In 1968, Alan Kay of Xerox PARC designed what he called a “personal, portable information manipulator.” The device, which might be described as the overweight, ugly offspring of an iPad and a Blackberry, was dubbed the “Dynabook.” “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke How the world has changed in 30 [...]

On November 17, 2011, 45 mobile phone carriers around the world committed their product roadmap to using NFC technology for mobile payments. As part of this commitment, the operators would have to abide by a new set of design specifications. If these specifications become commonplace, future mobile phones would automatically have the capacity to make [...]

Overview I see lots of posts asking about the existence of a clickable, rich text UILabel and the answer is often the same…. it’s not possible so use a UIWebView…. NOOOOOOO! The idea of contemplating using such a heavyweight control for a purpose for which is was not designed is a tad crazy. So I [...]

Mobile applications are expanding exponentially, but whilst most app development still seems to be concentrated on iPhone development, the number of companies looking for iPad development is catching up fast. This uptake of new development is in spite of the stringent requirements for acceptance of apps within the Apple App Store. Apple has always had [...]

It is a natural situation that companies want to save money, reducing costs maximises profits after all, and when it comes to sourcing software development services, this is no exception. The iPhone and iPad development market is awash with budding developers, small agencies as well as more established software houses and do-it-all companies. Why is [...]

iPhone and iPad Apps aren’t going to market themselves. No matter how brilliant, how innovative or how plainly time-saving and cost-effective an app might be, it always requires some form of marketing. Luckily, not all marketing costs money, especially on the internet. Learning how to harness virtual word of mouth can go a long way [...]

Good developers know how to save time, this generally means no copy-and-paste, no duplicate code and a good class structure to keep common items grouped together in an efficient class hierarchy. One way to add functionality to an existing class is to subclass it. We create a new descendent of our class, add the required functionality and use the new class in place of the old one.

As developers, solving problems is what we do, but often the approach is just as important as the solution. Today, we are going to run trough an example of how a relatively complex problem can be solved by ‘thinking simple’, giving you a self-working, generic solution.

With the increase in sales figures for the iPhone and iPad, as well as other platforms such as Android, it is clear that the mobile ecosystem is a valuable and profitable environment for businesses to target with their products and services. With each generation of device comes a wave of new adopters, sat atop a [...]

Well this is going to be a fairly short article, but I just wanted to share with you a snippet of magic I discovered quite some time ago. It is something that I posted on StackOverflow and to date is the most up-votes I have received on there, with votes coming in pretty much every day.