Category: I-phone

Dear Aunt TUAW,

A nephew needs some help.

I just got my iPad and I’m really, really liking it. Although not a replacement for my Macbook Pro, it certainly has cut down on my usage a lot.

I’m trying to create an “Evaluation Form” for my iPad and immediately process the results for display.

I have 10 categories with 10 questions in each category. The participant provides a score of; 1 (less like them) – to – 10 (more like them) and secondly they rank the relevance of the question to their situation: Completely Irrelevant – Somewhat Irrelevant – Somewhat Relevant – Completely Relevant to weight the score’s importance to the participant.

With Excel I’ve been using a basic spreadsheet for inputting the data and then on a following Sheet showing the results in a Radar Chart which has been quite effective. The first chart show results by category. Then additional charts breakdown the result of the questions within each category.

I like the Radar Chart because it quite visually tells the participant where their strengths are and where they are weak. Well of course Excel does not work on the iPad except through third-party apps and Numbers doesn’t do Radar Charts.

I’m hoping you might have a suggestion on how to get this to work on my iPad or to provide an alternative “App for that. (Thought about Roambi but there’s no way to directly input data on the fly).

Here’s an example:

Category 1
Question: A Input ____ Relevance ____
Question: B Input ____ Relevance ____
Question: C Input ____ Relevance ____

Your loving nephew,

Tom

Dear Tom,

You’re asking a lot of that poor iPad. There are bits and pieces around of what you’re trying to do, but not one single solution — at least as far as Auntie knows of.

She turned to iOS developer Zach Starkebaum, whose Form Tools PDF app allows users to enter data using PDF-based forms. He told her that when it comes to radar charts the options are limited on the iPad. “If you can move into the world of line and bar graphs there are many options like Numbers and OmniGraphSketcher that can provide professional charts.” But radar charts? A little harder to come by.

“If you need radar charts and you have an available internet connection, Google docs is an option,” Starkebaum explained. “On your Mac, you can setup a Google spreadsheet with a Radar chart much like you would in Excel. The interface for Google docs on the iPad is somewhat limited, you will probably want to setup the spreadsheet on a Mac or PC.” Starkebaum pointed to this example sheet he created, that you can copy and modify.

He recommends enabling the Publish as web page option available under the Share menu, explaining that this allows you to get a quick link to a web or PDF version of the spreadsheet. Here is a link from his example; you can even create a form from the spreadsheet to enable easy data entry. Open the spreadsheet in Safari on your iPad and enter the appropriate values. Open the link to the published web page and you will have a presentable Radar Chart.

If you just want to capture the form information for entry later, Starkebaum’s own app Form Tools PDF), has a new version that will be available soon that supports the export of form data as a CSV file that you can open in Excel for further processing. Don’t feel that you have to be tied to a single app solution for both gathering and viewing the data.

Auntie sends Zach Starkebaum a big hug for his help in researching this information and doing all that legwork with the forms!

Here’s hoping that it helps you out.

Kisses,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me collect and chart data on the iPad originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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J.D. Power recently recently released the results of a consumer satisfaction survey that focused on Smartphones. To the surprise of no one, Apple was first and HTC second with Blackberry, Samsung, and the rest trailing behind. The iPhone had the best scores in everything but features, which HTC prevailed in.

For Smartphones, the key factors are: performance (35%); ease of operation (24%); features (21%); and physical design (20%).

For a sixth consecutive time, Apple ranks highest among manufacturers of smartphones in customer satisfaction. Apple achieves a score of 838 and performs well in all factors, particularly in ease of operation and features. HTC (801) follows Apple in the smartphone rankings.

What will it take to dethrone Apple and the iPhone? Please share your opinions with us in the comments.

If you have ever been left wondering why some html or javascript runs perfectly on the desktop browsers, but not on iOS devices then this tool could be the answer.

This tool allows you to remotely debug web pages that are running on your iOS device remotely using a client running on your desktop – similar to how you can debug and tweak web pages using Firebug, the Web Inspector for webkit browser’s, or Google Chrome’s developer tools.  This means you can do all the tweaks on your desktop and see the exact effect on an actual device in real-time.

The project is Weinre from Patrick Mueller and you can find detailed information on the Weinre homepage on Github here:
Weinre – Home

This should definitely help to eliminate any frustrations that can occur when something on a web page that should work perfectly on an iOS device doesn’t run at all.  This should be especially useful to you if you are using a javascript/html5 framework such as Phonegap.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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In this application we will see how to images scroll in the application. So let see how it will worked.

Step 1: Open the Xcode, Create a new project using View Base application. Give the application “ScrollingImage”.

Step 2: Xcode automatically creates the directory structure and adds essential frameworks to it. You can explore the
directory structure to check out the content of the directory.

Step 3: Expand classes and notice Interface Builder created the ViewController class for you. Expand Resources and
notice the template generated a separate nib, ScrollingImageViewController.xib for the ScrollingImage application.

Step 4: We need to resources in the Resource folder.

Step 5: Open the ScrollingImageViewController.h file and make the following changes:

Step 6: Double click the ScrollingImageViewController.xib file and open it to the Interface Builder. First drag the Imageview from the library and place it to the View window. Select the view and bring up Connection inspector connect File’s Owner icon to the ImageView and select “FirstScrollView”. Save the .xib file, close it and go back to the Xcode.

Step 7: Open the ScrollingImageViewController.m file and make the following changes:

Step 8: Now compile and run the application in the Simulator.

You can Download SourceCode from here (ScrollingImage)

It’s been a while since my last post so an update is in order. As I’m sure most of you can relate too, life is busy. The summer holidays are now over and my kids are now back at school. These holidays seem to have gone really quickly but I still think that six weeks […]

Tiny Heroes is a fun one from David Whatley, the mind behind the popular GeoDefense titles for the App Store (who’s also, incidentally, speaking later on this week at the 360iDev conference going on here in Denver).

This one is tower defense as well, but it’s got a nice Dungeon Keeper-esque twist on the genre. Instead of defending from the invading hordes, you must shut down heroes, attempting to invade your dungeon for loot. The look and feel is a lot of fun, and the interface is smooth and well-done, very reminiscent of Plants vs. Zombies (always a good thing). As you move through the game’s levels, you get more and more tools to stop the little heroes, including fun things like mimic chests and spike traps.

There are over 50 levels in the game right now, with more coming later, and of course Game Center and OpenFeint integration extend replayability as well. Tiny Heroes is a lot of fun — it’s only available on the iPhone (right now) for US$2.99.

Daily iPhone App: Tiny Heroes originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The latest developer seed build of the next version of the Mac’s OS is available for download. OS X 10.7.2 build 11C55 is on Apple’s servers, and it reportedly includes iCloud beta features for testing.

As always, we remind developers and testers to read the release notes carefully before installing.

New OS X 10.7.2 seed posted originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Once again the weekend is coming to a close, so it’s time we gather together for another Talkcast! Normally we have a variety of things to discuss, but this week we’re going to shake things up with a very special guest: Chicago Sun-Times technology columnist & author Andy Ihnatko, a veteran of Mac commentary and all around delightful fellow.

Odds are good some of the regulars will call in as well, and if we’re fortunate (and my voice holds out) perhaps there will be some TUAWTF aftershow action. Join us, won’t you?

To participate, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for +5 Interactivity, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 — during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8.

If you’ve got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free Blink or X-Lite SIP clients, basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!

Talkcast tonight, 7pm PT/10pm ET: Ihnatko Edition! originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Sep 2011 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Display manufacturer LG was reportedly struggling to meet production targets for Apple’s iPad 2 LCD due to quality issues (particularly a “light leak” issue noted in early models). According to a report from DigiTimes, LG has solved those issues and is back to cranking out displays for Apple as fast as it can make them.

LG reportedly built 4 million displays for the iPad 2 in August, and it’s expected to build another 4 million this month. Considering that iPads don’t usually hang around on shelves for too long, the implications for Apple’s quarterly iPad sales are pretty staggering. If Apple is really selling 4 million of these things every month, that puts the iPad on a very rapid track to being the best-selling consumer electronics device of all time.

According to DigiTimes’s source, “Apple’s iPad 2 shipments are expected to reach 12-15 million units in third-quarter 2011, which will benefit its suppliers.” No doubt it will be a benefit to Apple too.

LG solves iPad display quality issue, shipments resume originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week, Laptop compared OS X Lion versus Windows 7 to determine which operating system was “better,” both overall and in individual features. OS X Lion took Laptop’s top overall score, mostly on the strength of Lion’s better interface, Multi-Touch gestures, Spotlight, iLife, and Time Machine. Lion’s parental controls also got the nod for being slightly broader in scope than those offered in Windows 7, and Lion was also hailed as a more secure OS than Windows — not for the usual “security by obscurity” reasons that such studies usually like to hammer to death, but for real improvements in the more secure way Lion handles applications.

Windows 7 offered a better multitasking experience for Laptop’s money; the magazine considered Mission Control a decent but “confusing” interface in Lion. Windows 7 also took the crown for a better gaming experience — I don’t think anyone will be surprised by that — and the magazine also considered Internet Explorer a better native browser than Safari. I’ll be honest, I hate Internet Explorer more than I’m comfortable describing fully in a “family-friendly” format; however, as long as I’m being honest I’ll also say that aside from iTunes, Safari feels like the part of OS X that still needs the most work. Apple’s added some gee-whiz features like Reader to its browser, but in terms of overall functionality (and stability) Safari doesn’t feel like it’s changed much in the past couple years. Unless you’re counting the nasty new memory leak introduced with Safari 5.1, that is, or the tab-reloading oddness that’s causing issues.

The one portion of Laptop’s rankings that I strongly disagree with is the magazine awarding Windows 7 higher marks for value than OS X Lion. The main reason I disagree with their analysis is that they don’t actually compare Lion to Windows; instead, they compare Macs to PCs. While it’s generally true that Mac hardware is more expensive than “equivalent” PC hardware, if you’re going to make an apples-to-apples comparison you need to compare the operating systems themselves and not the hardware they run on. And as we’ve pointed out in the past, in terms of value for money OS X Lion blows all versions of Windows 7 away.

Naturally, since the magazine put Lion on top it’s being roundly accused of a pro-Apple bias by Windows fans who can’t seem to accept that Apple does indeed manage to do some things better than Microsoft. But with the sole exception of the “value” category, I’d say Laptop’s comparison was fairly even-handed overall. I’ll reluctantly admit that Windows is still better at some things than OS X, but just as Laptop claims, I maintain OS X Lion is the better choice overall.

Hat tip to Mark S.

Laptop magazine gives Lion the thumbs-up over Windows 7 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Sep 2011 11:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to another edition of the best in iPad and iPhone development featuring the iOS resources from the last week that have been featured in the last week in order of popularity.

This week the top resources included open source libraries allowing for the usage of blocks in many different iOS classes, enhanced tableview cell’s taking advantage of the iPad width, and a grid view designed for high performance.

Here are the resources:

1. Open Source: Massive Collection Of Objective-C Blocks Extensions – This is an extremely useful collection of dozens of open source extensions adding the ability to use blocks with numerous iOS classes.

2. Open Source: Library For iPad UITableViewCell’s With Multiple Dynamic Controls – A library allowing you to easily create iPad UITableViewCell’s with multiple interactive controls along with controls cloning the appearance of common desktop controls.

3. Open Source: High Speed Interactive iOS Grid View Component – A grid view component designed for high performance and fashioned after the UITableView pattern for ease of use.

4. Tutorial: Using The Tapku Library To Create An Elegant Marked Calendar – A tutorial and example code demonstrating how to use the calendar capabilities of the multipurpose Tapku library, and add markings on special dates.

5. Tutorial: In-Depth Tutorial On The iOS UITableView And UIPickerView – An extremely in-depth no stone left unturned tutorial on creating a thermostat application while explaining how to create an interactive UITableView integrated with UIPickerView controls.

6. Tutorial And Open Source Library For Building A UPnP Client On iOS Devices – A tutorial demonstrating how to create an application that can communicate with UPnP devices using a special UpnP communications library.

7. Tutorial: Building A Beautiful Front End Interface For A News App – A tutorial on creating a beautiful grid interface similar to the Pulse News App.

8. News: Open Source Wolfenstein 3D and Doom Apps Released With Significant Updates – iD Bethesda has updated their Wolfenstein and Doom iOS apps with many signifcant features such as iPad support.

9. An In-Depth Look At The Sensible Tableview UITableView Library – An overview of the premium Sensible TableView “UI replacement” library and some of my first impressions.

Thanks for reading, please bookmark and share this post!

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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I’m not going to lie to you: I’ve been referred to as the Tony Stark of iOS development. Maybe it’s the beard, short stature and taste in snappy shirts, but I like to think it’s at least partly due to my many in-house UX demos.

My business is called Instinctive Code, and I have a series of projects I tend to refer to as Instinctive Labs. Some of them are tools, some are toys, and some are nascent reusable components for later release.

One such component brings pie menus (or radial/circular menus) to iOS.

You can watch a video demo of some of its customisation features on YouTube, which is also embedded below.

MGPieMenu supports many, many visual and behavioural customisations, including whether the central disc is drawn and/or interactive, and what it does (in the video, it goes back up one level in the menu hierarchy). The appearance of the menus is completely customisable, and the API is naturally designed to be as near to a drop-in replacement for OS X-style NSMenu/NSMenuItem hierarchies as possible, with various conveniences added.

I’ve never released it because I’m frankly concerned that it may be subject to legal problems in the current awful patent lawsuit climate. I have no specific knowledge of any issues in that area, but it seems a likely candidate. This is just another example of questionable patent law hindering innovation in user experience, which would otherwise benefit many people.

On a more positive note, pie menus are very enjoyable and immediate to use, present a large hit area with minimal average movement required, and can support nested menus as seen in the video. The component feels completely at home on a capacitive touchscreen device, and gives a very natural yet pleasantly futuristic interaction experience.

If you’re interested in this sort of work, you may want to follow me (@mattgemmell) on Twitter. I talk about UX a lot, and always announce new projects or articles there. You might also enjoy some of my other UX-related posts:

• iPad Multi-Touch (with videos and source code). I wrote some funky musical-instrument-like code to test how many simultaneous touches the iPad hardware could detect. Like my guitar amp, it goes up to eleven.

• Finger Tools (with video). A UX concept for canvas-like applications requiring multiple tools without any tool palette. Adobe used this concept in Eazel, claiming to have independently thought it up months later.

• Touch Notation (with Photoshop and Illustrator files). An easy-to-scribble notation for software designers who want to describe multi-touch interactions.

The recently released Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” (read my review of it at The Guardian) includes a new version of Mail, Apple’s desktop email client. There are several new features in Mail that I’m enjoying, and one of the least promoted is the new Favorites Bar. I think it’s very useful, particularly if you like to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, and so I’ve written this brief article describing how it works.

The first thing to do is make sure that the Favorites Bar is visible, by choosing Show Favorites Bar from the View menu. The bar sits horizontally below the main toolbar, and it looks like this:

You can drag mailboxes to reorder them, drag them off the bar to remove them, and drag other mailboxes into the bar to add them (including Smart Mailboxes). Each one will show the unread count for that mailbox in parentheses, if it’s non-zero.

They serve as drop targets for dragged messages too (except for Smart Mailboxes, of course, whose contents are controlled by search criteria), which is handy if you’ve hidden the mailboxes list using the widget at the left side of the Favorites Bar for a more iOS-like experience.

So far, so good – but where the feature really shines is with its automatically-applied keyboard shortcuts. If you open the Mailbox menu, you’ll see that there are two submenus pertaining to your favorite mailboxes. The first is the Go To Favorite Mailbox menu:

A keyboard shortcut of Command-n is applied to each of your favorite mailboxes in sequence, with n being a number starting at 1. You can trigger the shortcut to open the corresponding mailbox (i.e. to select it in the mailboxes list, displaying its contents).

Similarly, there’s a Move To Favorite Mailbox menu:

Here, a keyboard shortcut of Command-Control-n is applied to each of your favorite mailboxes, again with n being a number starting at 1. With messages selected, you can move them to any of your favorite (non-Smart) mailboxes using the corresponding shortcut.

Prior to Lion, Mail was never particularly good at allowing quick keyboard-navigation between specific mailboxes, or the ability to move messages without using the mouse. The new version of Mail goes some way towards fixing these problems, and is substantially more usable because of it.

If you enjoyed this article, you may want to follow me (@mattgemmell) on Twitter to hear about new posts as soon as they’re available.

… is not here. It doesn’t exist. You were probably expecting something from paper.li, which lets you create an online “newspaper” from Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds.

The reason that I haven’t created such a thing is because I really, really hate them. Allow me to explain why.

It’s recycled content

Someone writes something, be it a tweet or a blog post or a… whatever it is that people write on Facebook. You then see that content, because you’ve subscribed to that person’s tweets or blog, or added them on Facebook.

The stuff has already been published and shared. You know it has, because you’ve seen it. Then, you decide to take it and redundantly re-share it in an aggregated form. Why not just share the original thing? Retweet, or Like or comment. There are dozens of ways to do that. I’m far more likely to be interested in a one-off shared thing, rather than a boatload of arbitrarily-collated stuff you’ve thrown together. Paper.li’s tagline is “be a publisher”, but you’re not – you’re being a republisher.

For the same reason, I have no idea why people do “links roundups”. I get trackbacks to my blog posts that are just people posting a list of links, often bizarrely grouped purely on their approximate date of publication. What possible value does that add? If you want to keep that kind of archive, go right ahead – but don’t include it in your blog’s regular feed, or (for the love of $CHOSEN_SKY_FAIRY) tweet about it.

You’re contributing nothing

Newspapers contain editorial. There’s some kind of journalistic contribution, however brief, in each article. With these online “newspapers”, there’s zero. It’s just a wad of links and extracts, styled to appear something like a newspaper. No commentary by the “publisher”.

Just an idea, but… why don’t you write something yourself? Even just a brief remark on why you care about each item enough to share it? Give me a reason to be interested. As it is, I can read all that stuff in its original form; why should I bother going through your prettily-styled wall of links?

You’re (almost) implying endorsement

When someone updates their “newspaper”, it seems to blast out a tweet saying “The [Name of your paper] Daily is out! Top stories today via @mattgemmell etc”. That’s just a sliver away from implying that I’ve agreed to contribute to your “newspaper”.

Now, I’m not saying that you need my permission to share a link to my blog or to a tweet of mine (you definitely don’t), but the entire language of the message is designed to evoke the sense of contributors to a publication. We all know that’s the case; that’s why they worded it that way.

You’re tacitly agreeing to let people kind of think that I’m associated with your “newspaper”. I’m not. I think that’s a bit disingenuous. Maybe even a little sleazy. Don’t do that.

You’re spamming Twitter

Seriously, letting something auto-tweet to your followers? Didn’t we all agree that that’s an abuse, likely to get you unfollowed? Oh, but wait – since it mentions my Twitter username, I’ll see it even if I don’t follow you, in the Mentions tab, every day.

Thanks for that. Really, thanks; spam the very people you harvest most of your shared content from. I’m so much more likely to follow you now. Or indeed to not block you.

Please, just… stop. Just stop.

If you want to read some original content, you may instead wish to subscribe to this blog. If, on the other hand, you hated everything about this article, then you will also certainly not enjoy following me (@mattgemmell) on Twitter.

I read the official quotes from Android handset manufacturers about Google’s acquisition of Motorola with considerable glee. They’re… somewhat formulaic, shall we say.

For example, here’s Peter Chou, CEO of HTC:

“We welcome the news of today‘s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply committed to defending Android, its partners, and the entire ecosystem.”

Feels edited somewhat. Like, say, Google gave them a spec quote and told them not to deviate too far from it, or there would be (further) consequences. Here’s a possible (and entirely hypothetical, oh goodness yes) original version:

“We would welcome a coherent statement of intent from Google regarding its future plans for Android licensing.

Instead, we received the news of today’s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply ambivalent towards its existing hardware partners on whom Android’s success has heretofore rested.

We feel that Google has betrayed us, even though we have long been committed to defending Android as a viable smartphone platform despite the immediate, falling-chandelier-like fragmentation of the user experience, the nonexistence of a hardware baseline, and a bizarre lottery on future software updates.

Once again, Google demonstrates a combination of cluelessness and contempt for its partners, and the entire ecosystem.

On a personal note, Larry: fuck you.”