Replacing a UIView backing layer with CAShapeLayer and ensuring the path is animated on frame change

Recently i’ve started making a lot of use of CAShapeLayers as the backing for a UIView subclass. The main reason for this is it gives me a reusable high performance background which is especially useful as I find a lot of my apps usually have similar looking views with different content. This is all well …

Objective C & iOS Weak Singletons

Temporary shared memory management is always a bit of a difficult problem to solve. There are various well known ways of dealing with this problem but recently i’ve come across a novel solution to this problem that actual takes advantage of Objective C’s Automatic Reference Counting (although it could also work without ARC) The singleton …

Events App

Over the last few months i’ve started putting together an app for tracking sporting events. A lot of the ones i’ve used have always lacked in the ability to see what is available on a day. They usually have a horrible list that requires lots of scrolling and it’s especially clear. So I set about …

The real problem with PHP

A few mornings ago a discussion was started around PHP and it’s problems. This discussion was based on the following article: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ There were 2 camps, the camp who agreed with the article and that PHP was terrible and the camp that agreed with the article but felt PHP did it’s job and the article …

Tube App

My next app is a simple one. But one which i’ve found quite useful for the last couple of weeks and one I hope when it’s live on the store will be useful to other people. The purpose of this app is two fold. First is to solve the problem at hand, and second is …

Custom iOS fonts and how to fix the vertical position problem

Every new iOS design I have to implement uses custom fonts. A few years back this would have been impossible but luckily since iOS4 it’s been reasonably simple to add your own fonts to iOS Apps. The process is as follows: Add the font (*.ttf or *.otf) to the project Make sure it is added …

New iPad Review for tech drink.

I recently wrote a Review on the iPad 3 for my good friend Ben Greenwood over at tech drink, i’ve included a link here to the review so anybody reading my blog doesn’t miss out 🙂 New iPad… Nearly A Month In, How Is It Performing?

Resolution Independent Images for HTML5 based mobile sites & apps

In the last year i’ve done quite a lot of work with HTML5 for mobile Apps. This is both websites running in a mobile browser and actual HTML5 based webview applications. One of the biggest problem has been the many different screen resolutions across the different platforms, this poses a problem as a design usually …