As you may have mentioned, lot of iPhone apps (especially games) run by default in landscape mode! You can easily force the app you develop to run in landscape mode! Let’s see how:

1. In Xcode find the file [YourAppName]-Info.plist and open it up.
2. Right click on the table and select “Add Row”. Select “Initial interface orientation” and set the value to Landscape (left or right).
3. Right click again and add Status bar is initially hidden.This is optional, it has nothing to do with view orientation, but it will hide the status bar.
4. Open [YourAppName]ViewController.m file and uncomment the following:

   // Override to allow orientations other than the default portrait orientation.
   - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation {
       // Return YES for supported orientations
       return (interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait);
   

5. Change the code you just uncommented to look like this:

   - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation {
       // Return YES for supported orientations
       return (interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight);
   }

   Parameter interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight starts the app with the Home button at the right side. interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeLeft starts the app with the Home button at the left side. Set the same landscape orientation that you’ve set in Info.plist file.

Fluid is a free, powerful (Mac OS X only) app that lets you create a site specific desktop app out of any Website. You can download Fluid (it’s free) here. In this tutorial I will create an app to easily access my Mint installation.

1. First download Fluid and launch it.
2. Fill in the info as you see in the images below. Many websites give high-res .png images that will look great on your OS X dock. If you don’t have such an icon, there is an option to use the website’s favicon instead.
   
3. After filling the info, click “Create”. That’s it after a few seconds your app is ready to go and any website can be easily accessed via launching this custom app.

Here is video walkthrough of the tutorial.

Things is a task management app by cultured code. Thing is a mac-only app available for mac and iphone. I’ve been using things for about one month now (both desktop and iphone version) and I am pretty amazed with it. I love the app’s simplicity and ease of use. Most of the task management and to-do apps I’ve tried in the past, were complicated leading to bad user experience. Things is exactly the opposite. 

Hitting the hot key, the quick entry panel appears (most of my to-dos are entered this way). From here you can create a new to-do, put it in a category, project and of course tag it. Desktop editions supports also “area of responsibility” feature. I have two areas: home and personal, but you can create as many as you like. Creating a project is easy and you can create as many to-dos as you like within project. Deleting tasks is as simple as drag and drop the task on the trash icon in the bottom left corner.

The best part comes when you use both Things for Mac and Things Touch for the iPhone. Opening Things on iPhone, automatically syncs your to-dos with Things for Mac (supposing that you have Things open on your mac and that iphone and mac are on the same wifi network). Checking done things, fades the task out, so it looks different from non completed tasks. At the end of each day, completed tasks and project are moved to Logbook (which is an archive of your completed tasks). You can customize this and log completed tasks hourly or weekly.

If you are tired of complicated task management apps, you should give Things a try. It is a little bit pricey but it worths every penny! Using both desktop and iPhone versions is the best way I’ve discovered to keep my to-do tasks organized.

Mac OS X comes with great and powerful tools pre-installed. The scenario is simple: you have coded your app and designed a great logo for it. How you create the OS X icon for your app? The answer is: very easily.

• First of all open the logo in illustrator if it is .eps file or in photoshop if it is in psd format.
• Save the image as .png after resizing to around 512×512 pixels.

• Open Icon Composer (it is in your Developer>Applications>Utilities folder in your Macintosh HD drive. Drag and drop the png file you saved in Icon Composer window and select “copy to all smaller sizes”

• Save the image, giving it the name you want.

• Open IconDroplet (it is available for free here). Drop the icon in IconDroplet (or choose File>Choose File.

• The output icon is placed in the same folder with the image you dropped in IconDroplet.
• Double click the icon and see it in your Dock like a running app.

Here is a list of ten apps I use on a daily basis (both web and desktop apps). The main system I’ve been using for a while is a unibody MacBook, so many of the applications on the list are mac-only.

Mint

Mint is a site-stats program that promises to give a “fresh look” at your site. Many of you are probably familiar with mint. I use it a lot for tracking visitor habits and to see stats from this blog. I’ve installed lot of peppers, which add extra functionality  like Secret Crush, User Agent, Feedburner and Visits Differ. Be aware that more peppers means more javascript code loading when someone visits your site, which leads to slower page loading. Mint costs $30 (no subscription or year-by-year costs). All updates until the next major version (which will be version 3) are free as long as most of the available peppers (about 90% of them). Keep in mind that mint is self-hosted, which means that after you buy it, you have to install it on your hosting server.

Safari

I’ve been using only Firefox for almost three years now, but recently switched to Safari, which seems to run faster on my MacBook. Safari lacks the extensibility of Firefox, but its clean layout alongside with fast page loading are huge pros. The only thing I miss is Google Toolbar which is not available for Safari. Plus I am now used to Safari bookmark management and it will be a hard time for me to make a switch again.

WordPress

WordPress is probably the best piece of software I’ve ever came around. Free, 0pen-source, bringing tons of new features with every major release. I use it on a daily basis for managing this blog, update plugins, read comments and clean spam. I’ve tried some time in the past to use other software for blogging, but it lasted only for about two days. After using WordPress for about two years, I feel very familiar with it, and I cannot even imagine my online life without it.

iTunes

iTunes has become my main music player. I love the options it offers for organizing music. Most of my albums have full ID3 tags including cover arts and genres. I use iTunes also for managing movie trailers, movies and for syncing my iPhone and my iPod.  What I love in the last version of iTunes (version 8 ) is the grid option which is the way I usually use to navigate through my library.

Things

Before Things I’ve never used a GTD application. I’ve read lot of reviews on Things application after the recent Macworld 2009 expo, so I decided to give it a try. Things is the best to-do management application out there. I downloaded the trial version (which lets you use the app with full functionality for 15 days) and I bought a license just after 4 days of trial use. I am so excited with the features of this app, that I will write a separate post reviewing the app alongside with its companion product for the iPhone.

Transmit

Transmit is an ftp client by Panic. It offers great capabilities and is the only ftp program I use for managing the files of this blog. Transmit offers drag and drop interface which makes file exchange between your mac and your server a piece of cake. It supports ftp and sftp and integrates well with Panic Coda, the well known editor.

Coda

Coda is a text editor by Panic. Although it is called a text editor it offers much more like terminal, svn capabilities, css, even books and in general everything that a web developer needs.  I use it for editing the php files of the blogs, manage css files (I use also CSS edit for this purpose) and of course for html editing. When I need to edit a file on Typpz’s server, I find the file using Transmit ftp click, ctrl+click>edit with Coda, and after editing cmd+s to save it directly on the server. Coda costs $99 and worths every penny. I find it better and much more easy to use than Adobe Dreamweaver which costs much more. Both Coda and Transmit are mac-only apps.

Xcode

Xcode comes built-in in every Mac. It is a great IDE. I use it on a daily basis for practicing with the iPhone SDK. I also use it as a simple text-editor for java and c programs I write for my studies. I write the programs in Xcode and I prefer to compile them using the Terminal. In general Xcode and the other development programs that come with every Mac, offer everything you need for developing applications for Mac OS X using cocoa, java and objective-c.

iPhoto

I use to snap large amounts of photos each day with my camera. Right when I am back home I plug my camera to my mac and import them to iPhoto. iPhoto offers exactly what I need and use: tagging, album creation and most important it is easy to use. For professional users there are also Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom.

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop needs for sure no introduction. I use it daily for editing images for this blog, editing my photos and for designing layouts for web sites I design. 

Next to come is a post about apps I use on a daily basis on my iPhone.

If you use iPhoto on your Mac (ok you use it, because it is the most commonly used application in iLife suite and comes pre-installed with any new Mac), you’ve noticed that iPhoto keeps all your photos in a file called iPhoto library. The point is that iPhoto library is a package, not a single file. To view its contents and find your original photo files:

1. Left-click (or ctrl+click) the iPhoto library file which is in your user>pictures folder, select show package contents and 



2. Navigate to “originals” folder and that’s it! You can now view, edit, move or delete your original photo files!

As you know, if you use a Mac, you can uninstall programs just by moving them to the trash. That uninstalls the program but leaves on your hdd some preferences files which have to be deleted manually (they are too small though, so you do not have to delete them as they do not slow down your mac). AppCleaner is a small, free app that manages to completely delete applications. Another key feature of AppCleaner is that it deletes widgets from your Dashboard with a single click. That is for me very useful, because I do not have to navigate to user>library>widgets to delete them. The video above shows how easy this process becomes using AppCleaner.

I released (thanks to Mint for that) that around 1% of Typpz visitors view the blog using their iPhone and Mobile Safari. As with almost every site that is not optimized for viewing on cell phones, viewing from an iPhone means zooming in and out the parts of the page you want to read. To make those 1% a little bit happier, I built a very simple web app that parses and views Typpz blog content right from your home screen and as shown on the screenshots above, content is readable without having to zoom in and out. The web app is built using Dashcode and one of its preinstalled templates.

The url for Typpz blog mobile edition is http://blog.typpz.com/mobile. When viewing from an iPhone, you can push the “+” button on mobile Safari and bookmark the app right on your home screen. When accessing typpz mobile app from a saved bookmark on iphone’s home screen, there is no top and bottom  navigation bars (yeah no chrome at all) like in Safari which means more space filled with content.

Every user that uses a Mac has came across Dashboard widgets. Creating widgets is very easy using the Dashcode IDE which comes preinstalled with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. So I decided to create my first widget, which parses typpz blog feed and displays it on your dashboard. Dashcode provides a ready-to-use template for RSS feeds, so if you want to build such a widget, you only have to make it look as you want and tweak in few things in the code.

Most of the operations like changing the appearance or adding images can be done with few clicks, without even write a single line of code. Below are some screenshots of Dashcode (clicking the run button on the upper left side, deploys the widget on your dashboard, so you can see how it acts in real time).

You can download Typpz widget to bring typpz feed on you dashboard here. After you download the .zip file, double click it to extract (most of the times it will be extracted by itself when download finish) and click the widget icon. When Mac OS asks if you want to install the widget click “Install”. If you later want to uninstall a widget you installed, you have to visit Mac HD>Users>”Your Name”>Library>Widgets and move to trash the widget you want to uninstall.

Ok here is a bunch of photos I took since I got my iphone! Next to come are a review for iPhone 3G (I want to use it for two weeks so I will be able to judge the battery life better), a list of the apps I use on it and reviews for some of those apps .