Iphone

I've noticed an issue I've been having with my iPhone 6 Plus a couple weeks ago. After the phone has been in my pocket for an indeterminate amount of time, I would randomly be unable to light the screen back up. The phone would come out of sleep, I could swipe to unlock (or use Voice Over) and I could see the backlight come on. The problem was the screen itself was just black - nothing to show. Rebooting sometimes fixed this. It was especially annoying when trying to board a plane and then being unable to bring up the boarding pass. ...

I've brought an old project out of the moth balls recently, the Migraine Diary application I wrote as part of my master's thesis. It was my first "real" iPhone app and I call tell I didn't know what I was doing entirely looking through the code. What this has forced me to do, however, is re-learn some of the basics of iOS development and of Apple design patterns. I have been spending some time back in the Apple developer documentation and will probably be posting some of the gotchas that tripped me up two years ago and I'm solving now with the better, more elegant solution. ...

Have you enabled Emoji on your iPhone to use emoticon-like characters like 13 year-old Japanese girls? Well if you have, you've noticed that sending those characters in e-mail and IM to non-iPhone users ends up in little boxes of unreadable gibberish if you're lucky or whitespace. Most people understand the concept of Unicode if you're a geek. Someone like my mom doesn't always remember that Emoji being sent over IM, while she's on her own iPhone, isn't going to be readable when I'm on my Mac. ...

There has been quite a bit of press about the upcoming Verizon / CDMA iPhone. I'm happy to hear that AT&T will finally lose the monopoly on the iPhone in the United States, but I'm disappointed that nothing has come out yet about T-Mobile carrying the GMS version of the phone. AT&T needs the competition to spread out the massive amount of users onto another network because frankly, they can't handle the amount of growth they've experienced. The iPhone is a great device, and I've had nothing but a positive experience for the most part with AT&T. ...

I may have mentioned it before, but I created a Migraine Diary application for the iPhone as my master's captone/thesis project. The school year finished out for me and I submitted the application to Apple on the 29th. Two days - TWO DAYS - later they approved it and it's listed in iTunes! Head on over to Net Workz LLC to find the app. I still have a lot of work left to do before I'm really happy with it. Help screens, more graphing, and encryption are two things I really need to get out there. Until then, enjoy!

I haven't written unit tests before in Xcode. I started to read Apple's article on unit testing with iPhone development because I wanted to follow sound development principles with an agile approach. Not long into the guide, I got stuck. Literally. Using Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard caused Xcode to lock/hang during the build of the logical unit test. Same results after iPhone SDK 3.1 came out. I couldn't find anything online either except a few people experiencing the same issue. In the system console (not Xcode console) I was seeing: ...

Everyone is giving their two cents about the iPhone 3GS. I'm excited to see that Apple is releasing a faster phone that still feels like the first generation iPhone. Developers are used to a specific screen size for instance. Drastically changing the environment will create the discord other cell phone manufacturers feel when it comes to 3rd party applications. I do suspect, however, that next year will bring drastic change to the iPhone. Apple is still getting to where they really wanted the 1st generation iPhone to be. They realized that its easy to make their own hardware and software, but its hard when dealing with so many third parties. Cell phone carriers like AT&T stand in the way of real progress. Why doesn't Apple follow suit with Virgin and create their own private label cell phone company? I suspect that would give them a lot more flexibility in pricing and give them the ability to put whatever carrier they want behind the name. ...

I've been scratching my freaking head for an hour trying to figure out how to load an image from my application's bundle. Doing this in Interface Builder is easy as pie, but not so straightforward. [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"thefilename" ofType:@"jpg"]]; Easy, isn't it?