longitude and latitude to meters, I found a much better way to get annotations to fit on a Map View, thanks to this site:

http://codisllc.com/blog/zoom-mkmapview-to-fit-annotations/…

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Helpful Core Data debugging

Posted on March 16, 2010 by admin

Core Data is really great, but if your app crashes without warning it can be a major headache. Replacing the default error handling code with this more involved approach saved me hours of time debugging:

http://www.designcodeexecute.com/2009/08/28/iphone-sdk-coredata-debugging-error-1560-1570…

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Can not use an object as parameter to a method (Obj-C errors, part 2)

Posted on March 15, 2010 by admin

This is an easy one to seasoned X-coders, but one that tripped me up a few times when I first got started.

BAD CODE:

-(void) makePhotoFromImage: (UIImage )image;

ERROR:

can not use an object as parameter to a method

TRANSLATION…

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Objective C compiler errors: translations for newbs

Posted on March 4, 2010 by admin

I’m pretty new at Xcode and Objective C, so there may not be a one-to-one correspondence here between errors and the most probable cause, but this helps me so it may help you.

This will be a work in progress; …

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Dump mySQL database design into OmniGraffle

Posted on November 9, 2009 by alec

Check out this blog entry on Designweenie if you are a Mac user that uses OmniGraffle to design mySQL databases.

One important note: you will need to run AppleScript Editor in 32-bit mode if you are using Snow Leopard (Mac …

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mySQL to SQLite cheatsheet for iPhone developers

Posted on September 2, 2009 by alec

Although I started writing this as a cheat-sheet for myself (after many hours of struggling with this by trial-and-error), I figured it would be helpful for other iPhone developers who’d like to take a mySQL database online and migrate it …

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