I’m an iPhone/iPad developer, and I have to admit that before the iPad I would use hard-coded pixel values when building apps. I knew it was a bad idea, but there was only 320×480, and I was in a hurry to publish. With the iPad, I don’t think that way anymore.

The bigger challenge for an iPhone OS Apple TV, in my opinion, is that iPhone OS is designed for multitouch interfaces, and the current Apple TV is designed to be used with a (very) basic remote control.

If I were Apple, I would build a new Apple TV that has no remote control. Instead, it would be controlled by an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Touch the screen on your mobile device and then show a pointer on the TV, sort of like a Wii. This could make for some amazing user interfaces and take Apple one step further to living room / home domination.

Anyway, that’s my $0.02. Back to coding (I released an RSS parser for Cocoa today).

and I’m about to go on a BBQ journey:

So, if you want to control the z order, you need to order your views properly. The z-index of views goes up as views are added.


<ImageView
android:id="@+id/view_server_os_logo"
android:layout_width="700dip"
android:layout_height="700dip"
android:adjustViewBounds="true"
android:layout_gravity="left"
android:src="@drawable/ubuntu_large"
/>
<TextView
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_marginLeft="22dip"
android:layout_marginTop="-700dip"
android:text="Server Name"
/>


In this case, I move the TextView up 700 pixels and it will sit on top of the ImageView because it comes after the ImageView in the layout XML.


DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
httpclient.removeRequestInterceptorByClass(
org.apache.http.protocol.RequestExpectContinue.class);


This took me a while to track down, unfortunately, so I’m blogging it here so others can hopefully save some time.

New features include:

• longer timeouts
• password lock
• multiple user accounts
• minor bug fixes
• email cloud files as attachments
• email links to cdn-enabled cloud files
• ping IP address uses web view in the app

So, on April 3 when I got my iPad, the first thing I did was run the Rackspace Cloud app, and since I had developed it, I nearly immediately wanted to look at the XML of one of the API responses. I searched the App Store, and there was nothing. So I built something!

Tonight I submitted Curly. It’s a simple HTTP client for the iPad that does pretty much everything my Mac tool would do. Here’s a screen shot:

I’m selling it for $4.99 to help cover the costs of being in the Apple Developer Program, and I would greatly appreciate your support. If $4.99 is too much for you and you still want it, I’ll be happy to give coupon codes for it or something like that once it’s in the App Store.

The excellent graphic design was done by Hudd Byard.

It’s on github:

http://github.com/rackspace/ipad-rackspacecloud

To do this, I built a simple UIViewController with a xib that has a transparent black background, rounded corners, a UIActivityIndicatorView, and a UILabel for the message.

Since I have several screens where I’ll need to use this, I created a simple Objective-C Category to mix in my new view to any UIViewController.

Header:

@end


Implementation:

@end


Then, in any view controller, adding spinners is as easy as this:

#import "UIViewController+SpinnerView.h"

[self showSpinnerView];
[self hideSpinnerView];


You declare validations like this:

+(void)initialize {
    [Person validatesPresenceOf:@"firstName"];
    [Person validatesPresenceOf:@"lastName"];
}


And check them like this:

if ([myObject valid]) {
    // yay! proceed as planned
} else {
    // handle the validation errors
}


Click here to get it. Hope you enjoy!