gnapse.com » iphone http://gnapse.com/blog whatever comes to my mind Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:50:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 My new iPad nano (aka iPhone) http://gnapse.com/blog/2010/02/03/my-new-ipad-nano-aka-iphone/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=my-new-ipad-nano-aka-iphone http://gnapse.com/blog/2010/02/03/my-new-ipad-nano-aka-iphone/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:54:10 +0000 ernesto http://gnapse.com/blog/?p=116 Most people are going crazy these days talking about the most recent gadget announced by Apple. They’ve seen the video, they went to the announcement conference, they are wondering when will they get one in their hands. They simply can’t wait.

Meanwhile I am enjoying a similar experience. Somebody noticed out there that there are many of us with an iPad already (kind of). The iPad nano has been around for a couple of years now but with another name. And I recently got one and I am delighted with it. Why going crazy about the new one when you can have the nano version which fits in your pocket, has a camera and makes phone calls too!

iPad nano

iPad nano

Now seriously, after using the iPhone for some days I understand why people are crazy to experiment with its big but younger brother. Touch screens are seriously redefining how we interact with computers and from a developer standpoint it’s amazing the whole new set of possibilities that arise. And it’s not only touch screens and multi-touch, but also the ability to make a program adapt to different orientations of the device, to be able to access hardware services like a compass, accelerometer, GPS, etc.

]]> http://gnapse.com/blog/2010/02/03/my-new-ipad-nano-aka-iphone/feed/ 0 Great ORM for the iPhone SDK http://gnapse.com/blog/2009/10/20/great-orm-for-the-iphone-sdk/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=great-orm-for-the-iphone-sdk http://gnapse.com/blog/2009/10/20/great-orm-for-the-iphone-sdk/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:23:57 +0000 ernesto http://gnapse.com/blog/?p=83 I’ve started to dwell into iPhone’s data persistence world, and I have to say it’s a very diverse one, for such a small-device platform. We developers have four basic approaches to save our application’s data (property lists, archiving/nscoding, core data and sqlite), not to mention that preferences get stored and saved outside our app, and that we also have the low level approach of reading and writing directly to files on disk (but who needs that?).

However, I am spoiled by my Ruby on Rails background, and I started to think about ORM and ActiveRecord in no time. It turns out that, as I expected, I found a few blog posts and projects out there for this. Nothing surprising, since I’m not the only one coming to the iPhone from Rails, and I have just recently started programming for this platform. Several people have been struggling with it for some time now.

One of the most promising and wonderful projects I found is called SQLite Persistent Objects. It’s like ActiveRecord for the iPhone written in Objective-C (of course), but even better in some respects. You don’t write you data schemas first, but your classes instead. It’s the objects the ones that create the database and tables in the background as needed. It even features dynamic search methods too!

If you’re programming for the iPhone, I really recommend it (although I haven’t tested it thoroughly yet). The article above gives a link to a download, but the project seems to be hosted on google code, so ti would be presumably better to download it from there.

Update (2009-10-23): Coincidentally today the author of SQLite Persistent Objects posted in his blog that after deciding to discontinue development, another developer took over, so the project (which I didn’t know was dying) is alive again! He also links to a great presentation that get you started very quickly.

]]> http://gnapse.com/blog/2009/10/20/great-orm-for-the-iphone-sdk/feed/ 1