Unless you’ve been stranded on a remote Pacific isle, you’re no doubt aware of the current furor over third party iPhone applications not being able to run in the background. To be blunt, I’ve never seen so many experts without a fricken’ clue. If you haven’t written code using the jailbreak tool chain, your opinions [...]
Welcome! Many people arrive at this page while searching for information about developing iPhone applications. The ideas from this article are expanded upon in my book, iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual.
As we’re all waiting with bated breath for the release of the iPhone SDK later this month, now would be a good time to [...]
Sometimes it takes awhile to fulfill a promise.
One such pledge was made last century to my good friend Jeffrey (he was only a prince at the time.) I said that I’d love to write something for his fledgling mailing list: A List Apart. This past month, I finally got around to writing that piece: Put [...]
If the changes to the Leopard Dock are a good idea, shouldn’t Apple go all the way and do the same thing to the Finder? And then applications, too! Hell, I can totally see these windows flying around with Spaces and Exposé and Core OMFG!
Forget about October, I’m stoked about 10.6! Let’s hope they add [...]
Yeah, I see a lot of icons in my business. I often get asked what makes for a successful desktop icon. And I’ve answered many times—but never in public. This essay also gives me a chance to write about something other than the iPhone :-)
Let me begin with this disclaimer: this discussion is directed at [...]
Want to make your site look better on the iPhone with one line of HTML?
It’s easy—just add a <meta> tag that lets the iPhone know how wide to display the initial page. I added the following code to the <head> in my template yesterday:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=808″ />
Every browser besides MobileSafari will ignore this information. But [...]
Now that the iPhone has given us all a taste of a multi-touch user interface, I have been hearing many people say how cool it would be to have touch-based input on a new line of desktop displays from Apple.
If you’re one of the people who think that a multi-touch monitor is a good idea, [...]
Even if everything isn’t copacetic in the land of “sweet”, at least Javascript and Quartz are getting along.
Thanks to Apple’s contribution to the WHATWG’s HTML 5 specification, it’s pretty easy to use Quartz graphics technology in an iPhone application. Together with MobileSafari’s event handling, you can start to do some fairly sophisticated drawing using a [...]
Take a look at every application on the iPhone: what do they have in common?
The answer is a navigation bar at the top and a toolbar at the bottom. The navigation bar at the top gives the user a well known location for “backing up”, starting an editing session, and canceling operations. The toolbar provides [...]
Summary
Changes to the Dock in Leopard do not follow the Human Interface Guidelines
Steps to Reproduce
Set desktop background to a light and solid color to make the shadows appear more clearly. In the examples, I used Solid Mint.
Make sure Preview and TextEdit are displayed in the Dock. Additionally, you can download and launch Transmit as another [...]