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April 27, 2011 12:11 am

Implementing iAd in iPhone applications

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by    in Programming

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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January 9, 2011 2:02 pm

Getting the timezone on the device

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Since the LogYourRun iPhone application will show you your running data in week and month views it is necessary to know the timezone of the user in order to bring up the data for the correct week/month. At first I thought I could use the NSDateFormatter to do this. The documentation says that you can get timezone informationby using %z or %Z as the format. The %z should get you the offset in hours while the %Z should get you the name. However when tested it turned out that the opposite is the case…

The following code gets you the timezone offset in hours:

NSDateFormatter* dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"Z"]; // error in documentation - the zone in hours should be 'z' not 'Z'
timezoneoffset = (int) [[dateFormatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]] intValue]/100;
DLog(@"format %@", [dateFormatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]]);
[dateFormatter release];

(Note the division by 100 is because the timezone is reported in military time so for 30 min offset the final timezone would be read as x.30 which is not really correct – but for getting a ballpark figure it would suffice).

Since the code is not behaving according to documentation it is not a good idea to use this to get the timezone because the code will break if the code ever starts behaving according to documentation.

Instead it turns out that there is a very nice NSTimeZone object which will give you the timezone offset from GMT in seconds:

int timezoneoffset = ([[NSTimeZone systemTimeZone] secondsFromGMT] / 3600);

Then all you have to do to get the hour difference is divide by 3600 (seconds per hour). If you cared about the half hour offsets you would make this a float – but this is plenty for getting a ballpark figure.

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September 3, 2010 11:35 pm

MGTwitterEngine and Locations

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by    in Programming

So Twitter just updated their API to disallow the use of authentication through the REST API. They were nice enough to announce that in an email 2 days after they turned it off so that meant that I had to learn all about OAuth overnight and scramble to find something that could take over the Twitter functionality of the LogYourRun iPhone app.

Luckily most of the leg work in this are has been done by Matt Gemmell and his Twitter engine. Some slight modifications are required in order to get it running on the iPhone and working with OAuth.  Update:  The guys at iCodeBlog have a great tutorial on how to implement the libraries.

With these libraries dropped in the new Twitter authentication system is fairly easy to implement. The main problem is that the MGTwitterEngine does not support the Twitter location API. Since this is an important piece of TweetMyDistance I modified the MGTwitterEngine.m and added a function for tweeting with location. The new method takes latitude and longitude as well as the tweet and if this is a reply to a previous tweet. As you can see from my tweet it works great. The code below should replace the code in MGTwitterEngine and don’t forget to also update your .h file.

- (NSString *)sendUpdate:(NSString *)status
{
    return [self sendUpdate:status inReplyTo:0];
}

- (NSString *)sendUpdate:(NSString *)status inReplyTo:(unsigned long)updateID
{

	return [self sendUpdate: status inReplyTo: updateID withLatitude: 0.0 andLongitude: 0.0];

}

- (NSString *)sendUpdate:(NSString *)status
			   inReplyTo:(unsigned long)updateID
			withLatitude:(double) lat
			andLongitude: (double) lng
{
	if (!status) {
        return nil;
    }

    NSString *path = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"statuses/update.%@", API_FORMAT];

    NSString *trimmedText = status;
    if ([trimmedText length] > MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH) {
        trimmedText = [trimmedText substringToIndex:MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH];
    }

    NSMutableDictionary *params = [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithCapacity:0];
    [params setObject:trimmedText forKey:@"status"];
    if (updateID > 0) {
        [params setObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%u", updateID] forKey:@"in_reply_to_status_id"];
    }
    if (lat != 0.0 && lng != 0.0) {
		// lat=%1.6f&long=%1.6f&display_coordinates=true
        [params setObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%1.6f", lat] forKey:@"lat"];
        [params setObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%1.6f", lng] forKey:@"long"];
        [params setObject:@"true" forKey:@"display_coordinates"];
    }
    NSString *body = [self _queryStringWithBase:nil parameters:params prefixed:NO];

	DLog(@" twitterbody: %@", body);

    return [self _sendRequestWithMethod:HTTP_POST_METHOD path:path
                        queryParameters:params body:body
                            requestType:MGTwitterUpdateSendRequest
                           responseType:MGTwitterStatus];
}
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April 29, 2010 10:54 pm

Converting App from iPhone to Universal

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by    in Programming

With the iPad selling like hot cakes it seems like a good idea to get on the bandwagon and make some apps for the iPad.  The LogYourRun app is not particularly well suited for running on the iPad – I doubt that people will be strapping their iPads to their arms and run around the park.  However, the heart rate app seems like something that people would enjoy using even on iPads.  Since I did not want to have to maintain two separate apps I decided to make the app universal.  This was actually quite an easy process and took only about 10-12 hours (could have been faster if I had known what I was doing – which is why I wanted to share what I learned).

First step is to make sure you copy your application folder so you will be able to go back to the original application if you mess up.  Then with your newly copied application upgrade your target to work on the iPad in addition to the iPhone.  Click on your target and go into the menu – under Project you will find an entry that says “upgrade current target for iPad”.  Select the “One Universal application” option.  This will generate a new group which contains your new iPad version of the MainWindow.xib file – MainWindow-iPad.xib.  You can use this new nib to load all your iPad specific views.

At this point I went through all my existing nibs and created iPad versions (can be done in the Interface Builder) and saved them as XxxViewController-iPad.xib in the Resources-iPad folder.  For iPad nibs you have to make sure that you have versions of the nib that look decent and are usable in both landscape and horizontal orientations.  This can be tricky if you have a lot of UI elements but is very important since iPad apps have to support all orientations.  Make sure you anchor your UI elements to the right edges and that they scale to look nice.

The heart rate app uses a tab bar.  It took me the longest time to figure out how to get this to rotate.  The reason for this was that I had not read Apple’s documentation.  Turns out that all the view controllers that the tab bar links to have to return YES for all shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: orientations.  This makes sense conceptually.  In addition you need to set your view controllers to automatically resize when rotation occurs.  Once these are set you will be able to see what the rotation looks like in the iPad simulator (hopefully great).

Loading the iPad specific nibs using the view controller is a great way to get these to show up on the iPad only – but there are some cases where you will need to load a view controller programatically (in my case when the user clicks on the help button it brings up the help VC).  To make sure that you load the right nib you can check if the app is running on the iPad.  The following code is what I used:

- (BOOL) isIPad {
#if (__IPHONE_OS_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= 30200)
  if ([[UIDevice currentDevice] respondsToSelector: @selector(userInterfaceIdiom)])
    return ([UIDevice currentDevice].userInterfaceIdiom == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad);
#endif

  return NO;
}

This code will check if the iDevice responds to the userInterfaceIdiom selector and if it does it checks if the device is an iPad.  If it is I load the iPad version of the helpVC if not then I load the iPhone version of the helpVC.  Make sure you also put the respondToRotation in these VCs since they will need to respond predictably also.

Finally you will need to create a default image that can be presented on the iPhone.  In your info.plist you can set the “Launch image (iPad)” to the base name of the iPad graphic (e.g. Default-iPad.png).  You can then create two images named Default-iPad-Landscape and Default-iPad-Portrait and add them to your project.  The iPad will pick whichever of the default images that fits with the rotation of the device.

When uploading your app – build the app in OS3.2.  The app will run on both iPhone and iPad from one binary. You will also have to upload screenshots for the iPad version for display in the iPad app store and create two new icons (50×50 and 72×72).  Once you have all that together your app is ready for submission and you can start praying that it will be a speedy path to acceptance.

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March 22, 2010 11:24 pm

Using audio services to play alert sound

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by    in Programming

Some times it your application may inadvertently quit with out the user meaning to quit your app.  For example people run with the running/GPS app and the iPhone may be in a pocket / arm band / hand where the square button could be pressed unintentionally.  If the app quits while running it will not collect running data for the rest of the run and the user will be very disappointed.  To avoid this I have setup an alert which will make a sound if the user quits the app while the app is collecting running data.  I was able to find the original apple alert aiff files via Google and I chose to implement the Indigo sound as the alert – the cricket is not really loud enough to be an alert sound.

By implementing the playback of the sound as an alert sound the sound will be played even on the 1st gen iPod Touch which does not have a speaker.  Alert sounds can also be set to finish playback after the app finishes – which is an important feature for this use.  I was able to find how to set this property on Nagano’s blog.  Not sure what most of the page says but the language of Objective C is universal. Remember to add the audiotoolbox to your project.


#include &lt;AudioToolbox/AudioToolbox.h&gt;

I then load the sound in the viewDidLoad init function for the view controller where I want to play the sound – this way you are not trying to load the sound as the app is quitting.  The soundFileObject isa global for this VC.

// SOUNDS
 NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@&quot;Indigo&quot; ofType:@&quot;aiff&quot;];
 NSURL *fileURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path];

 OSStatus err;
 err = AudioServicesCreateSystemSoundID((CFURLRef)fileURL, &amp;soundFileObject);
 if(err) {
   DLog(@&quot;AudioServicesCreateSystemSoundID err = %d&quot;,err);
   exit(1);
 }

 UInt32 flag = 1;
 err = AudioServicesSetProperty(kAudioServicesPropertyCompletePlaybackIfAppDies,
     sizeof(UInt32),
     &amp;soundFileObject,
     sizeof(UInt32),
     &amp;flag);
 if(err){
   DLog(@&quot;AudioServicesSetProperty err = %d&quot;,err);
 }

Then under viewWillDisappear I have the following:

 if (runActivity.isStarted) {
   // play alert sound if exiting while running
   AudioServicesPlayAlertSound (self.soundFileObject);
 }

This way the sound will play if the view is unloading while the user is expecting the app to be collecting data.

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