Archive for June, 2009

Multiline cells in iPhone SDK 3.0

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

While surfing the web and browsing through development related forums, I encountered a lot of questions regarding multiline UITableViewCells. Prior to iPhone SDK 3.0 this was not an easy feat and although it is very common in UIs, the work that is related to creating multiline cells is not proportional to how common they are.

Apple definitely made it easier with new SDK, since we can interact directly with the UILabel. I know it’s pretty straightforward, but I’m always surprised by how many developers disregard the documentation & turn to forums/blogs for help.

Creating multiline cells is now as simple as setting the numberOfLines property to 0 (or a predefined number) of the textLabel, which is in turn a property of the cell. Given the height of the cell is sufficient, behold a multiline cell.

cell.textLabel.text = @"Some long text...";
cell.textLabel.numberOfLines = 0;

Change the height of the cell with the tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath: delegate method of the UITableViewController, either by returning a fixed height or by calculating the height needed to show the desired text.

Note that the text property of a cell is being deprecated in favor of textLabel.text, more info on the new 3.0 predefined cell styles can be found here.

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Posted in Cocoa Touch | 2 Comments »

Be Tv version 1.2 available

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Almost 3 weeks after submitting the 1.2 update to Apple, it has finally been approved and can be downloaded in the Belgian AppStore as of yesterday June 17th. Apparently some minor event called WWDC & the release of a phone delayed the approval division of Apple. We weren’t the only victims, the UiTagenda update was approved after 3 weeks too & a new Facebook update addressing some specific 3.0 bugs is still in review after several weeks.

Picture 1The main improvements of version 1.2 have been mentioned before and can be found here. This new update is fully compatible with firmware 3.0, but isn’t built for 3.0 specifically. Users with 2.x firmwares are still able to install & use Be Tv.

In the mean time I can announce that Be Tv has been downloaded more than 20.000 times and has never left the top 50 since version 1.0 was released almost 3 months ago. It is currently at position 43 in the general top free applications and at position 9 in the entertainment ranking.

Unfortunately the new release was hindered today by a datacenter problem. And as with most things, it wasn’t something we could do much about ourselves. A firewall was misconfigured at the datacenter causing traffic directed at the Be Tv server to be rejected for a timespan of 6 hours, which is of course totally unacceptable. This downtime had nothing to do with the new Be Tv release, nor with firmware 3.0, there is and was no need to reinstall the application. We have started the quest to find a new hosting partner, since our current partner hasn’t proven to be reliable & responsible.

Update now and enjoy the new release!

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Posted in Emmer Inc | 4 Comments »

Be Tv version 1.2 under review

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

The new Be Tv version has now been under review for exactly 1 week. It will probably be approved and released somewhere at the beginning of next week. If WWDC doesn’t slow the process down, that is.

We aim at releasing an update once every month, which we would have made, if Apple didn’t take so long for reviewing the application.

The main improvements of version 1.2 are:

  • The ability to reorder channels.
  • Caching of the data.
  • An improved Now Playing screen, showing a progress bar of the current program & the name of the upcoming program.

Here’s a short video demonstrating these features, a full size video can be found on Vimeo.

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Posted in Emmer Inc | No Comments »