46 posts tagged "objective-c"

Core Text Objective-C Wrapper

One of the most promising and mysterious new frameworks introduced in iOS 3.2 is Core Text. Apple defines Core Text as a “text drawing engine”, which allows Mac (and now iPad) apps to render rich text on any graphics context. Strings drawn with Core Text feature lots of custom settings such as detailed font information, columns, variable line and paragraph heights and several different attributes, which designers and font aficionados surely understand much better than I do. Many new apps have been using this framework since the release of the iPad, particularly newspapers and ebook reader applications, rendering gorgeous text in custom fonts, many of them not available natively in iOS. This framework is also used in lifestyle and corporate applications, too, where using a custom font is sometimes required to match the specifications of brands and trademarks.

Objective-C Categories as Stylesheets

It is very important that iPhone and iPad applications use visual styles in a coherent way. This helps users learn how to use your application faster, it helps them scan your UI for important information as quickly as possible, and it also can convey a strong marketing message; companies who want iPhone or iPad applications often have complex visual identities, including predefined fonts and colors, and they will want their applications to match those choices.

iPhone Apps without Objective-C

Yes, it’s possible. Even if Objective-C is one of my preferred programming languages, in any case I think it’s worth mentioning that, 2 years after the official iPhone SDK has been announced, the iPhone development landscape has really grown up, and many, many different options are available today. This article provides a very high-level enumeration of some options I’ve found on the web, but I’m sure there are even more alternatives around.

Code Organization in Xcode Projects

Xcode does not impose any structure to your source code tree. This is both cool and useful to quickly throw a couple of lines for a prototype, but in my experience, this approach does not scale. More often than not, without any hygiene, your project can become a mess. Just using Xcode defaults, after a while your resources will sit beside your .xcodeproj file, all the project classes will be thrown together in the Classes folder, and if you have a relatively large project, this approach makes finding individual files painful.

Playing With HTTP Libraries

It’s fun to find out how to tackle the same task in different programming languages; in this case, it’s all about doing HTTP requests over a network: fortunately, there are networking libraries in virtually all major programming languages. In my current project, I’m generating wrappers easing the access to the core of the project itself, a RESTful API. This way, developers interested in using the API can just take a wrapper, include it in their projects, and start coding right away. No need to know this (relatively low-level) stuff; just use the API. The wrappers themselves are auto-generated from the API definition itself, but that’s another story ;)

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