Been doing alot of research of late into data plans for the iPad. It’s pretty overwhelming the amount of options out there! It’s useful to have data on the go as WiFi is not available as much as it is in the States. The best one i have found so far is this one from O2. It seems to meet my data and cost requirements for my iPad. Anyways, hope this is helpful to someone!

Been pretty busy of late since finishing in my previous job, have been working on a startup idea that hopefully people will use, so will be updating the world about it very soon :) Will also be posting a ton of iOS code that i have to share with lots of custom controls and what not!

I quickly created this utility today, so it might be useful to anyone. It’s a singleton to just display popups on the top of the window. Useful and can be made to look alot nicer than UIAlertViews. You can download it here: https://github.com/jeffhodnett/JHNotificationManager (Keep in mind you can do alot with the graphics and UIView being displayed, so this is really just an example, it’s up to you to be creative with how it displays stuff!)

I was working with cocos2d CCBezierTo and CCBezierBy animations recently(read this if you don’t know what bezier curves are) and was getting annoyed because stuff wasn’t doing what i expected it to. So i wrote a little helper project for me to see what bezier paths my sprites will take based on the two control points and the end point, so am sharing it with everyone. The app looks as follows, with the points clearly named and the ability to drag them around to preview animations in real time. You can download the project on my github page at

I created a custom ticker view called JHTickerView for displaying a ticker type news feed. It basically uses UIView animations to manipulate a UILabel across the screen. It’s main features are: Takes an array of strings for ticker text Can be set to loop or not The ticker speed can be set The ticker can be paused and resumed It’s pretty simple, worth a download to see it working, but is a useful start for someone to create a new ticker from a RSS feed or something. You can download this JHTickerView project on github.

I wanted to mess around a bit with UITextView’s recently and make some custom ones. Here is a custom UITextView for updating status messages, called JHStatusTextView. It’s main features are: Custom font Character counter Placeholder message Rounded corners Some nice delegate callbacks It uses UIAppFonts custom fonts capabilities available from iOS 3.2 onwards. So if you want to set your base SDK a little lower, this will not work for custom fonts and you may have to use FontLabel. To get UIAppFonts working you need to add it as a property to your project info.plist. Then specify the filename for [...]

Resource bundles are a great way to modulorize resources in a project. It’s useful for when you create frameworks and want to have some resources/images included and make it easy to add one centralized resource, rather than multiple resources. What Apple say about loadable bundles: Loadable bundles are packages of executable code and related resources that can be loaded at runtime. This flexibility allows you to design highly modular, customizable, and extensible applications. So to create a new resource bundle, I found the easiest way is to create a file in your project using Finder. For this example im going [...]

A quick tutorial for adding the coverflow effect to your project, it’s a really useful/cool effect for any kind of app. (In fact you’ll be able to add lots of cool UI from the Tapku library, but i’m just focusing on the Coverflow effect for this tutorial). At the end of this tutorial you’ll end up with something like this Were going to be using the excellent free library Tapku by Devin Ross. So to being lets download the library: https://github.com/devinross/tapkulibrary Now lets create a new iPhone project Here i’ve called the project ‘Coverflow’ for this example I generally like [...]

I’ve been interviewing alot of people recently for iPhone and iPad developer positions. Asides from algorithm runtime problems, I ask some general iOS questions. So being the kind person I am, i’m posting some questions based on difficulty and expected answers. NOTE: If you want to test your iOS skills before you read the answers, here’s a text file just with questions – iOS Interview questions BEGINNER Q: How would you create your own custom view? A: Subclass the UIView class. Q: Whats fast enumeration? A: Fast enumeration is a language feature that allows you to enumerate over the contents [...]

Here’s a two quick macros for quickly inputting 255 based rgb color values instead of constantly having to divide by 255 everytime. // Color macros #define RGB(r, g, b) [UIColor colorWithRed:r/255.0 green:g/255.0 blue:b/255.0 alpha:1] #define RGBA(r, g, b, a) [UIColor colorWithRed:r/255.0 green:g/255.0 blue:b/255.0 alpha:a] Their usage is then: UIColor *color1 = RGB(31, 15, 22); UIColor *color2 = RGBA(31, 31, 22, 0.2);