Anyway, this post is intended to answer some questions about Notified.

Q: What’s taking so long?!
A: I’m not a full time developer, I have an active social life, and I’m also studying, this is a side project I work on when I’m not too tired to.

Q: Why don’t you release what you have?
A: We won’t release an incomplete product, and releasing the icon version first, and then the MS Extension would result in pissed of people complaining about paying for the MS Extension when they already paid for the icon version.

Q: Wait, wasn’t the icon version supposed to be free?
A: It was, but with all the work Daniel and I put into it, we decided it’d be fair to charge for it.

Q: So, what are the prices gonna be?
A: It’s gonna be 99c for the icon version, and 2.99 USD for the MS extension. It’s a really affordable price for a great feature.

Q: What does the MS version have that the icon doesn’t?
A: It includes everything the icon version includes, plus the feature that you can call the window wherever you are, in a game, in safari, etc, via Activator.

Q: The screenshot says iPod, but it’s in an iPhone, are you trying to fool us? *suspicious look*
A: The screenshot was taken live from my development iPod, but was put over a screenshot of the iPhone simulator because it looks better that way. I’m sorry, but there’s no iPod simulator.

Q: What does this mean, regarding the release date?
A: It means that we are really close. We’re aiming for it to be ready with iOS4, but there are still some 4.0 bugs left to fix.

Q: It took you too long! I hate you!
A: Patience is virtue. And that’s not a question…

Q: I’ve always wanted this feature, how can I pay you?!
A: Well, it would make Daniel and I happy if you bought the app when it’s released.

• We are gonna store a variable in the user defaults to store the locked orientation, or the lack of lock.
• Check the lock when the view controller wants to rotate.

First, on first run, we need to store the variable on the defaults, so on the app delegate, we’ll do this:

We are storing -1 because that’s gonna mean “unlocked”

Now, to lock the orientation, when the view controller that’s gonna lock it is in the orientation we want to lock, we’ll do this:

Now, on the view controllers we want to lock, we’ll override this selector like this:

What that selector returns is ture for the supported orientations, so the first thing we’ll do is to check that interfaceOrientation is not upside down. Then, if orientation is -1, which means unlocked, return true, because we want it to rotate. And finally, if orientation is not -1, we’ll compare it to interfaceOrientation to allow it to be only in the locked orientation.

Aditionally, you can store orientation in an ivar, to avoid so many calls to the user defaults, but for the sake of it making sense, I didn’t do it here.

The idea is this: Instead of making changes to your DataSource and just telling the table to reload the data, you tell the table to animate the changes in certain sections/rows.

So, how do you do this?

First, open UITableView.h, and scroll to this:

For now we’ll ignore the first two selectors.

Now let’s take a look at the rest.

If you try to call it just like that, it will probably crash. This is because the table expects the data to have changed accordingly, so this are the steps to follow to animate changes:

1. Choose which cells/sections you want to update. This is usually done by user’s interaction, like when they swipe on a cell and click “Delete”.
2. Update the data on your Data Source. Be very careful with this, because when you delete cells/sections, if the new cell/section count doesn’t match the old one, plus/minus the added/deleted rows, it will make your app crash. You might have to look for special cases where sections might merge.
3. Tell the tableView to insert/delete the sections/rows you want to.
4. ???
5. Profit!

It’s that simple!

Now let’s take a look at those two first selectors.

Say you have a complex case, in which you make changes to your data source, and then want to add some cells, and delete some sections. If you call them just like that, it will crash, so we use the begin and end updates selectors.

What these two do, is that, all changes made after beginUpdates is called, will be saved, and won’t be applied until you call endUpdates, so you can remove sections and rows at the same time, something impossible without this technique.

Anyway, I hope this was clear enough, and please use it, it makes your application look way better, and it’s very simple.

Here are some small but useful additions to the UIColor class in UIKit.

This is what it does:

• Adds a method to get a color from a Hex string (with either this #FFFFFF or this FFFFFF format).
• Adds a method to get a color from an Hex string with custom alpha value.
• Adds a method to get a color from a selector string.

Here’s the download:

File: UIColor Additions (1.95KB) added: 19/03/2010

Turns out, you can edit the “Slide to Unlock” and “Slide to Answer” strings easily, but I didn’t find a way to get rid of the “Slide to view” that shows when a push notification arrives.

So I made this small Mobile Substrate extension that just doesn’t create that label.

It’s really small and doesn’t allocate any extra objects. It even avoids the OS to allocate one.

To install, just download the dylib and put it in /Library/MobileSubstrate/DynamicLibraries/ and set permissions to 755.

The source code is also available, it was made with Skylar’s template. And you’ll need the Springboard and mobile substrate headers to compile it.

Downloads:

File: NoSlideText.dylib (15.17KB) added: 15/03/2010

File: NoSlideText Source (18.33KB) added: 15/03/2010

If you are a member of M*, click here.

Notified-Notifications the way Apple should have made them.

This is what the update includes:

• Greatly improved theming system: Themes are now stored in a different folder and you can preview and apply them on the app itself. For more about themes, go here.
• Bug report mail form inside the app.
• Some extra settings.
• Bugfixes

What was left out:

• Podcasts, Audiobooks and Genres were left out until the next version. The reason: adding them with the current system would be painful, and so the menu system  is going through a rewrite to be a lot more flexible and faster.

Enjoy!

If you don’t know what iClassic is, you can look here.

Now, a little something you should know: to avoid any legal action against us, we had to make some changes on how iClassic looks. However, we made sure it was easily themeable (the images you need to theme are 5), so users can submit their themes to Cydia to customize the look of the app (There might be a couple, already).

Eventually, the support for themes will be a lot better, and I’ll add a guide on how to make them.

So, head to Cydia with your Pay Pal account and get it, it’s only 2 bucks!

Some cool stats:

• Since we made it public, the iClassic page of this website has gotten 2600+ visits.
• The average visits to this blog was multiplied by 20.
• My twitter follower count went from 33 to 102.
• The app has been featured in more than 15+ different sites (it’s not easy to count because not all of them are linking to us)
• Our thread in iPodTouchFans.com has more than 16 000 visits and over 200 replies.

The app is going into the Cydia Store, which is run by Saurik. To have the package on the Cydia Store, we need to give our payment details to Saurik, and I’m guessing he has to do stuff on his server, before we send the package for hosting (it will be on BigBoss’ repo, btw).

And that’s the problem. Saurik is unreachable. We’re assuming, from his last tweet, more than a week ago, that he’s still on Germany, but it’s just a guess, the fact is that he’s not answering. (I read somewhere that we were waiting for Saurik’s approval. That’s not the case).

Please understand, however, that it’s not Saurik’s fault, he probably has important things to do, and  we can’t blame him for that, so I’ll ask anybody who ever thought of trying to contact him to complain, DON’T. If you e-mail him, you’ll only bury our e-mails even more, and a lot of people tweet to him already, don’t spam him more for no reason.

Finally, the app is working, and we’ve sent review versions to some people (3, as of right now), and until Saurik answers, I won’t have any updates. When he does, I’ll announce it, and it shouldn’t take longer than a day for the app to be available.

PS. I know there are other stores (like the Rock app), but we’re gonna stick with Cydia Store. If anybody deserves a share of our profit, that’s Saurik, also, the Rock app requires you to install a bunch of stuff and we don’t want to force you to have on your device.

It’d be a lot of help if you helped me spread the word for this, by clicking in one of the “Share and Enjoy” buttons below!

EDIT: The app is available on Cydia now. (Yay!)

Compared to the hype iClassic has generated, this app probably doesn’t mean a lot, but it’s my very first public app, so I do care for it .

Anyway, I updated it a little bit, adding an “interface”.

About a week ago, I bought a car stand for my iPhone, and an iTrip that does charge it, and I started using it a lot, but using the iPod.app, then I realized that it would be cool if I could keep the interface (big artwork, mostly) but use swipes instead of buttons, and I also realized it’d be REALLY easy.

So I opened Interface Builder and I started to “drag n’ drop” (I’m still not a fan of IB). Made the connections (almost too easy), and done, it now has some basic track info.

I also added a volume bar, and a button to select the music you want to hear.

Here’s a screenshot: