Jun
18Scale-9 in Objective-C Cocoa on the Mac
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Posted: 18th June 2009
Tags: Cocoa, Objective-C, Scale9, UI Design
Posted in Objective-C and Cocoa
Comments: 1 Comment »
Having used flash extensively for the last few years I have really come to rely on using Scale-9 scaling on UI elements in the rich internet apps I design and develop. It is a great technique for things like rounded rectangles, button graphics etc and ensuring the rounded corners do not distort when stretched.
I have recently been doing Cocoa Development on Mac OS X 10.5 and was looking for a way to do this in Cocoa and came across a great drawing method named NSDrawNinePartImage. The method has the following signature:
void NSDrawNinePartImage(NSRect frame, NSImage *topLeftCorner, NSImage *topEdgeFill, NSImage *topRightCorner, NSImage *leftEdgeFill, NSImage *centerFill, NSImage *rightEdgeFill, NSImage *bottomLeftCorner, NSImage *bottomEdgeFill, NSImage *bottomRightCorner, NSCompositingOperation op, CGFloat alphaFraction, BOOL flipped );
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Jun
18Great 404 Page Idea
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Posted: 18th June 2009
Tags: 404, Usability
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Usability
Comments: 2 Comments »
I came across a great 404 page the other day and thought I would share it. The page at first glances looks like any other but if you read the text, you will see that they have redeemed themselves for the broken link by offering me a discount of $3 off any of their products.
This is a great way to capture the interest of would be browsers that would normally see this page and immediately hit the back key, instead not only do they capture my attention, but they also tap into my curiosity which gets me to immediately click the products link.
In this case I didn’t need any of their products but this is a great tip.
Also note the search bar being visible. This is essential on a 404 page for keeping customers that know what they are looking for on your site.
Mar
1Review: iPhone SDK Programming: Developing Mobile Applications for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch
1
Posted: 1st March 2009
Posted in Objective-C and Cocoa
Comments: No Comments »
Maher’s Book is an in-depth reference into the world of iPhone application development aimed at both beginners and experienced Objective-C / Cocoa developers alike
The book is concise and more theoretical than many of the others I have read on the subject and covers everything you need to know to get started. One of the best things about this book is the depth it goes into many of the topics. For example, the book goes into great detail about consuming RESTful web services and parsing XML and makes use of real-world Web APIs such as Google Maps API for these examples. The book also provides a good insight into using the local file system and creating and working with local sqlite3 databases as well as several concise chapters on creating views and working with pretty much every control. Unfortunately the book lacks any coverage of Interface Builder (this may partly be down to when the book was written and what features were available at the time of writing) which provides in many cases quicker and easier solutions to creating views and handling events. I feel the example views shown in the various screen shots have suffered because of this.
Overall this book serves as an excellent reference, going into more depth in the programatic theory than many of the other books, and is certainly good value and just over £20.
This book is available via Amazon.co.uk
Dec
3Mate Framework for Adobe Flex
3
Posted: 3rd December 2008
Tags: as3, Flex and Air, Mate, RIA
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 4 Comments »
I just wanted to share with you a great framework I have been using recently called Mate (pronounced ma-tay).
Developed by the guys at ASFusion Mate is a great framework that features MXML declared event handling, dependency injection and best of all it is really easy to use and implement (It even has a way of reusing your existing Cairngorm commands. Additionally in the next version there will be an infrastructure for mocking out your services and really provides a clean architecture for Flex apps.
The framework is provided as a .swc file you can drop straight into your /libs folder and supports both Flex 2 and Flex 3. The only downside to the framework is the documentation does not reflect the latest .swc and is a little light in places, however the forums are excellent and very active and there is a good selection of examples.
I will be blogging about this in more details soon, but wanted to share my initial thoughts and urge you to look at this framework as it is really worth it.
Nov
22Rails deployment is so easy these days
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Posted: 22nd November 2008
Tags: Apache, Phusion Passenger, Ruby on Rails
Posted in Ruby on Rails
Comments: No Comments »
I have been meaning to blog about Phusion Passenger for a while as about 3-4 months ago we migrated Stubmatic from using Apache / Mongrel Cluster to Phusion Passenger A.K.A. mod_rails.
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Nov
20Excellent OS X SQLite 3 Management & Query App
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Posted: 20th November 2008
Tags: Adobe Air, iPhone, sqlite 3
Posted in Flex and Air, Objective-C and Cocoa, Python Django, Ruby on Rails
Comments: 1 Comment »
iPhone and Adobe Air developers (as well as any others that use SQLite 3) Menial has just released an excellent little app for creating, managing and running queries against SQLite 3 databases called Bases.
The application is simple to use, very user friendly and has worked well from the testing I have done. It costs just £10 and there is a free trial available so you can try before you buy.
Find out more and download here
Oct
20Creating a two-way binding between Model and Form in Flex
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Posted: 20th October 2008
Tags: ActionScript, AIR, Flex and Air
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 14 Comments »
A quick sorry to all my Flex readership for the lack of Flex related posts these last few months. I though I would drop a quick tip / class I often use to create a two way binding between a form to a corresponding class model.
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Sep
15Please Help Me Win Carsonified’s Golden Ticket…
15
Posted: 15th September 2008
Tags: carsonified, Web Design, web development
Posted in Misc.., Technology Rants and Raves
Comments: 27 Comments »
I am a big fan of Ryan Carson and the guys over at Carsonified. They have just announced a competition to send one person to all of Carsonified’s events for 2009. To win, all one needs to do is post a blog entry (this) linking back to Carsonified’s competition post and then get 25 comments. So, if you are a regular reader (or your first time here) and would like to help keep me up to date on what is happening in the world of web apps, design etc as well as send me on some Carsonified workshops, then please add a comment supporting me to that this post. If i win I promise to share my knowledge gained on here.
Also, if you are a blogger yourself and entering this competition, please comment so below and I will return the favour and add a comment to your blog post entry.
Thanks in advance to all those that comment..!
Regards,
Jon
