Today I published my very first YouTube video *yay!*. It’s a preview of one of my iPhone apps, Stay In Touch – with you.
I used a screen recorder for the video itself and then I used iMovie for the finishing touches.
Enjoy the result!
For one of my apps, I wanted to change the color of the selectionIndicator on the UIPickerView. Apparently, there isn’t a simple tintColor available for this (yet). I did look into subclassing the UIPickerView for a moment, but then I decided to go for the easy and simple solution of creating my own selectionIndicator and placing it on top of the UIPickerView.
Code:
// CGRectMake values for the frame we’d like
myPickerView = [[UIPickerView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0,0, self.view.bounds.size.width, self.view.bounds.size.height)];
// add the UIPickerView to your viewcontroller, actionsheet, …
[mainView addSubview:myPickerView];
// set the selectionindicator to none
myPickerView.showsSelectionIndicator = NO;
// define the image that we would like to use
UIImage *selectorImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"selectionIndicator.png"];
UIView *customSelector = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:selectorImage];
// set the x and y values to the point on the UIPickerView where you want to place the image
// set the width and height values to the width and height of your image
customSelector.frame = CGRectMake(10,(actionsheetPickerViewTemplates.bounds.size.height / 2) + 16, self.view.bounds.size.width – 10, 47);
// add the custom selectionIndicator also to the same viewcontroller, actionsheet, …
[mainView addSubview:customSelector];
selectionIndicator.png
selectionIndicator@2x.png
Do you have trouble keeping track of all the things you have to do?
Do you wish someone reminded you when it’s time to change the sheets, make a dentist appointment or renew your subscriptions?
If so, this Recurring Tasks (RT) app might be just the thing for you! RT helps you keep track of when you did what last and reminds you when you should be doing it again.
FEATURES:
- Search functionality to find tasks quickly
- Color indicators for a quick overview
- Tasks ordered by what you should do first
- Add a note to your accomplished task
- Date when you should complete the task again automatically calculated for you
- Choose how frequent you want to perform each task individually (how many days/weeks/months/years)
- Choose when you want to be reminded of doing each task individually (how many days/weeks/months/years in front of the due date)
- Switch reminder functionality on or off for each task individually
- Choose at what time of the day that you want to see the reminder for each task individually
- A complete history of when you did what (dates + notes) for each task individually
Follow the easy 3-step process in the user guide (part of the info screen) to get started!
If you’re interested in doing a review on this app, let me know and I’ll send you a promocode.
Pedometer Tracker – walk home
It is well known that our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are not very good for our health. However, research has shown it is not necessary for everyone to start a vigorous exercise routine, but it is more important to just be active and enjoy it. Most websites advocating for people to walk more give the advice of trying to walk 10,000 steps a day – a number that has been shown to increase your health.
Pedometer Tracker – walk home helps you keep track of the number of steps you take each day.
It will give you a simple, yet stylish overview of how much walking you do both in numbers, as well as cool little graphs showing you how the number of steps you took fluctuated over time.
Note: this app does NOT count your steps, but it’s a nifty system to jot down the numbers from your pedometer.
For a pedometer, we recommend the Yamax Digi-Walker SW200.
FEATURES:
- Search functionality to easily find steps.
- Add a note to your steps.
- Add tracks: walking routes that you take often. This way you’ll have an idea of how many steps a certain activity will be. For example: walking to the grocery store or taking the long way to work.
- Custom set the number of steps that you would like to reach each day. By default this is 10,000.
- Color indicators to give a quick overview of how well you are reaching your goal.
- Statistics: last 7 days overview.
- Statistics: average weekday overview.
- Statistics: average month overview.
- Statistics: average year overview.
- Statistics: top 5 overview.
If you’re interested in doing a review on this app, let me know and I’ll send you a promocode.
Do you wish you’d see your friends more often?
Are you bad at staying in touch?
Could you use help organizing your social calendar?
If so, the Stay In Touch (SIT) app might be just the thing for you!
SIT helps you keep track of when you saw each friend last and reminds you when you should be getting in touch with them again.
FEATURES:
- Search functionality to find friends
- Color indicators for a quick overview
- Friends ordered by who you should see first
- Switch reminder functionality on or off for each friend individually
- Choose how long beforehand that you want to see the reminder and at which time for each friend individually (days, weeks, months, years)
- Choose how many days, weeks, months or years there should be between appointments for each friend individually
- Add a note to your last seen appointment
- A complete history of when you saw your friends (dates + notes)
- Date when you should make a next appointment automatically calculated for you
- Add friends manually, from your address book or from Facebook.
Follow the easy 4-step process in the user guide (part of the info screen) to get started!
Watch the following screencast to get a feel for the app:
If you’re interested in doing a review on this app, let me know and I’ll send you a promocode.
I’ve received quite a lot of unwanted, anonymous calls lately on my iphone. I find it quite annoying and so I tried to find a way to block them. However, apps like these don’t seem to be allowed in the app store. There are a few apps available for jailbroken iphones, but I have no intention on venturing on that road.
As a workaround, I am now using a silent ringtone 
.
How does this work? Well, if you know the number that is bothering you, then you can follow the instructions of Macworld’s Mac OS X Hints here: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080522211148943
If you’re, however, like me and you don’t know the number, then you can download the silent ringtone there and do the following:
This way, you’ll hear when a contact in your address book tries to reach you, but you won’t be bothered anymore with any other call.
So peaceful
Yesterday, 20 October, Apple held an event called “Back to the Mac”. I first heard about it a few weeks ago and I had been looking forward to it ever since. So, yesterday after work, I rushed home to watch it live on the apple website (with Safari).
There were countless of rumors that Apple would present some features of their new OS X 10, baptized Lion. I know that Apple always tries to be innovative and bring new ideas into their products, so I was very curious to see as to what they believe would be the near future of operating systems. Turns out, their answer to this question is entirely in the name of the event “Back to the Mac”. Let me explain:
Apple started out with their Operating System for the mac (OS X). A few years ago, this evolved to the iOS for the iPhone, which then resulted in the iOS for the iPad. And now, it’s time to take everything they learned from these experiences back to the Mac.
Some concrete examples of this are:
Lion will be released in the summer of 2011. I will be looking forward to it .
Apple also presented their new iLife ’11. I was kind of disappointed when this seemed to be it, because personally, I was looking forward to the release of iWork ’11.
iLife 11 does show some nice interesting new features, though.
iLife 11 is already available in the mac store.
A new feature from Apple that did catch my attention in a positive way is FaceTime for the mac. FaceTime is already in use on the new iPod Touch and on the iPhone 4 for video calling. And now, it’s also released for the mac.
The contact list will be filled from your address book and then you can start calling any other mac, iPod Touch or iPhone 4 with FaceTime installed.
You can already download a beta version of FaceTime.
On the hardware level, Apple introduced the new Macbook Air with a 13,3″ LED backlit display and its younger brother with an 11,6″ LED backlit display. This is the first 11″ laptop that Apple introduces.
The most remarkable change is the use of flash storage in stead of a hard drive. The advantages of this are that it’s instant on, faster, more reliable, 90% smaller and lighter and completely silent in operation. The disadvantage, though, is that we are going back years in storage space, with a minimum of 64GB to a maximum of 256GB.
It has a beautiful, ultra thin and light design. I love that the resolution is relatively high. The resolution of the 13″ model is higher than the resolution of the current 15″ Macbook and the resolution of the 11″ model is higher than the resolution of the current 13″ Macbook. The battery life also seems to be very nice with its respectively 7h and 5h and for both a standby time of 30 days.
All in all, I’m very happy with the turn that Lion is taking and FaceTime promises to be a nice-to-have gadget. I’m still a bit disappointed that they didn’t introduce iWork ’11, but I’ll just get my hopes up again at their next event . And what the Macbook Air is concerned, Apple believes that it’s the next generation of Macbooks. Me, however, I’m yet undecided.
I have a memory stick in my digital camera and after deleting the files on it, the card didn’t seem to be empty. There were no pictures on it, but I couldn’t shoot my usual 202 images anymore either. And being used to that number for a while now, it’s kind of hard to settle for 70-something.
So … I started looking …
Turns out, that unlike Windows where when you delete files from an external device it most of the time isn’t sent to you trash, in OSX it always ends up there.
Meaning all I had to do to get all of my 202 “spaces” back, was take a picture so there was at least one on the memory stick. Then connect it to my laptop, delete that picture from the memory card and right after empty my trash. And after both deleting and emptying unmount the digital camera.
Et vwalla 
…
When I tried installing Diablo 2 and the expansion pack on my intel Mac, it kept telling me “You cannot open the application Diablo II Installer because it is not supported on this system”.
After doing some research, I found out that this is b/c the older CD’s do not include an OSX installer, they are OS9 which isn’t supported on intel Macs. Luckely, there’s a workaround for this:
On the Blizzard site you can download the OSX Native Installer (which also includes the latest patches) and then use this to install Diablo II as well as the Lord of Destuction add on (if you have it).
Good luck and see you on the other side …
EDIT: Diablo 2 is not supported on Lion. But, the good news is that Diablo 3 is almost here 
… see you there!
Apple placed 3 new ads in it’s “Get a Mac” series:
You can find them on their “Get a Mac” page
Just watch them, as always, they’re pretty good :d …
