Posts by Vinay Chavan

I personally think if something needs a walkthrough maybe its time to redesign the interaction. It generally means the app is over-designed, i.e. instead of solving the problem, we are trying to delight the user more.  Ofcourse delighting the user is must, but it should come through better usability and interaction first, and then through UI. I feel by adding walkthrough we try to make user feel that its rocket science, when it really should not be. Mailbox app gestures originated from app… Clear. Mailbox guys took it one step further. I loved the app at first look and kept…

Few days back, I had this awesome wallpaper on my iMac of Crysis 3 Hunter holding a gun, nicely made wallpaper with lot of thought given to detailing. Our graphic designer was passing by happen to see the wallpaper, He came towards the screen touched the screen where there were scratches on the gun, and admired the detailing…. “look at those scratches!” The other day, I found my old iPod classic while cleaning a drawer, first ever Apple product I bought. It has a dent on the side. First thing I did was touching that dent and remembering how that…

Command to find out how many lines of code you wrote in a folder tree… Following example is for ObjC iOS projects. find . -name "*.[h|m]" | xargs cat | wc -l

Everyone knows the application DrawSomething and the kind of quick success this application has seen is beyond imagination. This is the application where users can draw doodles and share with friends live. It is something very different and subtle the way you communicate with your friends live. There is human factor involved in this application. This is what i think is the key point of success. There are applications that allow you to create drawing on devices and also to share with your friends over various social networks. This just clears your table and puts a simple idea of sharing…

This is the text of the commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005. I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth to be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories of my life. That’s it. No big deal, just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots I dropped out of Reed College after the first…

Whenever using layers to add shadow, add rounded corners, show border or anything, just remember to set “shouldRasterize” property of a layer object to YES, default value is NO. self.layer.shouldRasterize = YES; This is what header file says about “shouldRasterize” property. When true, the layer is rendered as a bitmap in its local coordinate space (“rasterized”), then the bitmap is composited into the destination (with the minificationFilter and magnificationFilter properties of the layer applied if the bitmap needs scaling). Rasterization occurs after the layer’s filters and shadow effects are applied, but before the opacity modulation. As an implementation detail the…

[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourceURL] is same as [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath]] I need to use it a lot while making local html pages to show in UIWebView. Just to remember. :-)

We can use custom urls for this purpose, Lets say we want to add a button1 into HTML page and we want to call “-didTapButton1” when user taps on button1. We should have following code into HTML page that we are loading into UIWebView, <a href="didTap://button1"><img src="button1.jpg" /></a> Now next what we need to do is add methods from UIWebViewDelegate (To call this method the method owner needs to be the delegate for the UIWebView used), - (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView*)aWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest*)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType { NSString *absoluteUrl = [[request URL] absoluteString]; if ([absoluteUrl isEqualToString:@"didTap://button1"]) { [self didTapButton1]; return NO; } return YES; } And…

Gone are the days when individual developers or small companies used to make mobile apps, no one was really interested into mobile app system. And it all changed with iPhone App Store. People started thinking seriously about mobile apps as a business. Still when iPhone App Store was just released very few developers and small companies were into the serious app making business. Small companies got good stardom, users and money making opportunity with it. Whats good about these indi developers and small organizations that they did not get stardom by selling apps, they got that stardom by selling those…

I added this subject to the blog long time ago..some feb or something, I was gonna write a module that does the job but now…i dont think its required anymore ( this made me sad though :(, i didn get time to write that code ) since iOS5 has nice and beautiful tweet poster inbuilt into the OS. Its a delight!! ( Anyways i can write that code still! )

Adding following lines in startElementSAXFunc method, and we can use attributes string keys and values as following. for (int i = 0; i < nb_attributes; i++) { NSString *key = [[NSString alloc] initWithCString:(char*)attributes[0] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; NSString *value = [[NSString alloc] initWithCString:(char*)attributes[3] length:attributes[4] - attributes[3]]; NSLog(@"%@ = %@", key, value); [key release]; [value release]; attributes += 5; }

I was just too busy working on some cool iOS apps past few days. Adding some new UI tweaks, performance and other improvements to existing mundu IM Pro app. And finally we have sent update to the apple, Should get approved in few days. ( mundu IM has never got rejected in the past. :) ) http://twitter.com/#!/davinc/status/25094282717167616 For more info about “mundu IM Pro” on iPhone, please visit, http://itunes.apple.com/in/app/mundu-im-pro/id407228604?mt=8 or follow @munduIM Follow @munduIM for free promo codes.

Generally every person who is net freak starts his day by going through his RSS feeds. People like me, subscribe to many RSS feeds about programming, iPhone & Apple tech, Usability and stuff. Everyday I have about 30 unread articles in my reader app (I use NetNewsWire on mac). People start going through these articles and they really end up reading only small percentage of those unread, Usually only 5-6 out of 30. As most of the Articles are about same thing, same news, same product explored or smashed. Thats where the problem begins. What people want to read at…