iOS and Mac developer
Today I got a Maximo iP-HS2 iMetal Isolation Headset for my iPhone. It was $36 from Buy.com and has the full functionality of Apple’s standard earbuds including a built-in microphone and call control button. Since this is an in-ear model, the sound quality is a lot better than Apple’s earbuds and it provides good noise isolation. I was able to listen in the gym at a comfortable 50% volume and still block out the music blasting from a boom box.
In an application I’m working on, I display a UIWebView with a navigation bar. I wanted to display the title of the web page in the navigation bar when I load a page, but there doesn’t appear to be any obvious way to do it.
There’s actually a very easy way to get the title (or any other property) of a page in a web view: stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:.
In this case, I use the delegate method webViewDidFinishLoad to obtain the page title and set the title of the navigation bar,
- (void)webViewDidFinishLoad:(UIWebView *)webView
{
NSString* title = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: @"document.title"];
navbar.title = title;
}
The result looks like this:
Apple now allows developers to issue up to 50 promotional codes for each version of any application in the store. The codes allow the recipient to download a full copy of the application. Currently they can only be redeemed in the US app store.
This makes it a lot easier for developers to send out review copies. Until now, it was necessary to build an Ad-hoc copy of any non-free application, which required providing the device ID of any iPhone or iPod it will run on.
An iPhone developer appears to be bribing people to give good reviews to his application Santa Live.
How can this possibly be permitted in the App Store? iTabla is free from the app store, but you must purchase a license from their site for 119 Euros (about US $155) to activate it. I’m pretty sure that’s a direct violation of Apple’s terms of service.
One of the changes I’m making in the next version of ICanHasCheezburger is improved multi-touch handling. In the current version, I’m only handling left & right swipes to switch to the previous or next images. For the update, I’d like to handle the same gestures as the photo app:
In many cases you can use a UIScrollView, which implements most of those behaviors. For ICHC, I decided to subclass UIImageView to handle touch gestures.
This has to be the best thread ever in Apple’s support discussions. “Susan” writes:
Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!
Hilarity ensues, including two posts by her husband under fake names.
Classics, the new book reading application for the iPhone bears a striking resemblance to Delicious Library.
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Andy Finnell has written a great blog post discussing iPhone app pricing. I found that his average of 16 sales a day for a non-free application is exactly on target. That’s the usual number I see for iDjembe.
On the other hand, ICanHasCheezburger, which is free, sold about 4500 copies on Nov. 13, when it was #74 on the top 100 free application list. Since then it settled down to about 2500 on the 15th. If #74 sells 4500 copies, the top free application must have sold at least 10,000 or more (my guess).
Free applications will always sell more than one that costs money, but I’m sure a top selling paid application could easily sell over 1000 copies a day. Most paid applications are nowhere near those heights.
I have no intention of quitting my day job to write iPhone software, though. I priced iDjembe at 0.99 because it’s a simple app and I just wanted to get something out there, although I am planning a big update. I won’t release it until after the update to ICanHasCheezburger and a new application I’m developing that will be associated with a particular website.
