My Twitterings...
At the Free Time Studios blog, I just officially announced the release of an open source library for iPhone projects called FTUtils. Check out the post and the screencast:
I promised a list of the websites I mentioned in my talk at the HTC on Wednesday. Instead of putting my own list together, I defer to the master: Ari Braginsky. This google doc is where I found most of the sites that I follow daily:
It’s a huge list, so I’ll give you a few must haves here:
Thanks again for the great class and all these links!
Thanks for including Mobile Orchard! We appreciate it 
Sure, Dan. I read Mobile Orchard every day.
I’m also looking forward to your 360|iDev presentation.
Morning, I’m enjoying you session right now on Core Animation and checking your site out. Do I need special access to the iphone resources google doc? I get an error saying I don’t have access. Thanks again for the awesome session.
It’s not my doc, and it looks like the author took it down. 
I’m glad you enjoyed the talk. Keep an eye on github for some more code samples.
Correction. Ari just moved the google doc. I’ve updated the link in the post.
As promised, Here are the slides for my talk at the Houston Technology Center’s Web Based Startup School on 6/17/09. The slides aren’t really useful on their own since I only used them as a visual aid in the talk, but they might trigger some memories for those in attendance.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – What it Takes to Become an iPhone Developer
Abstract:
Since the opening of the iPhone app store, many developers have turned themselves into true success stories. While these stories are more exception than rule, their telling has inspired countless others to give iPhone development a shot. The app store is a revolution in software distribution, and it gives independent developers the power to make their own success. If you are considering becoming an iPhone developer, or if you are just curious what it’s all about, this session is for you. You will learn how to get the SDK, how to join the iPhone developer program and some common iPhone business models. We will also look at the technical side of iPhone development and get a look at the tools of the SDK. Since this session falls on the day of the release of iPhone OS 3.0, we will also get a good look at the new features in the OS and SDK that enable even more rapid development and new business models.
I just got confirmation that I’ll be speaking at 360|iDev in Denver this September. I’m really excited about the conference! I was disappointed that I didn’t hear about the last 360|iDev until after it was over, and the raves of Jeff LaMarche and Owen Goss made me a little jealous. If you can swing it, come on out. It should be a great time!
Here’s what I’ll be talking about:
Using Core Animation to Build Complex and Attractive Interfaces
Core Animation plays an integral role in the iPhone user interface and is responsible for much of its intuitiveness. Careful use of animation can make even an average app a joy to use. In this session you will learn how to effectively apply the features of Core Animation in your own apps. After a brief introduction to the principles behind Core Animation, you will learn how it is used in UIKit. Then, we will dig into the meat of Core Animation and how to use it effectively. Using the open source FTAnimationManager as an example, you will learn how to tame some of the complexities of the Core Animation API. By the end of this session, you will be comfortable with Core Animation, and your apps will run more smoothly and be more visually appealing.
Last night, I butchered the hog my wife shot at the ranch this weekend. If anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation, I found this awesome guide. Very useful! 
Hey Nate! First of all – I love your hog butchering guide by the way. Second of all – how the heck are you?! I don’t do facebook but I found you there anyhow. Looks like you have some exciting stuff going on. Well, I just wanted to say hi and hope we can catch up! Can you believe it has been nearly ten years since we graduated from Trinity?
I tried the Cooks Illustrated modified version of Michael Bittman’s recipe in the NYT. Just waiting for it to cool…
I have used this recipe before. So easy. This reminds me that I should make up a batch for the bread lovers in our family.
Florent Pillet and one other person are discussing. 
Matt O'Donnell, 
Eric,
Mike Ross 3:28 pm on January 22, 2010 Permalink
Hey Nathan, playing with your FTAnimation code – good stuff, thanks! Seeing something strange and can’t figure it out. I was hoping you my have a thought. Using the Popin animation, popin and popout work find first time, then each following invocation fails to show the popin animation (also, the view isn’t displayed). But, I can click in the view (triggering the Popout), and the popout animation is shown. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance Nathan.
neror 3:56 pm on January 22, 2010 Permalink
Mike: Interesting behavior. I’m not sure exactly what’s happening. The animations all take over the hidden attribute on UIView to hide or show the view based on the type of animation. This is because the animations were originally designed as transitions. For example, after popOut is finished, the hidden attribute is set to YES right before your delegate selector (if there is one) is called. There might be some kind of race condition going on, but it’s hard to say.
I can take a look at it if you can give me a small example.
Mike Ross 5:24 pm on January 23, 2010 Permalink
Thanks for taking the time to respond Nathan. It was user error; I was passing in a different key on the addAnimation: call. This led to the problems noted above. Great stuff Nathan – I appreciate you making this available to us.
Florent Pillet 8:31 am on March 15, 2010 Permalink
Hi Nathan, FTUtils is a nice library. I started using it and was wondering why you are setting the removedOnCompletion for animation groups to NO. This makes it so that each animation persists in the view layer, even though it’s complete. Moreover, since you’re keeping a reference to the view (kFTAnimationTargetViewKey) in the animation, this has a later impact on memory management: if I show a view using, say, a back-in effect then make it disappear with a slideOut effect, since the backIn animation is never removed from the layer, there is a live reference to the view, so even if I do a removeFromSuperview: call from the slideOut delegate’s stopSelector, it’s not enough. I have to -removeAllAnimations on the target view first, so that -removeFromSuperview causes a dealloc of the view object.
I’m interested in hearing your thoughts about these!
Thanks for making FTUtils public!
neror 3:06 pm on March 18, 2010 Permalink
@Florent Pillet
I’m glad you like FTUtils and that you’re getting a lot of use from it!
The reason I set
removedOnCompletiontoNOis that I want to manually remove the animation in theaminationDidStop:finished:delegate method. FTAnimation assumes that it will always be the delegate for any animations it creates, and it forwards the delegate calls to thestartSelectorandendSelector. As a result, the animation should be removed every time, but you found a bug in my delegate method. I was callingremoveAnimationForKey:inside of anifstatement when it should be called all of the time. I’ve pushed up the fix to github already.The reason I have to manually remove the animation is because after an “out” animation completes, FTAnimation sets the
hiddenattribute of the view toYES. In many cases, the view wasn’t being hidden quickly enough after the transform was reset, and the view would flash visible for a split second. My solution was to set thefillModeof the animation tokCAFillModeForwards(orkCAFillModeBoth) and hide the view before removing the animation from it. This is a fairly old optimization, and I don’t know if it’s still necessary. I’ve kept it there just in case. I could probably optimize further by only doing this for “out” animations, but I don’t think there is really any significant performance penalty for manually removing the animation.Thanks a lot for pointing this out, and I hope my explanation and fix help.
Bruce 9:23 am on May 19, 2010 Permalink
Hey Nathan, playing with your FTAnimation code – good stuff, thanks! Seeing something strange and can’t figure it out. I was hoping you my have a thought. Using the Popin animation, popin and popout work find first time, then each following invocation fails to show the popin animation (also, the view isn’t displayed). But, I can click in the view (triggering the Popout), and the popout animation is shown. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance Nathan.