A Passionate Technologists' Journal

How many of you know that you can search for a particular word in the webpage loaded in safari on your iPhone/iPod/iPad ? Most of them might say "No", because i was one of them before. Because, the solution is kind of hidden from the user's direct view. It could save you even hours when you come across a situation where the webpage is too long and you just want to know about a specific topic, so that you can skip everything and just jump to the section you wanted. Here's the trick to find a specific word in the webpage : Let's say i am on "saru2020.blogspot.com" (This is not too lengthy yet). But, still we need to take an effort to find an article that we are searching for. Let's say you want to see only the articles related to "iOS7", then definitely that is a huge task which consumes time. Instead, we can just search with the keyword "iOS7". That is what exactly we're gonna do now. Now, g...

  SARAddressBookBackup : This is an iOS library to Backup the Contacts in iOS Devices as .vcf file. Also, the Example project in Github illustrates on how to email the .vcf file. The .vcf file can also be accessed/shared through iTunes File Sharing. Story Behind its Birth : Searched the App Store for Apps that could backup all my contacts in my iPhone5. I would usually go mostly with free apps (Kind of a Freebie). When trying to backup my contacts, most of the apps asked me to purchase to backup contacts more than 500 or 1000 or whatever, completely depends on the app developer's decision and i have to abide their rules. I have more than 1000 contacts in my iPhone Contacts App. Finally, i found an app that backed up all my contacts, and it even allowed me to send the output file to my email, but that was not reliable (The app crashed several times). [Note : I didn't mention the App name here :) ] Just thought of how hard it is to develop an app that ...

MKLocalSearch provides a simple way to find local points of interest within a geographic region. Because of its no-hassle webservice integration and tight integration with MapKit , any location-based app would do well to take advantage of it. Usage : MKLocalSearchRequest *request = [[MKLocalSearchRequest alloc] init]; request.naturalLanguageQuery = @"Hospitals"; request.region = mapView.region; MKLocalSearch *search = [[MKLocalSearch alloc] initWithRequest:request]; [search startWithCompletionHandler:^(MKLocalSearchResponse *response, NSError *error) {     NSLog(@"Map Items: %@", response.mapItems); }];

iOS7 provides a way to use speech (Kind of text to speech conversion). To create an object, you do as below : AVSpeechSynthesizer *speechSynthesizer = [[AVSpeechSynthesizer alloc] init]; normally like any other NSObject. To let it speak, we need to pass the “ AVSpeechUtterance ” object to it using this API: [speechSynthesizer speakUtterance:/* AVSpeechUtterance object */ ]; So, to create an object for “ AVSpeechUtterance ”, you do as below : AVSpeechUtterance *utterance = [AVSpeechUtterance speechUtteranceWithString:@“Hey baby!”]; So, Utterance is the one that provides the text which will be spoken by the synthesizer. Also, it has few interesting properties, which could be tweaked based on our need. Like rate, volume, pitchMultiplier, preUtteranceDelay, postUtteranceDelay .  For example to slow down the speech, we could use : utterance .rate *= 0.5 ; whereas, preUtteranceDelay, postUtteranceDelay are used to delay the speech before and ...

Message UI Framework (Attach Files to Messages) : We have always ben using "MFMessageComposeViewController" to send messages, but we weren't allowed to add images to it. But, after iOS7, you could use : " - (BOOL)addAttachmentData:(NSData *)attachmentData typeIdentifier:(NSString *)uti filename:(NSString *)filename;" this API to attach images to the messages like below : if ([MFMessageComposeViewController canSendText] && [MFMessageComposeViewController canSendAttachments] && [MFMessageComposeViewController isSupportedAttachmentUTI:( NSString *)kUTTypePNG]) {      MFMessageComposeViewController *vc = [[MFMessageComposeViewController alloc] init];      vc.messageComposeDelegate = self ;      vc.recipients = @[ @"sender" ];      UIImage *myImage = [UIImage imageNamed: @"imageName.png" ];      BOOL attached = [vc addAttachmentData:UIImagePNGRepr...

NSURLSession is the replacement of NURLConnection, which resolves the issues occurring with the latter. Session objects are created with the class methods which takes the configuration object. There are 3 types of possible sessions: Default Ephemeral, in-process session Background session NSURLSessionConfiguration *sessionConfig = [NSURLSessionConfiguration defaultSessionConfiguration]; The above configuration object has properties which controls the way it behaves, for instance, whether the cookies are allowed, timeouts etc. And also few more properties like : * allowsCellularAccess : Could be set to say the operating system whether the device is permitted to run the networking session when the cellular network is available. * discretionary : Could be set to say the operating system to run the networking session when the device is connected to Wifi or has good power. After creating the session configuration object, we can create the session object...