There will be an iPad 3 sometime in the next few months. iOS 6 will happen later this year as will the 6th-gen iPhone. Mountain Lion will be upon us this summer. But the event that’s really going to set geeks on fire this year is Diablo III. Everything will pale in comparison to that. Also, is the next StarCraft installment still happening this year too?
Music is a very important part of my life. I don’t pay attention to lyrics much though. However, there are times when I want to read the lyrics to a song. Google “[song title] lyrics” and click on the first result. This will always lead to one of the worst experiences one can have on the internet. Lyric websites are some of the most user-hostile websites in existence. They are horribly designed and slathered in ads. In addition to the regular ads there’s at least half a dozen more ads that jump around the page trying to sell you the ringtone for whatever song you’re interested in. You may or may not be able to copy-n-paste lyrics. Unexplained things may happen simply by moving the cursor around.
It seems like song lyrics is an area where it’s impossible to do good work. Why? Surely, a well-designed user-focused lyric site or app would be a great thing which lots of people would use.
Better yet, why don’t the songs I buy from iTunes have the lyrics embedded in the metadata? iTunes has a place for it. Lyrics have their own tab right alongside ‘Artwork’. Many albums on iTunes will include lyrics in the digital booklet. Why not just put ‘em into the metadata as well? Why make me go to the trashiest places on the internet just so I can confirm the lyrics I think I’m hearing are correct?
This code will add rounded corners to a UIView.
Thermo 1.4 hit the App Store yesterday and guess what? Thermo is now a Universal app rebuild from the ground up for your iPad!
I didn’t know this app existed until today. Very cool if all you want to know is the outside temperature. Many times that is all I want to know. I absolutely love these kinds of apps. It takes a concept so simple and puts a really nice UI around it. It’s free. A 99 cent in-app-purchase removes the ads.
I’m hoping Apple eventually puts thermometers in their future devices so I can I get the indoor temperature for wherever I happen to be.
Minimal Mac: Microsoft's Biggest Miss -
Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed.
I would also add that Google Docs has done a heck of a lot to make Office irrelevant.
I was just thinking this morning if Apple would do an OS X version of Reminders. I thought they probably wouldn’t because they see that kind of thing as belonging with iOS. If you always have an iPhone or iPad at your side why would you also need a Reminders app on your computer?
I’m glad I was wrong. Also, Messages Beta!
Spotlight comes with the operating system. It’s already there. It’s going to index your hard drive and store that index somewhere. You may as well use it. Dedicated app launchers do have a bunch of features that Spotlight doesn’t but I don’t need those features and I don’t want a second index sitting on my hard drive for something I would only use once in a while. I just want to be able to tap on my keyboard a couple of times to launch an application or document. Spotlight does a great job of that for me.
One of the more challenging things about iOS development is moving past simple examples to something more complex. Unlike web development, iOS apps are not just a bunch of views which can arbitrarily link to each other. It’s more structured. Putting together an application which has the right kind of UI elements in the right places all working together is not trivial. Table views are easy enough to understand by themselves. Navigation controllers go hand-in-hand with table views. A tab bar is easy to understand on its own too. But what if you want to combine the two? What if you want to have a segmented button in your navigation controller like the built-in iTunes app?
It took me a couple of weeks of research and trial and error but I finally put together an iOS app template for an application where individual tabs can contain a navigation controller and table view. Furthermore, the detail view of the table has a segmented control in the navigation bar used to switch between different detail views. This is similar to (but not exactly the same as) Apple’s “store” apps like iTunes, App Store and Apple Store. It can be useful for a store or catalogue application if you want to stick to standard iOS UI elements and conventions.
There is no .xib file for the main view. The UITabBarController is setup programmatically in AppDelegate.m. In order to place a UINavigationController as the contents of a tab instead of a vanilla UIViewController you must create a UINavigationController with the desired UIViewController as its root view controller.
The segmented control in the detail view uses large portions of the great example by Marcus Crafter. I opted to use his older example which requires a container view. Marcus has a more recent example which doesn’t require a container view and is generally cleaner. However, I couldn’t quite figure out how to get that to work in this particular context.
The full XCode project is available on GitHub.
There may not be a scientifically way to ever measure this but I’m wondering… is there a wave of executives and managers who read the Steve Jobs biography and are now trying to establish their own reality distortion fields by asking unreasonable things from their subordinates and expecting it’ll all turn out awesome?
There are two meanings of the word ‘earth’. First, ‘Earth’ is the proper name of our planet. Second, ‘earth’ is a word we use to describe soil or dirt. Farmers say they “work the earth”. They might pick up handfuls of soil, rub it in their hands to determine its quality and say, “The earth is rich in minerals here.”
Assume we eventually colonize Mars. Would we adopt a lowercase usage of ‘mars’ in the same way we do for ‘earth’? Would farmers on Mars say they “work the mars”. Would they say to one another, “Feel this mars. It’s very dry.”?
We also tend to put “this” before Earth too in some contexts. If there’s a territorial or political dispute on Mars would peace-minded colonists say, “We all have share this Mars.”
Just thinking out loud here. Maybe not such a great idea.