Posts tagged Cocoa Touch

Radu Poenaru at Fraunhofer FIT presenting IdeaPitch - first screen

IdeaPitch – built on Microsoft Surface

3 years ago

by Radu Poenaru in 2009 - Fraunhofer FIT, Master thesis, My work, Others

I am very close to finish another project in Fraunhofer FIT: IdeaPitch on the Microsoft Surface.

This concept is very simple, you are able to “store” ideas in a repository, created using PHP and MySQL, and later on manipulate it on Microsoft Surface, along with the rest of the contributors. Other clients, iPhone and Air, were developed and are able to connect to the repository and register the ideas there. They are acting like individual clients, the iPhone can’t be used comfortable by more than one person. Not to mention that this is kind of personal device by its nature.

The Surface application allows users to connect to a PHP webservice which provides the interface to the small repository for “ideas”, the transfer is using XML to provide a easy way to consume data. Below you can see some photos which depict how these ideas are shown. The application uses quite a lot from the surface features – multitouch, special contextual menus – different for “idea” representation and for the main surface, a custom built management interface, allowing easy saving and restore of the session from the repository.

It features “agents” which can:

send the message back to the sender,
“duplicate” the message
send it to a timer
to a random logged in user by using the “decide”
… and worth mention also to a Nabaztag, the funny white wireless rabbit!

I have the feeling that this app will be demoed soon in some fairs or conferences regarding communication and collaboration where Fraunhofer FIT will be represented!

C# Cocoa Touch Fraunhofer FIT Interface Buider iPhone Microsoft Surface MySQL PHP User experience WPF XCode

XCode: Modal windows – Google maps

3 years ago

by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone, My work

From time to time, you’ll need to show in your iPhone application a view over the entire application without navigating and destroying your workflow of the application. I’ll present the mechanism of modal windows as it is implemented in Cocoa Touch.

Lets take a real case: you have a view in which you want to input an address. Near the address you have a button which will show the user the Map centered on the specific address that he inputted. How this can be implemented?

The answer is quite simple: you need to declare the view from which you launch the modal view as <UINavigationBarDelegate> in the header file (.h for newbies), like this:

@interface CtrlAddEvtView1 : UIViewController <UINavigationBarDelegate>

This way, the view will know “magically” how to interact with children views.

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Cocoa Touch Interface Buider iPhone Media Informatics Modal windows Objective-C RWTH Aachen XCode

Processing NSDate into an ISO8601 string

3 years ago

by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone

During the CSCW Lab, where I had the experience of working on iPhone, I had to connect to a XML RPC server. Some of the parameters of the request had to be formatted as ISO8601 standard. After some reading, I end up using the following code, managing both the conversion of a NSDate to NSString and a NSString to a NSDATE using the above format:

NSString –> NSDate

-(NSString *) strFromISO8601:(NSDate *) date {
    static NSDateFormatter* sISO8601 = nil;

    if (!sISO8601) {
        sISO8601 = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];

        NSTimeZone *timeZone = [NSTimeZone localTimeZone];
        int offset = [timeZone secondsFromGMT];

        NSMutableString *strFormat = [NSMutableString stringWithString:@"yyyyMMdd'T'HH:mm:ss"];
        offset /= 60; //bring down to minutes
        if (offset == 0)
            [strFormat appendString:ISO_TIMEZONE_UTC_FORMAT];
        else
            [strFormat appendFormat:ISO_TIMEZONE_OFFSET_FORMAT, offset / 60, offset % 60];

        [sISO8601 setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterFullStyle];
        [sISO8601 setDateFormat:strFormat];
    }
    return[sISO8601 stringFromDate:date];
}

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Cocoa Touch Interface Buider iPhone Media Informatics Objective-C RWTH Aachen XCode

Apple’s Xcode : symbol(s) not found at Line Location Tool:0

4 years ago

by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone

I am a begginer in XCode. My first real application for iPhone requires connection to a webservices. Since I wanted to use RPC XML or Soap, I searched on internet and found few examples (Apple programmers aren’t so into code sharing) to implement my requests. I want to mention that since the app is in the stage of proof of concept, the code is still not structured in classes separating the data and business layers as should.

So I took the example from CocoaDev and expected to run flawlessly.

But after pasting the code in my application and build it, a lot of unknown errors started to show:

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Cocoa Touch Error iPhone Line Location Tool:0 MacBook Media Informatics Missing Framework Objective-C XCode

iPhone Startup Tutorial

4 years ago

by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone, My work

This is the start of all iPhone Developers. It will be an extremely brief tutorial meant just for those which are at the absolute start of iPhone development.

First checks:

1. System requirements: verify if the iPhone sdk needs are met.
2. Go to Apple’s iPhone Developer Center , then download the SDK.
3. As you’ll need some experience and code to work on, download the Hello World sample application.
4. Double click (gotcha!) on the the Hello World project file (the .xcodeproj).
5. Alternatively, you can use the research assistant to increase your knowledge about the iPhone libraries.
6. Optional, but really recommended: look deeply into all source code examples that you can find and use the research assistant often.

Take a big breath and … just start!

Good luck

Cocoa Touch iPhone Media Informatics Objective-C XCode

Baby step into Apple’s iPhone programming – Cocoa Touch

4 years ago

by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone

I just started the most interesting lab of my life : Programming Apple’s iPhone using a MacBook with Cocoa Touch.It is held in Frauhover FIT, under Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Prinz and Dr. Wolfgang Gräther. In this lab we will start develop an iPhone application using Usability principles, Apple’s User interface Guides.

For me it’s the best opportunity to take a peak into the neighbor’s( Apple’s ) garden. For long time I was just curious about their technology and ways to program. But I lacked the hardware, because you can develop for Mac and iPhone only in MacBooks, Macs and obviously need an iPhone for testing.