Tag : ios | Made by Many

A tale of two cameras

22 March 2012
0 comments

I’m going to share some of the thinking and code behind the Picle iPhone app starting with the camera functionality. This will involve showing some code snippets and describing classes and frameworks found in the Apple iOS SDK.

At the heart of the the Picle app is the ability to use the iPhone camera and microphone in quick succession. The user experience of this functionality is critical to feel of the app so plenty of work has been done both before and after the initial release. Indeed the next release will have this completely reworked.

Read this post

URL encoding an NSString on iOS

31 August 2010
8 comments

I’ve been working on an iPhone app for the last few weeks, which I’ve really enjoyed. Every now and again, though, you hit what seems like a bug in the iOS SDK.

This seems to happen much more frequently than it ever did when I was coding in C#. As a result, my default debugging approach – that any problem with my app must be my fault rather than something in the framework – has shifted slightly. I’m now much more likely to question the framework itself, and with a quick Google search it’s common to find other developers who have experienced the same problem.

Here’s one that bit me recently. NSString has a method calledstringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding, which purports to make the string safe for use, say, as a parameter to a URL. There are several characters that are reserved in parameters toURLs – for example the slash character, or the ampersand, because these are characters that are used to delimit the URL itself. Therefore we encode these, and this is done using the percent encoding scheme.

Read this post