As all of us knows, location-aware services/applications are becoming more popular and widespread everyday. Especially, mobile devices play a very important role in that area. So we all, in some ways, need to access the location of a specific user of our app. Most of the mobile devices provides some hardware and APIs for letting application developers to access location services of the device. iPhone has a built-in GPS module and a framework is provided in Cocoa Touch called CoreLocation that is used for accessing location services of the device.
CoreLocation can be used to obtain the latitude and longitude parameters of the location of the device. But sometimes we need some more detailed information about that specific location. Country, city, state, street, may be postal code etc.. It depends on the application. That is something iPhone or iOS platform does not provide directly. However, we can use a web service such as Yahoo! PlaceFinder to access detailed information about a location of which we know the latitude and longitude parameters.
What SSLocationManager does is as follows:
- Ask CoreLocation services to determine current location of the device.
- Get current position in latitude and longitude from CoreLocation.
- Call Yahoo! PlaceFinder web service to get detailed information about the location specified with its latitude and longitude.
- Notify the application via SSLocationManagerDelegate and supply the detailed location data.
Here is a basic diagram that shows the overall structure:
SSLocationManager Diagram
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I gave a lecture on “iPhone Development” at Kadir Has University on April 26, as a guest lecturer. Here is the demo application I wrote for the lecture:
https://github.com/ardalahmet/TwitterSearchApp
It really is a simple application. It allows user to enter some text and search it on Twitter and shows results in a UITableView. It basicly demonstrates how to consume a JSON web service and how to use common UI views(UITextField, UITableview).
Git readonly url:
git://github.com/ardalahmet/TwitterSearchApp.git
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iOS family has become a very attractive gaming platform since the first release of the iPhone. iPhone platform both attracts game enthusiasts and game developers for many reasons. There are a lot to mention but to name a few;
- iPhone is mobile: You carry it wherever you go. It doesn’t matter whether you’re resting at home in the evening or you’re waiting your plane to arrive at the airport. Your little baby is in your pocket whenever and wherever you need it.
- iPhone provides a natural user interface: You can use your fingers as if you do in real world. You can swipe, multi-touch, drag, throw, catch and hold things in games. You don’t need a joystick or a complicated control device to interact with the game. The screen is there and you have the control with the touch of your hands.
- iPhone is compact and handy: Phone, music, productivity and entertainment… All in one device. You don’t need a separate device to enjoy your favourite games. And you don’t have to have hours of free time to play a game, even a 5 minutes of spare time while you wait for the metro at a station is sufficient for most of the games to play.
- App Store is a heaven for both iPhone users and developers: There are literally thousands of games in the App Store. Ranging from simple time-killer games to very complicated, rich graphics, multi-user games… You are both able to find your favourite childhood games and also discover many new games with a lot of innovative, surprising ideas and features. And for developers, it’s really a heaven. Imagine your simple, weekend-hack game is being listed with the games of the industry giants such as EA Games, Sega and many others. It was nothing more than a dream a couple of years ago, isn’t it?
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A couple of days ago, I was in the library, reading the book Deep Blues by Robert Palmer. I don’t know why, I skipped to the end of the book after a while and continued reading, and those last paragraphs from the epilogue “The World Boogie” and last paragraphs of the book as well, left a great impression on me. The book is a great read. I strongly recommend it to all the ones who ever once felt the spirit of the blues…
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I gave a seminar on “Introduction to iPhone Development” at Kadir Has University on March 24. Here is the demo application I wrote during the seminar:
https://github.com/ardalahmet/ToDoListApp
It doesn’t do anything useful but just demonstrates some uses of common cocoa touch UI elements, some fundamental objective-c data types and basic persistence.
Git readonly url:
git://github.com/ardalahmet/ToDoListApp.git
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I put together all resources I had prepared for the CE241 and CE242 courses’ labs when I was the TA between the years 2008-2010, in Kadir Has University. What I mean by “Resources” is documents and all the source code for lab assignments, homeworks, term project assignments and any example programs. All those stuff is available as three separate git repositories on GitHub:
CE241–Fall-08
CE242–Spring-09
CE242–Spring-10
For course descriptions:
CE241 – Programming Languages
CE242 – Data Structures and Algorithms