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.

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.

How to upgrade Mobile Safari anti-phishing database

Since iOS 3.1, Mobile Safari features an anti-phishing filter. In order to be protected from phishing sites as much as possible, the filter's database must be up-to-date. According to Apple, the database upgrades automatically while the user charges the iPhone (in order to protect battery life). To upgrade you have to: connect the iPhone to … Continue reading How to upgrade Mobile Safari anti-phishing database