How-To

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 31 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

One of the new features that Apple added to Xcode 5 to improve the management and runtime performance of images is asset catalogs. In this post, I'll give you an overview of how asset catalogs work, and we'll add an asset catalog to the iAppsReview project so you can get hands-on experience with this new technology.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 30 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here. 

For the vast majority of apps that you build, it makes tremendous sense to make sure your app can be sold to as many iOS users in as many countries and languages as possible. The App Store is available in over 150 countries in 40 languages and automatically handles international payments and current conversion for you. All you need to do is make sure your app can support a variety of languages. I'll show you the basic steps in this post as we make the iAppsReview project multi-lingual. 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 29 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

As we continue to move the iAppsReview app forward, we now come to a point where we have to climb the learning curve on one of the more advanced Objective-C concepts—blocks. This discussion comes at an unlikely place. This week I'm going to show you how to take the image of a review that you have created in the Write Review scene and display it in the My Reviews scene. This seems like it should be pretty straightforward, but as you will see, it involves using the iOS Assets Library and using Objective-C blocks.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 28 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

Just about every app has the need to store and retrieve settings that are specific to the user. User settings include information such as name, ID, email address, password, high score (for games), preferences, and so on. 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience  how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 27 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In many of the built-in iOS apps, such as Settings, you are able to edit information directly in the cells of a table view. This is a nice feature, because you the user doesn't have to navigate to a separate scene just to enter a value. This is especially important when setting up email where there are several values that need to be entered.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 26 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous post we went through the steps of converting the Write Review scene in iAppsReview to iOS 7 and Xcode 5. In this post we're going to update a few more scenes and learn even more important information about Auto Layout, iOS 7's default edge-to-edge content, and how to specify a global tint for your app!

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 24 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous column, I talked about some of the great new changes in Xcode 5, Apple's tool for creating iOS apps. In this post, I am going to move the iAppsReview project to Xcode 5 and iOS 7 and we'll talk about some of the challenges you will encounter as you move your apps forward. 

I just came across a solution to a problem I never would have figured out if not for the great and powerful "Internets."

I was trying to send a full-resolution photo from my iPad via email. Normally on my iPhone, when I click send, I am presented with a pop up asking what resolution I want. Not so on iPad. Once I chose a photo and clicked to send via email, it automatically loaded the photo in a size that is not full resolution. I went directly to settings and hunted around for anything that seemed like it would control default resolutions. NOTHING!

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