Category: I-phone

Upgrading your Mac’s RAM is one of the simplest and cheapest ways to improve its performance, and it might be more necessary than ever if you’re running OS X Lion. While Apple states that the minimum required RAM for Lion is 2 GB, in my experience this is nowhere near enough memory to get Apple’s latest OS running smoothly, especially since the latest version of Safari has a nasty habit of chewing through RAM. If you’re running OS X Lion on your Mac I’d say the actual minimum RAM is more like 4 GB, and if your Mac will accept 8 GB or more, there’s no reason not to max it out if you can afford to.

For some reason many Mac users have got the idea that replacing RAM will void your warranty or your AppleCare agreement. That’s not the case at all for the current Macs in Apple’s lineup. Apple even provides instructions for swapping out RAM in the instruction booklet that comes with modern Macs, and in OS X Lion the System Information application’s RAM tab provides a link to online memory upgrade instructions.

If you’re intimidated at the thought of cracking open your Mac, don’t be. Swapping out the RAM is easy enough for anyone to do it — if you know how to use a screwdriver, you know how to swap out your Mac’s RAM. In fact, the actual physical process of upgrading the RAM is so easy that the hardest part may be finding the correct RAM in the first place.

It’s important to match up the specs of the replacement RAM with what your machine will accept, because otherwise it may not work properly — or at all. I generally source my RAM from OWC, because their site takes nearly all of the guesswork out of finding the correct RAM for any given model of Mac. OWC even performs testing to discover the actual maximum amount of RAM a Mac will accept as opposed to Apple’s often more conservative figures. For example, Apple’s official stats for my Early 2008 MacBook Pro state a max RAM of 4 GB, but testing from OWC and other sources shows my model will actually accept a total of 6 GB.

Newegg is another good site to find RAM, and you can often find some good discounts there. However, since it’s not a Mac-specific site, you may have slightly more difficulty finding the correct RAM for your Mac.

As general guidelines for optimum performance, it’s usually best to make sure your Mac has the same amount of RAM in each slot. In other words, if your Mac has two RAM slots and will accept a maximum of 8 GB of RAM, you’re usually going to get far better performance with 4 GB of RAM in each slot than you would with 4 GB in one slot and 2 GB in another, and not just because of the additional 2 GB of RAM. It’s also generally a good idea to have all of your Mac’s RAM from the same manufacturer. There are exceptions to these recommendations, but you’ll want to follow them unless your system is unusual in some way.

Once you’ve found the right RAM for your Mac, here’s a list of what you’ll need:

• RAM (it’s rather important to remember this)
• Phillips #00 screwdriver (for most Macs)
• A step-by-step guide — Apple’s own guides are decent, but iFixit’s are more in-depth

Some Macs are easier to upgrade than others. The MacBook Air’s RAM is impossible to upgrade, as it’s soldered directly onto the logic board. The pre-unibody models of the Mac mini were notoriously difficult to work on, requiring substantial disassembly to access the RAM, but the unibody Mac mini makes upgrading RAM almost absurdly easy — you don’t need any tools other than your fingers. Mac Pros require a fair bit of disassembly to access the RAM, but that model’s modular design makes this relatively easy. The iMac’s RAM is also easy to get at, a stark contrast to the risky-looking procedure required to replace its hard drive.

I’ve focused on portable Macs for our own mini-guide simply because that’s what I have access to. Though in most cases they require more disassembly than their desktop counterparts, it’s still nothing to balk at if you know how to use a screwdriver.

Pre-unibody MacBook Pro

Swapping the RAM on this model is simple and requires very little disassembly. Remove the battery, remove four screws on the RAM shield and the shield itself, and you’re in. I’ve done many RAM swaps on the older MacBook Pros, and it generally takes me less than ten minutes total.

Pre-unibody MacBook

Servicing this Mac’s RAM is also extremely easy. Remove the battery, loosen some captive screws on a retaining bracket and remove that, and you have easy access to not only the RAM but also the hard drive. The pic below is from a recent repair job I did for a friend’s MacBook; swapping out both her RAM and hard drive took less than 20 minutes.

Getting at the RAM on this model is very easy thanks to the release levers Apple thoughtfully included. Pushing on the lever causes the RAM to pop out.

Polycarbonate (plastic) unibody MacBook

Getting at the RAM on the unibody Macs isn’t quite as “user friendly,” as novice users may be put off at the idea of having to expose the entirety of the “guts” of their Macs for a simple RAM upgrade. The good news is that even though you have to remove the entire bottom panel on the unibody MacBooks, Apple’s made this very easy. Once again, all you need is a screwdriver and the courage to proceed.

Remove eight Phillips screws (kudos to Apple for not using crazy Y-slotted or security Torx screws) and you’ll be ready to remove the Mac’s bottom panel. This part can be tricky; in theory the panel shouldn’t be exceptionally difficult to lift off at this point, but I had to fight with the panel on my wife’s MacBook for a couple minutes before it finally budged. Once removed, your Mac will look like the picture below.

The RAM is exposed and sandwiched between the logic board and hard drive. Removing it is supposed to be easy, but the clearance between the RAM and hard drive was so tight that I found it a bit difficult to remove the RAM from the lower slot. Incidentally, removing the hard drive is also very easy if you happen to be doing that upgrade, too; removing a single retaining bracket with a Torx screwdriver allows you to lift the drive out and swap it with a new one. The procedure for the unibody MacBook Pro is essentially the same for both RAM and hard drive upgrades.

Even though it may seem intimidating to have to remove the entire bottom of your computer for these upgrades, the unibody Macs should be quite easy to service even for novice users. Even though I had to fight with the lower panel and the lower-slotted RAM when I upgraded my wife’s MacBook, it still only took about 15 minutes from start to finish.

Once you’ve put everything back together and started your Mac back up, you can verify that the Mac recognizes the new RAM by accessing “About This Mac” from the Apple menu. If all has gone well, your new RAM will show up and your Mac should feel much snappier overall.

Mac 101: Upgrade your Mac’s RAM originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Game engines are a topic that I have brought up many times on this site, including an open source iOS game engine list.

You may have noticed the overwhelming amount of information on this site featuring Cocos2D.  Well that’s simply because Cocos2D has the biggest community and thus the most information.  There are other quality open source game engines available, and you may want to look at other alternatives if you are having difficulty with Cocos2D or just starting out.

Here’s the roundup:

The Moai SDK has undergone some significant updates moving all the way up to 0.6. Notably adding support for OpenGL ES 2.0. It definitely looks like the Moai SDK team is very committed to providing updates.  With full Lua scripting support and a number of titles now released this is definitely an up and coming engine.

Cocos3D has been updated to v0.6.1 with a number of new features notably support for Cocos2D particle systems, fog effects, lighting enhancements, and a number of fixes.  Cocos3D is looking much more like a viable 3D engine, and a free 3D Reversi game created with Cocos3D is currently free in the app store if you want to check it out.

The Squirrel language supporting Android/iPhone Emo Framework has added an example game and updated to version 0.1.3.

The Sparrow Framework team has released some excellent tutorials covering Texture formats, and game auto-rotation.

Last, but not least Cocos2D has updated to 1.0.1 with a number of minor fixes.

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

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JSONKit has become one of the most popular JSON parsing  frameworks in iOS development due to it’s ease of use on iOS devices.  Recently I have seen quite a few searches on this site for a JSONKit tutorial, and although tutorials have been featured using JSONKit.  This is the first providing a guide for beginners specifically on JSONKit.

While the JSONKit developers provide good documentation, it’s always good to learn from example and I found an easy quick tutorial demonstrating how to communicate with the Rotten Tomatoes API, and download and display the returned JSON data in a readable format.

Here’s a video demonstrating the project from the tutorial in action:

You can find the tutorial by 14 Oranges on their website along with a downloadable sample project here:
How To Use JSONKit And Rotten Tomatoes

If you want to run the example you will need to get a key for the Rotten Tomatoes API.

You can find the Github for JSONKit JSON parser library here:
https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit

It’s always good to learn by example and this should get you started with using JSONKit.

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

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There are few categories as rich in apps as the Photography category in the iTunes App Store. The improving image quality of the iPhone’s — and more recently the iPod Touch’s — camera has led many people to replace their point & shoots with their iDevice.

While the camera can produce fairly nice images with the right lighting and a good motif, image editing can give the shots an almost professional touch. Whether it’s for editing on the fly to share among social networks or for semi-professional purposes when no “real” computer is available, Snapseed for the iPhone strives to offer a unique and complete experience. We take an in-depth look at the app and if its promise holds true right after the break.

The Interface

As with every app made for the iPhone, Snapseed has to make the best of the relatively small screen estate the device offers. The image editing app has succeeded, for the most part. It can be used both in landscape as well as in portrait mode, with the basic elements being simply regrouped. The current image gets the most screen space and the editing options are either lined up to the left or beneath it.

Welcome Screen in Snapseed with options aligned to the bottom

If you’re in the mood for sharing, those options are quickly accessible as well and offer not just saving to the photo library or sending via email, but also integration with popular services like Flickr or Facebook and even printing directly from the app.

Snapseed comes with five basic modes and six creative modes, each represented with an icon and its name, making it easy to pick one quickly without having to guess pictograms. In Basic Mode, you have automatic, selective adjust, tune image, straighten and crop, while in Creative Mode, you have black & white, vintage, drama, grunge, center focus and frames. Each of these modes offer more options when selected and that is where Snapseed really excels.

Editing an Image

At first, the image editing screen looks anything but spectacular. The photo is displayed almost in full screen and the bottom bar holds a couple of icons, but nothing else. No need to worry, there’s more beneath the surface than you might expect and Snapseed helps you discover it via an intro screen which comes up the first time you select an option.

Every adjustment option comes with a help screen

This layout is the same in every single screen in Snapseed, only the buttons on the bottom bar change. To adjust a specific area of the image (and not the entire image, for that use the other basic modes) you first need to add a control point via the plus sign. Using the pinch gesture you can widen or narrow the target area, which is then highlighted in red.

Adding focus points to part of an image

Per default, the first adjustment option is Brightness. To increase or decrease the value, simply swipe your finger to the right or left of the image. The effect is shown immediately: the control point will have a green border if the value is increased and a red border if decreased. Additionally, the bottom bar also reflects the changes. This way of editing is very intuitive; instead of moving diminutive sliders or put in values, you make use of the by-now familiar gestures on the iPhone.

But Snapseed takes this principle even further. As you have noticed, there are no menus in the editing screen, but surely you’d like to edit more than just the brightness, right? The other options can be accessed by sliding your finger up and down on the image. In the Selective Adjust Panel, contrast and saturation are revealed. In other editing screens like Tune Image, there are even more such as Ambiance or White Balance. And now, the tiny letter in the middle of the control point makes sense as well: it’s always the first letter of the manipulation option you’ve selected.

Switch between adjustments within an option with a swipe

Remember that no matter which screen you’re in, these gestures are the same throughout the app, making it really easy to use without a any kind of learning curve.

Once you’ve made your adjustments, you can compare the original image to the current one by simply tapping the tiny image icon on the upper right. If you’re happy with the result, leave the screen by tapping the bottom right arrow and it will apply the changes. If you leave with the bottom left arrow, all changes will be lost.

Creative Modes

If you’re in for more than the usual stuff, the creative modes might satisfy that need. As mentioned above, there are six to choose from, ranging from rather standard black and white conversion and frames to decidedly less standard vintage and grunge looks. You can use the familiar gestures to change the intensity of an effect, to apply different variations of an effect and even access options like brightness and contrast and saturation.

In addition to the standard buttons, the bottom bar now holds a shuffle symbol to randomly select effect styles or a symbol to select a specific texture. It all depends on the effect, but its great to see that the developers of the app followed through with the user interface, so it’s never confusing.

Creative Modes can add special effects to your photos

The Downside of the Interface

While the interface of Snapseed is thought through and the gesture based controls save a huge amount of screen space, there is one aspect that bugs me.

You can’t zoom in on the image. Now, on first glance that might not appear as very tragic, given that the photo takes up most of the screen. But many of the manipulations will look great as long as you don’t see the image at 100 percent — for example, on a printout or on a computer screen. Things such as contrast, brightness and ambiance can lead to ragged edges where light and dark parts of the image meet; you would be able to see and compensate for it if you could just zoom in. Of course, on the iPad you can’t zoom in either, but the image is displayed larger to begin with and the issue is not as bad there.

Verdict

Snapseed on the iPhone is not the average image editing application. You can make quick adjustments, to be sure, but in my opinion it is geared towards users who’d like to have more control over the changes they make. For that reason, it might not appeal to those who want to tap one button and have a spectacular effect applied to their image, ready to tweet.

Comparison: Before and After

While I like Snapseed on the iPad more due to the bigger screen, it’s been transitioned very well to the smaller iDevice and everyone serious about iPhoneography should consider it when deciding for an image editing application. If zooming into your image is of paramount importance to you, you could also check out Photoforge 2, which offers a similar depth of options, albeit with a slightly more complicated user interface.

What’s your favorite image editing app? Let us know in the comments!

It’s kinda crazy to think, but our little internet startup, Envato, has been on the air now for five years. We started back in 2006 as four very enthusiastic and totally green entrepreneurs with a shoestring budget and a love of the web. Fast forward five years and while we’re hopefully a little less green, we’re still incredibly passionate about Education, Marketplaces and the web! It’s been an amazing time and we’d like to share a look inside our Melbourne HQ offices, some stats about Envato and a big thank you to the community.

Behind the Scenes

With such a big milestone, we thought it might be good to give an inside glimpse into our Melbourne HQ offices and some of the people that work here. So we invited a Melbourne film crew called Compulsive to come in and shoot a 3 minute video about Envato. I hope you enjoy it!

As you may know, we also have a large remote team working around the globe on our sites. Next year we’re hoping to gather all of Envato and as much of the community as possible for an epic meetup, but in the meantime if you’re curious to see who’s who, you can check out this little video from our remote staff meetup last year in Chicago.

Some Stats

Looking back at five years of exciting and sometimes exhausting Envato work, I put together some stats about Envato from our time online so far. In five years we have:

• Published over 10,000 tutorials and articles helping people learn everything from Photoshop to Freelancing
• Hosted over 300,000 items for sale on our marketplaces from WordPress themes to Stock Photos
• Showcased over 12,000 items of inspirational design, photography and a host of other creative mediums on Creattica
• Listed over 8,000 jobs on our freelance job board
• Reviewed and rounded up over 3,000 apps on our AppStorm network
• Launched 9 marketplaces, 11 tutorial sites, 9 blogs, 18 books, 7 bundles, 4 Regular Podcasts, and more social media accounts than you can poke a stick at
• Accumulated close to 1 million RSS subscribers and twitter followers
• Signed up almost 1 million marketplace members, 90,000 Creattica members, 50,000 FreelanceSwitch members, and 40,000 Tuts+ Premium subscribers
• Served up well over 1.5 billion pageviews across all our sites since inception

Holy toledo batman!!

Thank You

I can’t say thank you enough to all of you for supporting Envato all these years. Whether you are long-time user of the Marketplaces, Tuts+, AppStorm, FreelanceSwitch or Creattica, or just a casual visitor, we’re really proud that you stop in and use our sites. If you’re one of the thousands of contributors, authors, writers, and subscribers, we’re honored and humbled that you have helped us build this company and filled these sites with such amazing content. And regardless of who you are, we hope that we can continue to provide value and service to you for many more years to come!

On behalf of the whole team, thank you all!
Collis
CEO, Chief Tea Drinker and Web Designer Who Doesn’t Get to Design Anymore
Envato

P.S. If you’re not all video’d out, you can check out this video of one of our early Envato staff

I’m sorry, but I couldn’t resist that title. But if you can forgive me, then I think you might just enjoy this app. Cocktail apps are nothing new to iOS, and quite frankly, I thought I’d seen enough of them, until this one came along. As soon as I saw the screenshots and learned that the wonderfully talented Datz brothers were designing it, I knew it was going to be special. I was not disappointed.

Want to find out more about The Cocktail App? Hit the jump and let’s tear into it.

Details and Preparation of Cocktails

Upon opening the app you will be presented immediately a list of the different cocktails. Simply tapping on one will bring up the details of the specific beverage. Under the details section you are given a lovely image of the drink, along with an explanation (a perfect quick fact that you can whip out to impress members of the opposite sex with your supreme knowledge of the beverage), and a list of the ingredients, each of which you can click on to provide you even more details.

Details of the cocktail — you know, because everyone needs to know this

A swipe to the left will bring you to the Preparation tab, a life saver if you are forced to make one yourself. Once again, you have some beautiful images of your equipment and then instructions to follow. These are very easy to follow and allow really anyone to make cocktails — providing you have the right materials.

Detailed instructions for preparation

Exploring the App

The second tab along the bottom is the Ingredients tab which has a list of all the ingredients for the many various cocktails in the app, sorted by alcoholic and non-alcoholic content. The best part about this section is that you can sort your cocktails by the ingredients. So if you like your drinks with maybe gin, scotch or maybe even some tequila, you can tap on each of the ingredients, the app marks them, and shows any cocktails that include those spirits.

Not sure what cocktail you want? Select your preferred ingredients and the app will recommend some

The third section is for your treasured cocktails — the Favourites. In any cocktail view you can hit the star in the top right corner and it will be added to this section. So when you’re in a situation where you panic at the bar and forget what you want, in about 5 seconds you can have a list of your best cocktails and you’re off.

The Favourites tab is handy instead of browsing through all of the cocktails

Design

Quite frankly, there are plenty of other cocktail apps in the App Store — some of which I even had — but what brought me to this app was the stunning design. As I am sure you have noticed from the previous screenshots, this app was built with the number one goal of looking fantastic, which it accomplishes by using subtle green and black tones and the absolutely wonderful icons. This app is a work of art, and although it may provide only a bit more functionality than the competition, it is by far my favourite due to its aesthetic nature.

Magnificent icons designed by Konstantin Datz

Functionality/Performance

We’ve seen the amazing design, but what’s a pretty app without a stellar performance? Well, I can tell you that this app is extremely quick and responsive, and that is down to the awesome developer, Moritz von Volkmann. He has done a wonderful job with the entire app. For example, the table view in the second Ingredients tab was made entirely from scratch, rather than using Apple’s Table View. It’s touches like this that make the app snappy and a joy to use — well done.

Complaints?

I’ve gone on and on about the positive side of the app, but are there any negatives? The answer is yes, but only slightly. The biggest complaint for me is that there are only 38 cocktails, which is by no means a tiny amount, but it would be great to see more. Hopefully more drinks come in a future update.

Conclusion

If you can’t tell by now, I love this app. Its unlikely to be one that you will use everyday and be essential to your life, but it’s a great app for its convenience alone. It will give you all you need to know about each cocktail, from the ingredients, to its background and the creation process, all wrapped up in a beautiful piece of art. Overall, it’s well worth the $1.99 not only for its use, but that is well under the cost of any cocktail you’re likely to find. Plus, with this you can make them yourself with ease for much less money — think of it as a good investment.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Prototype Snowmobile Driver. The developer describes Prototype Snowmobile Driver as a fun and exciting game to play. You are a prototype snowmobile driver and a world-wide company hired you to drive their new snowmobile prototype. Ride this amazing prototype at crazy speeds through trees and get snowflakes to score extra points. Drive as fast as you can to score more.

Do you think it’s too easy? Try to drive the prototype until dark falls and test your skills during the night.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Prototype Snowmobile Driver

Prototype Snowmobile Driver

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

• Dynamic environment creation
• Apple Game Center support with global leaderboard and great achievements
• Achievements notification during gameplay
• Addictive gameplay
• Takes advantage of the iPhone 4′s Retina Display

Requirements: iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.iOS 4.0.1 or later

Price: $0.99

Developer: Vinicius Rochedo

Vote for a Review

Would you like to see us write a full review of Prototype Snowmobile Driver? Have your say in our poll:

Would you like to see Prototype Snowmobile Driver reviewed in-depth on AppStorm?

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.

There are certain application categories that seem to draw a lot of attention from both developers and users. Aside from to-do list apps, the most popular category would have to be applications that promise to help you keep track of your money.

Some of them focus on sheer information while many have tried to gain users with stunning user interfaces. Saver falls into the latter camp, at once entering a saturated market and shattering the average user’s expectations. Want to learn about how it works? Follow along after the jump.

First Impressions

The first thing that greets you upon launching Saver is a gorgeous design that tries to melt away as much as it helps point attention towards your data instead of the visual chrome inside the app. There are different “tabs” that can be cycled through from the bottom navigation bar, including a settings page, daily view, quick-addition view and a gorgeous pie-graph view of your month’s expenses. Even while flipping through the app for the first time, you get the impression that the developer has thought through what UI design should mean; in this case, it means a beautiful shell of an app with the important, most interacted-with data displayed in a stunning way.

Using the App

Upon pressing the “+” symbol for the quick-addition page, you’re prompted to enter the amount of money that you’ve just spent and assign a category to the item. Many of the most common categories are there, including Groceries, Vacation, Food, Utilities, Amusement and iTunes. Each of the icons is perfectly rendered on the iPhone 4, providing enough information without becoming an overly-cluttered mess.

Saver's entry screen is well-designed and functional

Saver  allows the user to define a monthly budget, which is nice, but its implementation at this stage of the game is half-baked. For many — myself included — a monthly budget is essentially impossible to create due to an ever-fluctuating income schedule. A weekly view, in this instance, that allows you to track the budget for each week, is paramount. In my tests, the app also doesn’t support adding each week individually so that you can simulate a weekly budget, a work-around that I was definitely hoping to utilize.

Visualization & Customization

The app does offer options for the Graph page, allowing you to view the money you’ve spent by category for the week, month or year. This is helpful if you’d like to track your expenses or see how you spent your money throughout the past, allowing you to adjust future plans (or re-assign all of those iTunes purchases you don’t want your significant other finding out about). Also in the Graph page, you can tap one of the categories and be taken to the history for that category, so you can see that your food expenses are so high because of that dinner with your mother-in-law.

Saver's 'Graph' view is gorgeous and functional

Besides the gorgeous Graph view you can also view your information as a list of items divided by category with the amount for each entry on the side. This is useful if you want a more granular view of your expenses; say, if you’re trying to see if you spend more money on a Monday instead of a Sunday, or whether you’re more likely to pick up a pizza when your wife works late on Wednesdays.

There is, of course, another option. The Settings page offers a nice amount of customization, including the ability to set a passcode for the app. Sure, every time you launch the app you’ll have to type in another four digits, but now nobody has to know that you went and rented Toy Story 3 from iTunes three times in the past week. You can also decide that the week starts with Monday (for those of you still in a school-week state of mind), which currency you would like to use and view the developer’s website and help info.

Saver gives you plenty of options so you can track your way

Maybe the most useful setting, though, is the ability to decide which screen you’d like to see upon launching the app. For many this should be the ‘New Entry’ screen, but you can choose any of the other screens (bar Settings) if you’re so inclined.

Deeper Control of Your Tracking

There is some more (somewhat-hidden) functionality buried within the app. The developer offers a free backup service for the app so that you can retrieve your information should you (or someone else) do something with your iPhone or the application itself that requires a restore or re-install of the app.

One of my favorite features is so well hidden that I discovered it by accident while I was poking through the app late at night. You can, upon tapping a category a second time, do a few things with the information that you’re trying to track.

Subcategories allow you to assign more detailed information to an expense

You can also choose from some smaller, more precise sub-categories of the expense. For example, instead of simply assigning each purchase of an app to iTunes, you can hit iTunes twice and then say that you downloaded an Application. This applies to all of the categories; most of the common sub-categories or ubiquitous expenses can be found within this hidden sub-menu. It is also possible to add a note to a specific item. Say I re-up my Squarespace service for another month. While I can file it under Payments or Subscription, I can also add the more detailed “Squarespace” note that appears when I tap the expense.

If the sub-categories aren’t broad enough for you or you would like to get really specific about what you just spent your hard-earned cash on, the app allows you to create your own sub-categories. I’m in the middle of paying off a loan from a family member, so I just hit Payments and then Name and I know that I covered my expense for that month.

Conclusion

Is Saver worth choosing over the many other apps promising to help you track your expenses? I would say yes, but with hopes that the developer sticks with the application. There are a few wrinkles — like the missing functionality of utilizing a weekly budget — that should be ironed out, but the app is beautiful enough and useful enough as-is to warrant a purchase.

It’s almost September, and according to everybody with a website that has anything to do with Apple, the iPhone 5 will be announced and/or released soon. Although we’ve already seen some of the tricks that iOS 5 has in store, we still don’t know what kind of hardware changes are coming with the iPhone 5 — or whatever they decide to name it.

So what do you think is next? Let us know in the poll!

Hello iCoders,

I have a quick tip today that I have been using in some of my development that you guys may find helpful in yours. Lately I’ve been developing a Framework. We mentioned a little something about it earlier here on iCodeBlog. When developing a .framework, a lot of times during my work I couldn’t place break points in the code and had to rely mostly on NSLog. NSLog however really wasn’t doing the job for me. So I made 2 of my own NSLog’s that I have been using to work.

How it Works

With your Xcode projects there is a piece of code called the prefix header that is essentially included in every class in your project. This is set up in your Build Settings under the “Prefix Header”. You can put code in here that will be available to every class. Below I have the Prefix Header that I use in my projects. I define 3 things in this Prefix Header.

The debug constant must be set to 1 for the debug logs to print out. This is nice for turing off all logging before sending off to the App Store. DStep prints out whatever you pass in with a big line of ‘******************’ above and below it. I use it to mark big steps in execution to quickly look through logs. DLog works just like NSLog() except it prints the method and line along with it and once again puts ‘**************’ above and below. Customize them if you like and try them in your development process today! Happy Coding.

Follow me on Twitter @cruffenach

EDIT: The code posted here before was malformed by out code formatting plugin. My apologies. The GIST below has the correct code.

In this application we will see how to implement Segmented Controller in the application. So let let see how it will worked. My last post you can find out from here (Please attached the link of the previous post)

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

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: We need to add two resources in the Resource folder.

Step 4: Open the SegmentControlViewController.h file and make the following changes.

Step 5: Double click the SegmentControlViewController.xib file and open it to the Interface Builder. First drag the Segmented Control from the library and place it to the view window. Select the Segmented control and bring up Connection Inspector and connect Touch Up Inside to the File Owner icon and select segmentControlAction: , connect File’s Owner icon to the Segmented Control and select segment. Now drag the View two times from the library and place it to the Interface window. Drag the imageView from the library and place it to the View window and select the view and bring up Attribute Inspector , select the “bg.png” image. Do it once more time and select the “manu-screen.png”. Connect File’s owner icon to the View and select firstView. Select File’s Owner icon to the view and select secondView. Now save the .xib file, close it and go back to the Xcode.

Step 6: In the SegmentControlViewController.m file make the following changes:

Step 7: Now compile and run the application on the Simulator.

Booyah is a company, originally founded by ex-Blizzard guys, that made some big steps in the relatively early days of the App Store with its social game MyTown. Since then, it looks like the development over there has taken a turn for the more traditional. Early Bird is the studio’s latest product, and it’s a physics-based puzzle platformer that’s actually more similar to golf than anything else.

The idea is that you control a bird by swiping across the screen (Did I mention that Booyah has gone a little more traditional? At least it’s not angry), trying to make your way across a level to a target where a worm has taken up residence. Get there in fewer swipes than the game offers for each level, and you’ll be the early bird, with a star rating to match. Run out of swipes, and you’ve got to start the level over.

This one checks pretty much all the marks — the graphics and sound are cute, the gameplay is solid (though the swiping mechanic is a little simple), and there are plenty of rewards to go after, from that aforementioned rating to bonuses for landing right on the target and so on. Both Game Center and OpenFeint integration are included, and there’s apparently more content coming soon. The game is just US 99 cents for iPhone, or there’s a $1.99 HD version out for iPad as well. Early Bird’s not quite as risky or groundbreaking as Booyah’s other titles, but it’s a solid game for sure, and shows that when Booyah wants to focus strictly on hitting the right market with a well-made game, they can do just that.

Daily iPhone App: Early Bird originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iTunes Match, Apple’s answer to the “online music locker” service, has just entered beta according to an email sent out to members of the Developer Program. iTunes Match will store users’ music libraries in iCloud, allowing anywhere/anytime access to the entire library from any device.

iTunes Match is now available to US-based developers, and subscribers will receive iTunes Match service both during the beta period and an additional three months beyond the beta period for free.

Concurrent with the iTunes Match beta is a new beta version of iTunes 10.5, beta 6.1. Developers must download this newest beta of iTunes in order to enable iTunes Match. Apple encourages developers to continue maintaining backups of their iTunes libraries, as iCloud libraries may be reset periodically during the beta.

iTunes Match will cost US$24.99 per year when it launches. Its public release is expected to concur with that of iOS 5, iTunes 10.5, iCloud, and possibly OS X Lion 10.7.2, all of which may debut in either September or October.

iTunes Match beta now open to developers originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Engadget recently found a teaser page on the DirecTV website that speaks about a “Nomad,” a little box that promises to take your movies and TV from your home DVR out to the rest of the world (no relation, supposedly, to my favorite portable game console, the Sega Nomad). Details are slim, but it sounds very much like the Slingbox, in that it will take all kinds of signals from DirecTV, and send them out to all kinds of other mobile devices. In other words, DirecTV subscribers may soon have a way to watch their television service from anywhere right on their iOS device.

Gizmolovers has a whole bunch of information on the service, including that the box might possibly cost as much as $150 on its own. And unfortunately, there’s no official word on this at all, which means no actual date to wait or even hope for just yet. But stay tuned, DirecTV subscribers — you may end up watching TV on your iPad through that service sooner than you think.

DirecTV working on ‘Nomad,’ may provide streaming to iOS originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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• 2.7 GHz Core i7
• 256 GB SSD
• 4 GB RAM
• US$1499

• 2.5 GHz Core i5
• Standard HDD
• 4 GB RAM
• $1199

Macworld benchmarks: Mac mini BTO can match iMac performance originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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