How-To

The other day I was changing my Yahoo password and the site didn't like my chosen password because it included letters from my name and a number from my birthday. I wasn't intentionally using my birthday and it's pretty hard not to use at least one letter from my name, since my name is long and includes 11 letters out of the 24-letter alphabet. Fortunately, I had my iPhone right next to me and I was able to quickly generate a secure password using Siri. Here's how:

Recently, I unsubscribed from all but a few of the email newsletters I receive. Now, when I write “newsletters”, I am referring to those emails that are blog posts. I didn’t unsubscribe from them because the emails were no longer relevant or important to me (they still were) but I did so for two reasons:

1. I was getting a lot of emails. Some sites I subscribe to post several times a day.

2. It was not easy to share the content with my followers on social media via email.

If you've purchased a new iDevice, the good news is that you don't have to set it up from scratch if you are replacing an older device. One of my favorite things about owning Apple products is the simplicity in which transferring content can be done. As long as you back up your previous device using either iCloud or iTunes, your new device can be synced with all your content, including saved messages, email accounts, photos, notes, and other personal settings.

Here's how:

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 36 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous post, I provided an overview of using Google App Engine to scale your iOS apps, and demonstrated how to get Google's iOS sample app running on an iOS device so that you can check it out.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 35 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous post, I discussed making your web-enabled apps scalable by outsourcing your web services to a third-party company, and I provided an overview of the services offered by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. In this post, I'm going to dive into Google App Engine so you can get a detailed look at how to access web services hosted by Google from your iOS app. I'll provide an overview of Google App Engine's features, and show you how to set up and use Google's iOS sample app.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 34 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

Whether you are for or against the new U.S. healthcare initiative, everyone agrees on one thing. The launch of the HealthCare.gov web site was an unqualified disaster. Most visitors who came to the site when it was first rolled out saw the message shown in Figure 1.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 33 of the series. If  you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

So far in this series, with the iAppsReview project we have always retrieved and stored data directly on the iOS device (or Simulator) using Core Data. However, we eventually need to retrieve and store data on the web so we can read other users' online reviews, and post our own reviews to the web. Accessing data on the web is definitely not trivial. That's why I've waited to introduce the subject. We'll take it slow and in this post I'll provide an overview of the concepts before we begin diving into some real code in the next few posts.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 32 of the series. If  you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

in this week's post, I'm going to break down the process of installing and running an app on a real iOS device (rather than the Simulator). Even if you think you know everything there is to know about this process, things have changed a bit under Xcode 5, so I recommend you read on!

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 31 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

One of the new features that Apple added to Xcode 5 to improve the management and runtime performance of images is asset catalogs. In this post, I'll give you an overview of how asset catalogs work, and we'll add an asset catalog to the iAppsReview project so you can get hands-on experience with this new technology.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 30 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here. 

For the vast majority of apps that you build, it makes tremendous sense to make sure your app can be sold to as many iOS users in as many countries and languages as possible. The App Store is available in over 150 countries in 40 languages and automatically handles international payments and current conversion for you. All you need to do is make sure your app can support a variety of languages. I'll show you the basic steps in this post as we make the iAppsReview project multi-lingual. 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 29 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

As we continue to move the iAppsReview app forward, we now come to a point where we have to climb the learning curve on one of the more advanced Objective-C concepts—blocks. This discussion comes at an unlikely place. This week I'm going to show you how to take the image of a review that you have created in the Write Review scene and display it in the My Reviews scene. This seems like it should be pretty straightforward, but as you will see, it involves using the iOS Assets Library and using Objective-C blocks.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 28 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

Just about every app has the need to store and retrieve settings that are specific to the user. User settings include information such as name, ID, email address, password, high score (for games), preferences, and so on. 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience  how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 27 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In many of the built-in iOS apps, such as Settings, you are able to edit information directly in the cells of a table view. This is a nice feature, because you the user doesn't have to navigate to a separate scene just to enter a value. This is especially important when setting up email where there are several values that need to be entered.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 26 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous post we went through the steps of converting the Write Review scene in iAppsReview to iOS 7 and Xcode 5. In this post we're going to update a few more scenes and learn even more important information about Auto Layout, iOS 7's default edge-to-edge content, and how to specify a global tint for your app!

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 25 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

One of the main requirements for iOS developers is to create apps that can adapt to different user interface sizes. With the 3.5-inch and 4-inch iPhones, the iPad, and rumors of new Apple devices with larger and smaller form factors, you need to make sure your app can adapt and look great on all these devices.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 24 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous column, I talked about some of the great new changes in Xcode 5, Apple's tool for creating iOS apps. In this post, I am going to move the iAppsReview project to Xcode 5 and iOS 7 and we'll talk about some of the challenges you will encounter as you move your apps forward. 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! 

As I write this blog post (September 18, 2013), Apple has officially released iOS 7 and Xcode 5! I'm going to take a detour from my usual topic of building the iAppsReview app and give you an overview of these new tools and technologies. You can check out the regular series here.

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