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Development |

Posts for 'Development'


TOCropViewController – An open source image cropper for iOS

June 21, 2015 •

Over the years, I’ve built up a pretty crazy list of features that I want to add to iComics. One feature on that list that’s been kicking around since pretty much day 1 has been the ability to crop page images.

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iComics – State of the Union – May 2015

May 25, 2015 •

Sorry about the last update being so long ago!

2015 has been absolutely ridiculous for me so far (In a truly good way, that is!).

Thanks to a talk I did on integrating Realm into iComics last year, I’ve started working for Realm, remotely from Perth. This has been an absolutely amazing experience so far, having learned a HUGE deal about how companies operate in Silicon Valley, as well as integrating with a team that operates in multiple time zones. The fact that this all came about as a result of my work on iComics is something I still haven’t managed to process yet. Truly awesome.

In any case, now all of the main excitement has started settling down (Although not for long I’ll wager!), I’ve been looking at the next batch of features and upgrades that iComics needs. Since I’ve been getting quite a few emails asking about updates to the app, it seems a bit of a status update is already long overdue. Here’s some of the major points on we’re were at right now. 🙂

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Zoom to a point in a UIScrollView (2015 Edition)

March 31, 2015 •

A long, LONG time ago, I wrote a blog post on zooming to a point in UIScrollView. Even today, 3 years later, zooming to a point still isn’t a default feature of UIScrollView, and so with that functionality still being in hot demand, that original post has ended up becoming one of the most active links on my blog.

Sadly, over the years, I started receiving reports from various people using that sample code that in a lot of different scenarios, that code was actually broken. While it would work fine if the scroll view was completely zoomed out (Which was fine for iComics’ needs), if you were zoomed in at all, then the resulting zoom behavior would be incorrect. Not only that, I discovered a unique scenario in iComics where if the scroll view’s content size was of a particular shape and VERY slightly zoomed in (To a decimal fraction amount), then that code would utterly break, and the scroll view content would fly off-screen.

As a result of that catastrophic error, this year, I decided to delete that original zooming code, and rewrite the lot from scratch. Not only would this fix the broken functionality, but it also made a new feature of iComics v1.2.5, where tapping multiple times results in different zoom levels, possible.

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iComics v1.1 Post-mortem

December 30, 2014 •

So it’s been about a month and a half since iComics v1.1 shipped, and v1.2 is in review with Apple right now. I was so busy getting it ready to ship that I clean forgot about 2 important milestones for the app: On September 25th, the app has been on the App Store for TWO years now, and on November 1st, its codebase has been around for three years. Blimey! XD

In any case, now’s as good a time as any to reflect on how v1.1’s development went, what went well, and what sucked about it.

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iComics v1.1 released!

December 1, 2014 •

Blimey. Sorry it took so long to write this! For the last two weeks, it’s been a flurry of updating the site, sending out press releases, and responding to a mountain of user feedback, so I finally got the time to write the release announcement. XD

So! Done! After 521 days since the last update, iComics v1.1 was approved by Apple and made live on the App Store. 521 days is an absolutely ridiculous amount of time between updates to be sure, and I plan to a post-mortem of what happened at some point, but hopefully with the new look and feel, coupled with the new features, most people can agree it was worth the wait. I’ve already started getting some reviews in, and so far, they’ve all been resoundingly positive. Thanks a lot everyone!

Here’s some of the new stuff that’s included in iComics v1.1:

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TOWebViewController – An open source web viewer for iOS

July 27, 2014 •

Here’s a neat little thing I’ve been working on lately. 🙂

When it comes to building apps for iPhone and iPad, there’s often a design requirement in quickly displaying web pages to users, without needing to kick them out to another app in the process.

One example of this is social media apps; ones that deals with massive amounts of user-posted content, often with links attached. One of my most favourite apps on iOS, Tweetbot, handles this incredibly elegantly.

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