What I expect from WWDC 2014

Apple will hold its annual developers conference in San Francisco in June. WWDC will kick off on June 2nd in Moscone West. As every year the web is full of (accurate and inaccurate) rumors regarding what does Apple have in its pipeline. Based on the various rumors, I'll write about what I wish from Apple this year. It is clear that as last year was iOS year, this year's WWDC hot announcement is going to be about the mac mainly.

Retina iPad mini review

I've been using the 1st gen iPad mini for about a year now. My main issue was the display quality and recently -after iOS 7 release- its speed. When Apple released the retina iPad mini this year, I thought that they finally released the mini as it should be since last year: an iPad with the same specs as the full size iPad but with smaller -and not worse- display.

iOS SDK: Create a Pop Up window

In an iOS project I am currently working on, I got a request to create a pop-up window. Trying to figure out how to do it, I came up with a solution that is pretty easy to implement and very straight forward. All you need is a view controller with a transparent background and a subview (your popup window). After creating the popUpViewController, you can just call it from any other view controller.

Review: Iconic Book: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation

Ten days ago, I've came by Iconic Book: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation” while surfing the net. First thing that crossed my mind was: "Wow that the Apple Bible". I immediately ordered my copy ($75 cost for the book plus 50$ for ship costs -I live in Greece-). Three days ago I found a note in my door, that I have a parcel waiting for me in my nearest post office. Next morning I got it. First impression? This book is much bigger than I thought it would be. It is elegant, printed in high quality paper, exactly like an Apple book should be.

Migrating to modern Objective-C

Last year at WWDC 2012, Apple introduced Modern Objective-C alongside iOS 6. So what's this? In a few words, it is a huge step forward to help developers write less code to achieve the same things. Worth mentioning is that modern Objective-C has nothing to do with iOS versions, it has to do with the compiler, which means that it is backward compatible. Let's dive into the basics of transitioning to modern Objective-C. Xcode offers a refactoring tool (edit>Refactor>Convert to Modern Objective-C syntax) which will convert your project to modern objective-c (it will also set the appropriate flag in build settings). If you would like to adopt modern Objective-C when writing your code, which is the best, as it is intended to help you write less lines of code, general rules for doing so are the following.

Extend UIImageView class to easily add border to images

When coding for iOS, I usually style images with shadows show the layout looks more elegant. Adding shadows is easy, but when it comes to adding borders to UIImageViews things become trickier. That's because when adding a border to a UIImageView, this border hides info from the image. To solve this issue, we have to rescale the image and then add the border to the scaled image.

iOS SDK: animations and effects in UIImageViews

    iOS SDK is well known among mobile app developers for its elegant APIs that make creating polished and crafting UI experiences a piece of cake. In this tutorial I will present some small (and easy to implement) code snippets for adding effects to UIImageViews. Note that these effects are added on the fly … Continue reading iOS SDK: animations and effects in UIImageViews →