UIWebViews, UIKeyboards, and UIToolbars. Oh My.

Posted on by
Reply

You know the toolbar that appears above the keyboard when you tap on a form field in a UIWebView? Its called an inputAccessoryView. You can customize the inputAccessoryView for a UITextField or a UITextInput objects but not for a UIWebView. For whatever reason Apple decided to not support a custom inputAccessoryView for a UIWebView and has instead added their own view with buttons for navigating between form fields and dismissing the keyboard. Sometimes you might prefer to use a toolbar of your own design rather than the default one Apple supplies. While this is possible it is not without certain risks. This article will consider a few techniques for removing the default toolbar in order to replace it with one of your own.

Continue reading →

ContentEditable, Rich-Text Editing, and Mobile Safari

Posted on by
Reply

Have you had a chance to play around with HTML5′s contentEditable feature? Basically it lets you make any supporting element editable. Its pretty cool, check out the demo.

This feature offers up lots of potential for rich text editing. And, while the Mozilla demo doesn’t show this, you can even insert adhoc html which opens the door to inserting more complex html elements like images, tables, audio and video. It just takes a little extra effort.

ContentEditable is supported in modern desktop browsers but things get a little dodgy on the mobile front. The docs say it is not supported in the iOS browser but this is no longer the case since iOS 5.0. There are, apparently, a few quirks one of which involves the events that an active contentEditable node will dispatch.

Continue reading →

Fun with PhoneGap and jQueryMobile

Posted on by
1

Until recently the iOS apps I’ve worked on have all been native apps — partly because I’ve felt that you get the best quality app from native development and partly because hybrid libraries haven’t supported all the features I needed. Now I can say I’ve built my first hybrid app using PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile and I want to share my experience.

PhoneGap is a light-weight mobile framework that promises to let you build your app once with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then deploy it across all the major mobile platforms. It basically provides a native wrapper for a web app, exposing a variety of native OS features that would otherwise be unavailable — the camera and photo library for instance.

jQuery Mobile is a mobile targeted version of the popular jQuery and jQuery UI frameworks. It promises to be lightweight, flexible and easily themeable (your mileage may vary) but appears to still be dependent on the core jQuery library.

The app was fairly basic. It would be powered by an API, needed a login screen, a screen to display a list of a user’s saved images, and let a user either upload a new image from their photo library, or their phone’s camera. These are all features supported by PhoneGap, and jQuery Mobile looked like a great resource to get a jump start on the UI. Also, I’d only be concerned with the iOS version of the app… for now.

Continue reading →

Decrypting HTTP Streaming Video with NSURLProtocol

Posted on by
15

I want to share what I thought was a clever idea from a member of Apple’s DTS team. I’d been working on an app featuring a custom video player and video delivered via HTTP streaming. The challenge centered on how to elegantly decrypt an encrypted video stream in the app without transmitting the key with the stream. Some examples I Googled talked about serving the video up over a custom protocol and using a subclass of NSURLProtocol and then manually decrypting the stream, and while these worked, it seemed like a lot of unnecessary work. As it turned out subclassing NSURLProtocol was the right place to start but the final solution was so much simpler than the examples I’d seen.

Continue reading →

Comfortable Office Space

Posted on by
Reply

My career as an office worker has been a constant battle to find a way to be comfortable in my workspace. I have memories of fighting with the adjustments of office chairs and trying to recline with my keyboard in my lap and feet on my desk when the boss wasn’t looking. Even supposedly ergonomically correct desk setups were bothersome. For me, desks (pods especially) and office chairs just suck.

Continue reading →

Signing Google API URLs in iOS

Posted on by
Reply

Lately I’ve been working with the Google Directions API. The service is free to use, you don’t even need to sign up for an API key. However, if you do, you get to make more requests from the service per day. A lot more! So it certainly behooves you to sign up as a Premier customer if you plan to do more than make light use of the API. The catch is all requests to the API from Premier customers have to be signed with an API key, and this was just a little bit annoying to do for iOS development. So here’s a quick walk through to help out the next guy.

Continue reading →

Preparing Graphics for Multiple Mobile Platforms

Posted on by
1

If you are a graphic designer preparing graphics a multi-platform mobile app, there are a few things you should know before you start, to make things easier on yourself and the developer implementing your design. This article focuses on the iOS and Android platforms, beginning with a brief overview of the layout tools for each OS, then looking at how to deal with different screens, sizes and orientations.

Continue reading →

Strange iOS App Exit When Testing with the Debugger

Posted on by
2

Today I was testing a new build of an iOS app and experienced what I think is a weird conflict with a previous version of the app. Here’s what happened:

I was testing a developer build of the app on an iPhone 3G running 3.1.2 and an iPhone 4 running 4.0.1. Before testing I installed an updated developer provisioning profile on each device. Everything worked perfectly on the 3G, but on the iPhone 4 the app would show the splash screen for a split second then close. It was as if the app was crashing on the iPhone 4 but there was no crash information showing up in the debugger. As far as the debugger was concerned there was nothing wrong to report.

I opened the Organizer window and checked the Device Logs tab for any crashes but there was nothing regarding the app I was testing. Next I checked the Console tab and saw the following:

Tue Sep 7 15:59:11 My-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (UIKitApplication:com.appname[0x2d1][6531]) : (UIKitApplication:com.appname[0x2d1]) posix_spawn(“/var/mobile/Applications/…/AppName.app/AppName”, …): Permission denied

Tue Sep 7 15:59:11 My-iPhone SpringBoard[28] : Unable to obtain a task name port right for pid 6531: (os/kern) failure

Tue Sep 7 15:59:11 My-iPhone com.apple.launchd[1] (UIKitApplication:com.appname[0x2d1][6531]) : (UIKitApplication:com.appname[0x2d1]) Exited with exit code: 1

Tue Sep 7 15:59:11 My-iPhone SpringBoard[28] : Unable to look up event port name for pid 6531: (os/kern) successful

Tue Sep 7 15:59:11 My-iPhone SpringBoard[28] : Unable to send activation event to com.appname animate activate: safe animationStart = 406459.5189769584 deactivate: : (ipc/send) invalid destination port

Tue Sep 7 15:59:11 My-iPhone SpringBoard[28] : Application ‘AppName’ exited abnormally with exit status 1

I Googled for explanations about the different warnings without success. Not knowing what else to do I decided to test the app one more time from a clean slate, so I deleted both the app and development profile from the iPhone 4. I tested again and to my surprise the app launched and worked flawlessly.

So what happened? An ad hoc build of a previous version of the app was already installed on the iPhone 4 and I did not delete it before testing a new developer build. Maybe Xcode 3.2.3 doesn’t completely remove a previous version of an application when testing a new version, and instead only updates relevant parts of the application’s bundle. If the bundle wasn’t updated correctly I suppose it could explain this weird behavior, though I really would have expected the app to be replaced completely or for an outright crash when i tried to run the app.

Anyway, if you are testing your app and you see similar behavior and an error message like the one above try deleting your app from the phone and then testing. Maybe it will work for you as well.

Gripes About Android’s WebView

Posted on by
9

I’ve been a little disappointed with my experience using Android WebViews. Perhaps naively, I expected WebViews by default to just work and behave the same way as the Webkit-based Browser app. I was wrong. Android WebViews seem to start out as very basic browser implementations and require you to manually enable or implement support for various behavior that you just expect from a browser.

Continue reading →