Posts tagged ·

iPhone

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Why the $100 iTunes gift card back to school promotion is a great deal for Apple and iWorks

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There have been a couple of posts lately on why the $100 iTunes gift card is better than the previous iPod touch promotion. I fully agree that the economics are greatly in Apple’s favor since they get to make back the 30% on apps from the Mac App Store and the iOS App Store, books from their iBooks bookstore, and whatever their cut is of music purchased. But I have another reason why I think it is an amazing idea:


One of the main questions I get from people buying iPads is “how do I edit Word documents on the iPad?”. Right now there is no great solution for this. You can buy 3rd party apps that will let you open documents from your dropbox folder and edit them – but as anyone who have tried this can attest – there is a very high probability that any document edited in a 3rd party app will look very different when you open it on your PC in Word later. At best the fonts and alignments may be off at worst you may have just lost all the tracked changes that someone made.


I am sure that this is a huge factor for people wanting to use the iPad for work. People have told me that they are using citrix or remote desktop clients to access PCs so they can edit docs on the iPad, which just seems to defeat the whole purpose of having an iPad.


By Apple giving $100 to students they are giving a big discount on the iWorks suite (or maybe the students will just use it on music and games and ask their parents for $ for the iWorks suite). I hope that this will increase the number of people that adopt the Apple document platform and get people away from Word. With iCloud coming soon we will be able to open our Pages/Numbers/Keynote documents on the iPad / PC / Web (??). Personally, if the iPad could do documents well I would not need to bring a laptop when traveling anymore.

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Implementing iAd in iPhone applications

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There are a couple of tricks to implementing iAd in iPhone applications that are not 100% spelled out in the documentation provided by Apple. If you do not implement right your app will crash on phones running older versions of iOS such as iOS4.1 and iOS3.

For your .h file:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>;
#import <iAd/iAd.h>;
@interface iAdViewController : UIViewController <ADBannerViewDelegate> {
	ADBannerView *adView;
 	BOOL bannerIsVisible;
}
@property (nonatomic,assign) BOOL bannerIsVisible;
@end

In the .m file you need the following:

- (void) viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated {
	// check if iAd is available
	Class classAdBannerView = NSClassFromString(@"ADBannerView");
	if (classAdBannerView) {
		// create iAd
		ADBannerView *bannerView = [[classAdBannerView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero];

		if (&ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait != nil) {
			// NEWER
			DLog(@"NEWER");
			bannerView.requiredContentSizeIdentifiers = [NSSet setWithObject:ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait];
			bannerView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait;
		} else {
			// OLDER
			DLog(@"OLDER");
			bannerView.requiredContentSizeIdentifiers = [NSSet setWithObject:ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier320x50];
			bannerView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier320x50;
		}

		bannerView.delegate=self;

		self.adView = bannerView;
		[self.view addSubview:adView];
		self.bannerIsVisible=NO;
		[bannerView release];

	}
	[super viewWillAppear: animated];
}

I am creating the bannerView programatically in order to have the app also work on pre iOS 4.1 devices. The check for ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait is to see if the user is using iOS 4.1 or newer iOS. In iOS 4.1 the identifiers were based on size – but in newer iOS the iPad got iAds and the size no longer made sense – thus the landscape/portrait designations.

Finally – if your app supports multiple interface orientations – you need to let the banner know that the device rotated so it can show the right size ad.

- (void)willRotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)toInterfaceOrientation duration:(NSTimeInterval)duration {

    if (&ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait != nil) {
        // NEWER
		DLog(@"NEWER");
        if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(toInterfaceOrientation))
            adView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierLandscape;
        else
            adView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifierPortrait;
    } else {
        // OLDER
		DLog(@"OLDER");
        if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(toInterfaceOrientation))
            adView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier480x32;
        else
            adView.currentContentSizeIdentifier = ADBannerContentSizeIdentifier320x50;
    }
}
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iMovie for Editing Video on iPhone

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I shot the following footage of the Great Forrest Park Bicycle Race this weekend on my iPhone. I was going to try putting the videos together on my new iPad2 using iMovie – but there is no easy way to transfer the video from the phone to the iPad without going through iTunes – so i decided to do the mixing on the iPhone instead.

iMovie is very easy to use and after taking a couple of guesses on what the different buttons mean you can quickly get a hang of video editing using the phone – or you can use the excellent help from within the app. The phone version of iMovie has two simple transitions as well as a straight cut to the next video segment with no transition option. iMovie also comes with a couple of preset styles, which allow you to add text to your video clips (double tap the clip), but I did not use those for this project.

After editing the video it took about 3 minutes to export the final video and another 10 minutes to upload in HD to YouTube (over WiFi).

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