14 Essential Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs

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On January 30, 2009

Xcode is big. Apple’s Xcode Workspace Guide, a terse inventory of its features, is 116 pages. Xcode’s preference window has 13 sections, each with a dozen or more items. There are at least 206 keyboard shortcuts. I started counting menu items but gave up the ghost when I’d topped 300 items before finishing the third […]

Apple Approved iPhone Inter-process Communication

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On January 27, 2009

Apple is famously restrictive about confining third party apps to their sandboxes. That Apple doesn’t allow background processes is well-known, and Apple rejects apps that attempt to read the various databases and media folders directly. So it’s a bit surprising that Apple supports a form of inter-process communication (IPC) using URL protocol handlers. In this […]

9 iPhone Memory Management Links and Resources

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On January 26, 2009

Memory management is the process of keeping track of objects in your applications and “freeing” objects that you no longer want to keep around (otherwise nasty memory leaks can occur). On the Mac, you can optionally allow Objective C to deal with the memory management on your behalf, but as an iPhone developer, it’s a […]

How to Build a Simple RSS Reader iPhone App

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On January 21, 2009

Last year, Jason Terhorst of The Apple Blog put together a cute tutorial demonstrating how to build a simple RSS reader for the iPhone. At the time it violated the NDA, but it went up anyway. If you haven’t seen it, however, it’s well worth checking out, as it’s a great way to get into […]

Alocola: Mobile Orchard's Safari Helper: Makes Websites "Location Aware"

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Alocola is a free web-helper application that we’ve created that lets users provide their location information when websites ask for it. It is available from the App Store now. Alocola works with Safari. With Alocola, web developers need not create their own iPhone apps. Users simply browse in Safari the way they normally would; when […]

Build an iPhone Webapp in Minutes with Ruby, Sinatra and iUI

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On December 10, 2008

While Mobile Orchard and most developers focus on the development of “regular” iPhone applications using the iPhone SDK, it’s also possible to develop iPhone-specific apps as “webapps.” If you’ve used Google Calendar or Google Mail from your phone, you’ll have seen an iPhone “webapp” in action. While webapps can’t get access to all of the […]

Sharing Compiled Code: Building Static Libraries in XCode for the iPhone

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On December 3, 2008

Due to the potential for abuse, dynamic libraries aren’t allowed to be used in iPhone applications that are to be sold on the iPhone App Store. The downside to this is that it makes it harder to share libraries that you develop with other developers without giving up the code. It’s not impossible to share […]

12 SQLite Resources for iPhone Developers

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On November 12, 2008

There are plenty of different places to get a mobile application designed. The problem is that they’re quite expensive. You might be able to figure out how to create your own, but it will probably look very basic. Instead, a good mobile application development software can make it even easier, so that you can build […]

31 iPhone Applications With Source Code

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On November 1, 2008

There are plenty of different places to get a mobile application designed. The problem is that they’re quite expensive. You might be able to figure out how to create your own, but it will probably look very basic. Instead, a good mobile application development software can make it even easier, so that you can build […]

Take Stanford's iPhone Programming Class For Free

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On October 30, 2008

Silicon Valley’s own Stanford University is one of many universities that has chosen to make more of its course materials available online. With this, comes class CS193P: iPhone Application Programming. Lecturers Evan Doll and Paul Marcos are delivering the class, and providing the class slides, handouts, and example code on the CS193P announcements page. While […]