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No Love in the App Store

One of the problems, the main problem. of Apple's App Store is hierarchy.

What? What does structure have to do with it. I am not talking about structure as in a folder hierarchy, but more to do with the pecking order. I have to explore this idea a little before I can tie it to the App Store.

I am an Indie developer. I don't do this for no other reason but that I love crafting software. I am in someways like that stereotypical computer geek. I dislike hierarchy. The hierarchy in the pecking order. I want to do things for the heck of it, because I love to do them, to explore, to learn. In some ways this is antiauthoritarian. It is the way of the creative.

Becoming part of the pecking order starts to define who you are. It becomes a status thing. It defines your position in the company. You start making decisions with regard to the hierarchy. You might not even realize this, but how many decisions are made because of your place in the company, of your place in the hierarchy. Think about it.

Continue reading No Love in the App Store

A Simple Way to Animate a UIBarButtonItem

My first pass solution to animate a UIBarButtonItem was to initialize it's custom view with a UIImageView. The UIImageView can then be set up for animation with multiple images. Calling startAnimaiton/stopAnimation on the UIImaveView will then animate. This is great for animating buttons in tool and tab bars.

One problem is that the when initializing the UIImageView into the UIBarButtonItem, the UIBarButtonItem does not respond to touch events. Yuk.

A simple solution is to initialize the UIBarButtonItem custom view with a UIButton, then touch events for the UIBarButtonItem item are handle correctly.

But the UIButton does not have a way to use a UIImageView only UIImages. We want to use the UIImageView for its simple animation.

The solution is to add the UIImageView as a subview of the UIButton.

Here is the code.

NSArray *images = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:

        [UIImage imageNamed:@"image0.png"],

        [UIImage imageNamed:@"image1.png"],

        nil];

imageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage  imageNamed:@"image0.png"]];

Continue reading A Simple Way to Animate a UIBarButtonItem
sean@coolthingsmade.com