How to display a “spinning wheel” indicator in the centre of your screen
Sometimes you want to tell the user that something’s happening behind the scenes and that there’s no need to panic. While your process is happening you can display a “spinning gear” in the middle of your screen. One way of doing this is via a UIActivityIndicatorView. You can create them in Interface Builder, but it’s very easy to create one and show it if and when necessary. Here’s how: - (UIActivityIndicatorView *)indicator { if (!_indicator) { _indicator = [[UIActivityIndicatorView...
read moreHow to load a different storyboard depending on screen size in iOS
As much as I appreciate the idea of Auto Layout, I don’t think it likes me very much. In turn, I don’t like Auto Layout very much. The pain and hassle it takes to make several UI elements fit well on a 4 inch screen as well as a 3.5 inch screen regularly drives me crazy. On paper it’s a great idea – but in reality not fit for prime time. It’s not a coincidence that we can choose completely different storyboards for iPads and iPhones. Let’s take the same approach when dealing with the two different iPhone...
read moreHow to dismiss the iOS Keyboard when the done button is pressed
It has puzzled many generations how to get rid of the keyboard when the user is done entering text into an iOS text field. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious action we can attach to make this happen. That’s because rather than looking at the keyboard itself, we need to look at what actually brought it up in the first place: the UITextField. Even though the text field can trigger an action, we don’t want to touch that for dismissing the keyboard. All we need to do is to implement the following method from its delegate...
read moreLinks to the latest Social Icons
Facebook, Twitter & Co. change their brandings every now and again, and every time I need them for a project I keep scrambling to find the official links. Well no more – here’s a list of them all: Twitter: https://about.twitter.com/press/brand-assets Facebook: https://www.facebookbrand.com LinkedIn: http://developer.linkedin.com/documents/branding-guidelines Apple and App Store: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/marketing/guidelines/
read moreHow to increase your Build Number automatically every time you build your Xcode Project
Xcode includes something rather magical called the Apple Generic Versioning Tool. With this tool you can increase your Build Number automatically every time you hit “Build and Run” in Xcode. Here’s how you can add it to your project. I’m using Xcode 5.1 here with a new Single View iOS project. But this will work just fine in other versions of Xcode. By default, Version and Build are set to 1.0 (in your app target, under the General tab). We want to leave Version alone and only increase Build. Head over to the Build...
read moreHow to read you App Version and Build from the Main Bundle
The required Version and Build numbers you add to Xcode make it into your app’s Main Bundle. You can retrieve those values from the Main Bundle and use them in your app. Here’s how: - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; // set version and build fields from bundle NSString *version = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] infoDictionary] objectForKey:@"CFBundleShortVersionString"]; NSString *build = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] infoDictionary] objectForKey:@"CFBundleVersion"]; // display in your own labels...
read moreWhat are the button indexes in a three-button UIAlertView
The cancel button is always index 0, and all other buttons in the array start at index 1 counting up. For completion, here’s how to create it: - (IBAction)showAlert:(id)sender { // create an alert view with three buttons UIAlertView *alertView = [[UIAlertView alloc]initWithTitle:@"Three Button Alert" message:@"This is an alert view with more than two buttons. Will it work?" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:@"No Way (0)" otherButtonTitles:@"Perhaps (1)",...
read moreP2 Header Ad – Version 1.1 released
I’ve just released a quick update for my P2 Header Ad plugin for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/plugins/p2-header-ad/ I’ve added a tickbox which allows you do disable the add for logged-in users so the ad will only be shown to visitors. The release is also available on GitHub: https://github.com/versluis/P2-Header-Ad Here’s a quick peek at the admin interface:
read moreHow to use your own random header images in TwentyThirteen
I really wanted to use the new WordPress TwentyThirteen theme over on my other site http://www.versluis.com. But I didn’t like the idea of using the default header images. Since my previous theme had random header images, I thought it would be great to tap into the now built-in function and prepare a child theme that overrides those existing header images with my own. Here’s how I did it: first we’ll create a child theme then we’ll remove the existing header images and add our own images As a final touch I’ve...
read moreHow to remove __MACOSX from zip archives
Creating a ZIP file on your Mac is really easy: select a few files in Finder, right-click on those and select “Compress…”. It’s the equivalent of selecting “Send to ZIP Folder” under Windows. But Mac OSX does something rather bizarre when creating ZIP files: it adds several unnecessary, unwanted and un-called-for files starting with __MACOSX. This drives PC users nuts – and believe me, it drives Mac users nuts too. Thankfully there is a relatively easy way to remove those files. This may not always be...
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