Brian Bal

WWDC 2011 Videos Available

2011-06-23T00:00:00-04:00

Session videos from WWDC 2011 are now available.

Apple Changes In App Subscriptions

2011-06-11T00:00:00-04:00

Jordan Golson at Mac Rumors on “Apple Reverses Course On In-App Subscriptions”

There are no longer any guidelines about price at all. Apple also removed the requirement that external subscriptions must be also offered as an in-app purchase.

Cocoa Controls

2011-06-10T00:00:00-04:00

Cocoa Controls has a good collection of custom UI components for iOS and Mac OS X. Even if you don’t use these exact libraries in your project it’s probably worth taking a look through some of these to find out how they work.

The Beatles Complete on Ukulele

2011-06-09T00:00:00-04:00

The Beatles Complete on Ukulele, just a great site. They put out a Ukulele Beatles cover every tuesday.

Now Powered by Jekyll

2011-06-08T00:00:00-04:00

Inspired by Build and Analyze podcasts a few weeks ago I decided to move my blog from a wordpress install to one of the baked blog systems. After looking a few different baked blog systems I found that Jekyll was right for me. After a few hours I had moved all my old posts into the new system and now have the new BrianBal.com up and running.

iPhoneTracker

2011-04-21T00:00:00-04:00

The open source app iPhoneTracker is able to track your iPhone’s location by reading data from your iPhone backup. The app creates a cool heat map from location data provided by cell phone towers and wifi hot spots but not from GPS.

If your worried about someone gaining access to your location data, enabling encrypted backups for your iphone stops this kind of thing. Encrypted backups also have the added benefit of storing your email account passwords so that you don’t have to enter them again after a restore.

Stop Your iPhone from opening iPhoto

2011-04-15T00:00:00-04:00

Here is a quick fix to stop you iPhone from opening iPhoto every time you connect it.

Step 1

Connect your iPhone.
It will need to be connect so that we can configure what application to open when it is plugged in.

Step 2.

Open Image Capture. You can find the Image Capture app in your applications folder.

Step 3

Once Image Capture is open select your iPhone from the list of devices on the left.

Step 4

In the bottom left corner of the Image Capture app you should see some options for your iPhone.

Choose ‘No Application’ for the ‘Connecting this iphone opens’ option.

Now your iPhone should no longer open iPhoto every time you connect it.

nginx 1.0 is Out

2011-04-12T00:00:00-04:00

nginx 1.0 is out, time to update.

Flip Animation in C#

2011-04-11T00:00:00-04:00

Here is quick little function that does a flip animation in C#/Silverlight. To flip FlipAnimation(gridToFlip, 0, 180);

To flip back: FlipAnimation(gridToFlip, 180, 0);

private void FlipAnimation(UIElement element, double from, double to)
{
	Storyboard flip = new Storyboard();
	DoubleAnimation animation = new DoubleAnimation()
	{
		Duration = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 1)
	};
	flip.Children.Add(animation);
	if (element.Projection == null)
	{
		element.Projection = new PlaneProjection()
		{
			CenterOfRotationX = -0.01
		};
	}
	PlaneProjection projection = element.Projection as PlaneProjection;
	animation.From = from;
	animation.To = to;
	Storyboard.SetTarget(animation, projection);
	Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(animation, 
		new PropertyPath(PlaneProjection.RotationYProperty));
	flip.Begin();
}

iPhone Programming Tutorials

2008-12-26T00:00:00-05:00

Did you get that iPhone you wanted for Christmas? iCodeBlog has some great introductory iPhone programming tutorials.