iPhone needs a Siri button

Apple’s iPhone desperately needs a Siri button! From the beginning of time (in other words, 2007), the iPhone has only had the Home button. Well, and yes, the Power button. Ok, ok, and the volume buttons! Throughout every iteration these buttons have remained constant. From time to time, the OS added varying functionality to these buttons such as Assistive Touch or Mute/Rotation Lock. But overall their main functionality remained the same. The bottom line is, there is a reason why mechanical buttons are limited in today’s touch era. Mechanical objects offer greater probability of malfunctions than do their digital counterparts. Case in point, the now ubiquitous and quite profitable iPhone… Read More

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Top Ten Mobile App Features

Feedback system Responsiveness Do one thing right Socialize & Gamify A few clicks Website match Analytics Off-line Customize user experience It’s a mobile device Every app needs to provide the user with a direct connection to the company’s customer service department Above all an app must be responsive and quick. The best app in the world is useless if it takes too long to open. Great apps do one thing and do it right! If you try to juggle too much functionality into one app, the user gets overwhelmed. The best way nowadays to keep users interested is to Gamify or Socialize. Gamify means give your users that carrot they… Read More

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GrandCentralDispatch & Blocks

GCD helps improve your apps performance and responsiveness by outsourcing processes that require a lot or computing power to the background while keeping your UI responsive.  Normally you might want to do some heavy lifting. Let’s create an Empty Application.  You need to declare a IBOutlet UIImageView *imageView ivar in your appDelegate, make it a property and synthesize it in .m and make the connection in Interface Builder, IB.  In it’s viewDidLoad method put the following code: // Download the image NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@”http://www.santiapps.com/assets/bbkoko.jpg”]; NSURLRequest *req = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url]; NSURLResponse *res = [[NSURLResponse alloc] init]; NSError *err = nil; NSData *data = nil; data = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:req returningResponse:&res… Read More

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