Can an app sit 8 months idle in the AppStore, and all of a sudden become the #2 app? With no updates? No advertising? I guess the answer is yes! My coloring book app, Coloring Fun, is now the #2 app in Games/Kids category in the UK AppStore. Moreover it is indeed #43 in overall games category and #79 in the general apps category!! And the fun does not stop there. It is #3 in France, #5 in Italy, #7 in Canada, #7 in Australia and #17 in Germany… After 8 months?? And more importantly is there really a significant market for applications for kids in the AppStore?
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Eight months later #2 iPhone app for kids in UK AppStore
November 23rd, 2009 / in IPhone, IPhone Applications / by keremk
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Image manipulation and drawing using Quartz in the background threads
August 3rd, 2009 / in IPhone / by keremk
In many of the iPhone samples, the recommended way of drawing onto off-screen bitmap context begins by getting a bitmap context using the UIGraphicsBeginImageContext() API call. This works great if your drawing code is in the main UI thread, but in some cases you may want to do some processing in a background thread as well. The prime candidate for this is, when you download an image in a background thread and do some resizing/cropping shadows, borders on that image. You would still want to do that in the background thread in order not to block the UI thread and present a smooth experience. That is exactly what I was doing in my latest project (which BTW you can see the work in progress here).
Continue Reading »
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More useful open source libraries for iPhone development
April 10th, 2009 / in IPhone / by keremk
Back in December 2008, I wrote a blog entry that listed some of the very useful open source libraries that are available for the iPhone. Since then, I bumped into more libraries and some new ones are also added. Here is the list: Continue Reading »
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XCode templates for iPhone static libraries with unit testing
April 9th, 2009 / in IPhone / by keremk
Currently the only way to create re-usable code amongst different projects for the iPhone platform is to create static libraries. 3rd party frameworks (as in Mac OS X) are not supported in the iPhone SDK. Also setting up unit testing, which is a crucial part of building re-usable libraries of course, is not that trivial.
To help building static libraries for the iPhone, I decided to create a project template and file template. The project template includes 2 targets. One is the actual static library itself and the other is a unit test target. The file template simplifies creating unit test classes, by including the necessary header files and boiler plate code. I have included the Google Toolbox for Mac’s iPhone unit testing facilities and the OCMock framework in these templates.
The source code for the templates are checked into my github repository. You can take a look at the instructions to install and use them over there. Continue Reading »
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First iPhone Application – Coloring Fun
March 28th, 2009 / in Announcement, IPhone Applications / by keremk
My first iPhone application is approved and went live tonight! It is a coloring book application for kids. Once I submitted the application, the approval did not take that long (9 days). However changing from an individual to a company account in ITunes Connect took over 1 month. Anyways now that my account is set up properly, it should hopefully be faster to submit new applications.
A friend of mine came up with the original idea and also provided me with 10 of the original drawings. My dear wife, Oya Karatal, helped with coloring the drawings and picking the colors for the color palette. And I did the programming.
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Useful open source libraries for IPhone Development
December 21st, 2008 / in IPhone / by keremk
It’s been almost 3 months since the IPhone SDK’s infamous NDA restrictions were lifted, and there are now a good set of open source libraries available for the IPhone. In this post I will go through the ones that I know of one way or another. If you are aware of more high quality open source projects, please let me know in the comments so that I can update this post. Continue Reading »
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7 tips for using UIWebView
December 11th, 2008 / in IPhone / by keremk
For an IPhone app I have been building, I decided to use the UIWebView to render SVG files, instead of doing the vector rendering myself. I needed to have a way to read-in files generated from a vector authoring tool (Illustrator etc.) and after initially looking for an open-source SVG parsing/rendering engine of some sort, I decided on hosting the UIWebView itself instead and use the SVG rendering capability of WebKit. Another option could have been to read in PDF files as PDF is the default meta-file format for Quartz, but I needed programmatic access to each path drawn in the file and it was not apparent to me how I can do that once the PDF is rendered. (Any ideas on that is still welcome of course)
Anyways the point of this post is not really about different options for persisting and reading vector graphic files. I am rather planning to talk a bit about some of the tricky things I found out while trying to use the UIWebView programatically. Continue Reading »