Tutorials and excerpts about iPhone and iPad programming in Objective-C and Cocoa Touch

AppStore shortlinks from Apple

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If you still do not use Apple’s appstore.com shortlinks – now is the time to start! Read more below.

How does a “normal” link to the AppStore look like? Like something you can never remember or reproduce:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/doodle-booth/id403497940?mt=8&uo=4

(Link produced by Apple’s iTunes Link Maker)

Apple finally caught up with the web’s trends and now provides automatic short links to your iPhone/ Mac app. As usual the feature is a bit late, but it’s way more awesome than what you’ve seen before. The link above becomes simply:

http://appstore.com/doodlebooth (kaboom!)

With the added benefits that:

You don’t need to do anything on your side – the shortlinks works auto-magically
It’s a country independent link, ie for US visitors opens the US store, for Italian visitors – the Italian one

The link launches iTunes on the visitor machine where they can purchase your app. Let’s have a look how to make these shortlinks:

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JSONModel 0.9 is up on GitHub

You can clone this project from GitHub!

You follow the tutorial to understand how and why the code has been written, but still download the complete project from GitHub! Also in the repo you might find further modifications of the project, answering questions in the post's comments and much more! Download now from https://github.com/icanzilb/JSONModel

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Today version 0.9 of JSONModel is online on GitHub.
It’s the first version featuring breaking changes – it’s the first big overhaul of the code, cleaning a lot of spots where there was a mess and needed general optimisation. Also I sacked a number of methods (mostly in the networking part) which were the synchronous methods of the http client – after a long consideration I decided to get rid of them.

Also I am facing the first really non- obvious issue according to how the models behave.

I honestly think using protocols as modifiers for the model properties is quite cool (like <Optional> and &ConvertsOnDemand>). This works quite cool when the model is parsing JSON, but when you are assigning a value to one of these properties manually you have to either:

cast the value to id
or have a compiler warning on this spot in the code

Both are a bit inconvenient, so I am really thinking what to do. There is a little discussion about it on GitHub, (including a proposal from a gh user to make all properties Optional by default), so if you would like to contribute are welcome to write me or leave a comment on the GitHub issue here:

https://github.com/icanzilb/JSONModel/issues/38

All in all, enjoy JSONModel 0.9 and the more feedback you leave, the better. Thanks

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My Lightning Talk on JSONModel – presentation slides

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Yesterday I spoke at the UIKonf Lightning talks in Berlin and gave short presentation to JSON on the iPhone and JSONModel as a framework to building data models.

The talks followed the Ignite show model – 5 mins total time, 20 slides auto-advancing each 15 seconds. It was a cool experience and I got to talk to many interesting people, including Cesare Rocchi from the rw.com team (whoho!)

I decided to also share my slides with you, enjoy!

JSONModel Lightning Talk from Marin Todorov

And a link to JSONModel if you want to check it out.

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I’m giving Ignite-style-talk on JSONModel, come meet me in Berlin

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The UIKonf conference is taking place 2-4th of May in Berlin. On the 1st of May however, there’s a pre-conf event where Ignite-show-style-talks are going to happen to warm the conference participants. The Ignite talks are 5 minute presentation talks, made of 20 (15 sec) slides. Check out some talks here on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/iGNiTe

I am going to give a short talk on using JSON in iPhone apps and particularly how you can make your life easier and better by using the JSONModel library.

If you are around Berlin come meet and talk to me! The pre-conf event is free to attend and you can save 1 spot for yourself here: http://uikonf.eventbrite.com

Also my co-author on “iOS5 by Tutorials” Cesare Rocchi is going to talk on the conference itself, so you can meet both of us rw.com authors on the warm-up event at no charge :]]]

Looking forward to meet you on the 1st of May: http://uikonf.eventbrite.com

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Come see me speak on the iOS Conf in Berlin!

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If you are close to Berlin on the 3rd and 4th of June, come see me talk on the iOS Conf there! I’ll be giving talks on Passbook and Cocos2d, here is the info from the conference web site: Session: Passbook is your running start to distributing tickets over the air Marin Todorov authored the [...]

How to create particle system game effects with UI...

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Showing the particle effects in your game In the previous part of this 2 part series I showed you how to design 2 space game effects for your iPhone game. (If you missed the post, jump over to Part1 here) So far you’ve seen and tested your particle effects in UIEffectDesigner, but it’s time to [...]

How to create particle system game effects with UI...

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Creating games with UIKit is a perfectly good choice, since UIKit provides you with tons of powertools for it. I recently put together a small app called UIEffectDesigner to help you out design particle systems for the built-in QuartzCore particle emitter. On top of everything else the native emitter from Apple is cross-platform :] Nice! [...]

Black advertisment for UIEffectDesigner

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I usually don’t get into arguments with wackos on the Internet; usually because they seem to have infinite amount of time to do it, and I usually have more interesting stuff to do myself. However, this time is too good and I felt like blogging about it. Some days ago I released a free little [...]