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19 February 2010
Posted in
Homegrown -
Philip Roy
Creating the "NZiPhone.com and NZMac.com News" app - Well the exciting thing for me (as I write this first sentence) is I kinda became an official iPhone developer today. The iPad was released and I wanted to get my hands on the 3.2 SDK Beta....and the only way to do that was pay the $99 USD and become an iPhone developer. I did it also because the Taplynx folk were quick to state that Taplynx would support iPad development. So now that I've spent some money, I had better get on with tidying things thing up!
Fixing the news and saying bye to Brent
Before I start on changing the look and feel, I worked on some minor changes. First, apologies to Brent, but having a file called "BrentTemplate.html" in my project was nonsensical, so I renamed it and did a find and replace to change all instances of it to "NewsTemplate.html", just to indicate what the file was really about. This file, from my understanding, is the template from which the pages you see displayed (such as news items) load and contains references to values (such as colours) contained within your plist preferences. To change the file, I deleted the existing file from my project and then renamed the file in the finder. I then dragged this file into my project and finished with a "find and replace" to change all instances of references to the file...
Next, I decided that I didn't like the two separate news feeds for news items. It meant that as the application loaded, users needed to select a site before they could get any news. I felt it better to have these as one news feed, so they could see the news from both sites quickly. You might ask "why not just list the two feeds in one tab in TapLynx?", but my experience was that TapLynx listed all the posts of one site feed and then all the posts from the next...when what I wanted was a feed that joined two feeds together, put the feeds in chronological order and then selected the 10 most recent posts.
So I logged into Yahoo Pipes and set up a pipe that merges the two news feeds from my two sites into one and linked to this as my news feed...
Creating and using a header image
Next, I tried using the header file I had created to appear at the top of each screen. All the details (and a lot of Brent!) is outlined on the TapLynx site at http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Providing_a_Header_Image. Using the guide, I added another row into the "NGConfig.plist" by right-clicking...
...and then adding in the information from the TapLynx page to point to the header file that I had made earlier...
Cleaning all targets and running the simulator, it was all a bit of a mess...
The word "Forums" was appearing in the header, so I needed to switch that off. Reading the Taplynx site showed me how to do that by adding in a boolean variable (NavController_HideTitleOnRoot). Looking more closely at the example on the TapLynx site, I decided to tidy up my image quite a bit and also add in the silver fern into the image...
At this point I realised I had been using a file that was 320x46 when in fact it had to be 320x44...so some more adjustments and tidying got it sorted, including building in the glass/gradient effect into my Photoshop file....
So that's about it. I like the look of the header now, although I need to fix a few sections where it is used, such as the video section where the buttons are the wrong colour (I just need to change the value of "NavController_color" in the settings for that tab)....
I've found out that you can't change the colour at the top of the "More" section (it's an Apple thing supposedly) which is a bit of a pain. I want to try to kill off the word "Folders" that appears when I use sub-sections and think a bit about the page colours, such as you see in the image that follows...although I confess I now just want to get this baby published on iTunes...so I may leave some of the tidying for version 1.1....
Here is the information I put into the plist file. Note I changed the background colour to black, although I used a non-transparent background file in the end, so the colour setting change was probably redundant...
Read and unread
I didn't like the fact that in lists, unread titles were darker than read titles...so I swapped the colours. This meant unread items had a dark title and then when I read it, the title went lighter....a good visual aid for users I think. Here's the change...
By this stage I was happy with how it was all looking and just needed to do some bug fixing and have a good read of the material on the Apple Developer's iPhone site!
iPhone OS version in builds
I'm going to add this one here and in the last article, as it was such a silly thing for me to not realise. As I type this, I can see it makes sense.
I set the iPhone OS to 3.1.3 in Xcode and built the app from that point. What didn't jump into my head for a moment, is that doing so effectively sets the minimum requirements to version 3.1.3 on the iPhone and iPod Touch....meaning anyone who hasn't updated recently can't use it.
How silly of me....and how silly of me not to read the "Read Me" that came on the disk image that says....
Known Technical Issue
Because of a couple bugs in the iPhone Simulator in OS 3.0, you should build for iPhone Simulator 3.1. But, when building for the iPhone itself, build for OS 3.0.
So, quite quickly, I'm going to make a few tweaks and resubmit the app to the app store as version 1.1, so that iPhone 3.0 (and up) users can get at the app also.
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Cuby
said:
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Very Cool Thanks for sharing your TapLynx experience Phil! It's been very interesting to read, and I'm fascinated to find that you can actually develop an iPhone app without needing to code! I am actually in the process of creating a fun new iPhone app with someone else at the moment, but I imagine TapLynx is more suited to 'standardised' iPhone themed apps. Congratulations on getting out your NZMac & NZiPhone app out on the app store as well! Its very impressive and does a fantastic job! I love how there is hardly any waiting around for each section to load. One thing that made me laugh though was that in the forum section, if a post has made on the day of viewing, it seems to place it under the catergory of 'Future', with yesterday's posts making the 'Today' section.  Perhaps there is a small issue with time stamps, but I quite like this quirky bug. Cheers! Cuby |
Philip Roy
said:
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Thanks Cuby. Yeah I think as a starting point, TapLynx is great at being pre-baked and you just add the icing...but I know people are extending it already and building functionality on top of it, but that's for me to worry about at a later date  A new app has come out today (iGovernment) that is also based on TapLynx and I really like the look of how they've done things, so a few people are asking how they did things, such as improving the folders option. Re the Future. it's just that NZiPhone.com "before it's time!"...no, you're right....I probably need to check the forum posting dates, server time etc etc. I'll note it as a bug. Thanks again. Phil |
Philip Roy
said:
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The issue with the forum posts is that the forum RSS feed isn't displaying the post date correctly (it's not picking up the time offset), despite the times being displayed in the forum correctly. The forum component developers are focused on a major rewrite to the forum (due soonish) so I've just noted the error and will look at it again when the next forum version comes out. Cheers, Phil |
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