The iPhone OS started off with a single device, the original iPhone, ala, iPhone 1,1. In the last three years, Apple has been innovating hard and introduced multiple devices running the same operating system with different capabilities. For example, the original iPod touch, iPod 1,1 wasn’t able to record audio input, and till date iPod Touch cannot vibrate as a result of an alert. There are many such subtle differences between...

In iOS 4, Apple introduced a new way to send “push notifications” to your app without having a dedicated server and associated server side coding. The technique is called as scheduling local notifications. While this tutorial is about how to schedule local notifications, I would also explain how a powerful abstraction concept, Singleton design pattern could make this easier when adding local notification support to your app. If...

Officially, iPhone OS 4 is out of NDA and I can’t write a post on this. If you have been reading my blogs, you might already know how to send a in-app email Sending a in-app SMS is very similar to this, but with subtle differences. Prior to iPhone OS 4, developers have to depend on [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: @"sms:12345678"]; The problem with this is not just that it closes your app, but...

By now, most of you know how to send emails using the Message UI framework without quitting the app. In this tutorial, we will briefly discuss the techniques for sending a HTML formatted email with user generated content. Though sending a HTML formatted email is as easy as setting the option to HTML [picker setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:YES]; There are some cases that this method that this method doesn’t take care of. In...

What is Follow Cost? Follow Cost is a interesting and powerful statistic that helps you check the “cost” you would incur by “following” a person on twitter. This is a very useful statistic that I think every twitter client should adopt.  Tweetie for iPhone was the first to implement follow cost and I use this feature of tweetie to check whether a follower is “worth the pain” (as follow cost puts it). In...