Author Archives: Randall

How to change the color of a UIBarButtonItem

EDIT: There is a new way to do this in iOS 5 that is much easier and nicer. If you want to support iOS 4, keep reading. A UIBarButtonItem is an item that goes on a UIToolbar or a UINavigationBar. … Continue reading

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Geocoding on the iPhone: Getting the latitude and longitude of an address

I just started working on a project where I need to take an address and turn it in to a latitude/longitude pair. It turns out that this is called geocoding. When I was looking at the docs for MapKit I … Continue reading

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Why Apple is winning and Android’s bigger market share doesn’t matter

I was reading an article on Engadget this morning about ATT sending messages to their users that are illegally tethering their iPhones. Most of the comments were anger at ATT, “How dare they prevent me from using their services illegally!” … Continue reading

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Simple imgur iPhone Uploader

Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of adding image uploading to Thoughtback. One easy way to do that is to use another image host and just post a link in the thought. I decided to try out imgur because … Continue reading

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How to create a custom cocoa framework

I was recently trying to rip out some code from the Thoughtback app into it’s own framework so that I could eventually open source when we decide to make our API public. I’ve used frameworks plenty of times, but I’ve never … Continue reading

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Startups in Michigan?

So recently, I’ve been doing a lot of entrepreneury stuff with Thoughtback. My first exposure to the Lansing area entrepreneurial community was at Startup Weekend Lansing. At startup weekend, Thoughtback won the “Most popular” and “coolest” startup. We even got … Continue reading

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Learning from the Mac App Store

When I submitted my apps to the Mac App Store, I expected to get a few hundred downloads because the store was new. I thought every Mac developer on the planet was going to be submitting apps, but somehow, only … Continue reading

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Mac App Store – Holy Crap

Today was the launch day for the Mac App Store. If you don’t know what it is, it’s basically the same as the iPhone App Store, but for OSX. A lot of developers have been looking forward to it and … Continue reading

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Using blocks and Grand Central Dispatch for asynchronous web calls

Today at work, we were talking about building a REST framework and someone described how they made NSURLConnection behave synchronously. That seemed strange to me. Then, he told me that using Grand Central Dispatch made it easier to deal with … Continue reading

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Being a good Internet citizen.

Almost all the multimedia we consume today is free. Sure, there are websites that cost money, subscription cable, and satellite radio, but in general, we don’t pay for most of that stuff. So how do these services continue to operate? … Continue reading

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