Sending screenshots of your iOS device to the developer
In many cases, when trying to determine a problem with an application, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.
To create a screenshot from an iPad, iPhone or iPod, you simply need to press the power button (4) and the home button(1) at the same time. You’ll then hear the camera sound, confirming the shot was taken.
To send the email, open your Photos app, choose Albums, and then Camera Roll. You will see your screenshot at the end of the roll. Expand it to full size by tapping on it, and then email it by tapping in the Action menu (in the top right corner, with the arrow on it).
Thanks!
Read MoreThe best way to do custom, reusable UITableViewCells
So it’s probably the most common thing you want to do in iOS development, and that’s to create a page which shows a scrollable list of items, that is, a UITableView. UITableView, of course, comes with 4 default table cell styles, which can accommodate basic needs, but almost inevitably, you want to do something that isn’t covered by the default types. Perhaps you want to give it a nice gradient background, or maybe you would like to support multiline detail text, or maybe you’d like to have images loaded remotely, on a background thread, in order to maintain maximal scrolling performance. Maybe you need to add a UITextfield or a UISwitch. The variations are endless. As are the ways that you can implement a solution.
Read MoreWhither the Core Data context menu in XCode 4.2?
Core data is great for quickly putting together models, but it is also really good at letting you extend your models, during development. You know, so that we can actually do the Agile part of Agile Development. Especially if you just want to add or delete a few fields or a few entities, it makes modifications quite straight forward.
One thing that I missed in XCode 4 was the ability to add a new attribute to an entity, and then right-click for the contextual menu to copy both its property declaration and core data accessors for the header, and less importantly, the dynamic implementations for the impl file. You could even grab them as Objective-C 1.0 or 2.0.
They are still there, but somewhat hidden. You still copy as before, but now, go to the header file of your NSManagedObject entity, place your cursor
BTW, the model editor is still pretty buggy. One thing that seems to happen consistently is that relationships disappear, in map mode. Just try opening and closing the Attributes disclosure triangle to fix it.
Read MoreObtaining interim iphone builds
During an app’s development it’s critical to involve the client regularly. Mobilesce has many online tools to make this as easy as possible, but one thing that is very important is the ability to install pre-release builds on your device. This way the client can watch the evolution of the app and contribute to it where necessary. To do this, we need your device id, and then we can email you a link to a build from which you can automatically install the interim build on your device, just as if it was an app downloaded from the App Store. Of course, the app can only be installed on devices for which we have the device id. So how do you get it to us? Well, fortunately there’s a free app for that:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/ad-hoc-helper/id285691333?mt=8
Launch the app and it will allow you to send me an email containing the device id, which will look something like this:
f3a963450acd330d69171c84b2ecb73b00dfbc99
You can also grab it out of iTunes. With your device connected, click on its name and then click on Serial Number. It will change to Identifier (UDID). You can then take a screenshot and send that (since you can’t copy/paste). Screenshot is shift-cmd-4 (Mac) or alt-printscreen (Win).
Annotating Web Pages
I just thought I would quickly mention a nice tool I just found: bounceapp.com
The scenario is this: you or a co-worker are developing a web page, and you want a convenient way to point to certain items on the page to be fixed. You could take a screenshot, load it into some graphics program
(I like ImageWell), draw some labels and arrows on it, save the image, and then email it off to whomever is interested.
At WWDC a couple of years ago a nice extension was demoed for Safari: Coda Notes. You could do all sorts of cool annotations right on any web page that you happened to be visiting, and instantly email it off. Very cool. Unfortunately I found it to be a bit quirky, and I’m not sure it is entirely supported. YMMV.
Today I had the need for this tool again, and decided to give Bounceapp.com a try. You just enter a URL, it
shows you a screenshot of that web page, you draw and comment all over it, right in your web browser, click save and send the URL to whomever. Very nice! It took me longer to write this blog post than it did to annotate the page!
The interesting thing is that you don’t need to sign up to annotate a web page. The annotations are free for anyone to see, if they have the URL, and once you have left the editing page, you can’t edit it again. This is good because you don’t want people changing your notes! But if you do want to restrict access, and have the ability to save and edit your annotated web pages, you need to sign up with Notable, for at least their free plan. This will also give you and your team members the ability to add comments to each annotation. The last nice touch I’ll mention is they associate your annotations with your account after sign up automatically, so you don’t lose anything, though you should send them a new sharing URL – the previous free one still works, but there is a new one for collaboration and they are not connected.
Read MoreSubmitting an iOS crash report
When an iOS app crashes (the app freezes and the device display returns to the home screen) the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch generates a crash log file. This log file will help the application developer determine what is going wrong with your app.
To send the crash report:
- Sync your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch with iTunes.
- Browse to the following folder:
- Mac OS X: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/DEVICE_NAME/
- Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter\DEVICE_NAME\
- Windows Vista: C:\Users\AppData\Roaming\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\DEVICE_NAME\
Note that DEVICE_NAME will be the name of your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch as shown in iTunes.
- Each log file will begin with the name of the application. Create a zip file of those files (Mac: Right-click->Compress, Windows Right-Click->WinZip) and then email it to the developer.