egocode

EGOCache 2.0

shnhrrsn — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 17:48:52 -0400

It’s been a while since we’ve updated EGOCache, a large reason for that is that it’s been fairly stable and gets the job done. There’s not too many bells and whistles you can build into a key value cache store, at least not many that are necessary, so we’ve left things largely alone. Aside from a few pull requests, not much has changed in EGOCache since we released in October 2009.

So, what’s new in 2.0? Everything. Nothing.

Internally, 2.0 is completely rearchitectured/rewritten. Externally, the API remains largely untouched, so you’ll be able to drop it into your existing projects and go.

The only major API change is that +currentCache has been deprecated in favor of +globalCache. This was made purely for semantics, because you can now instantiate your own EGOCache instances and set a different cache directory if you’d like. This could be useful if you’d like to divide caches for different items (photos vs UI caching).

Under the hood is where all the fun stuff c:

EGOCache 2.0 is now built entirely on ARC, Objective-C blocks and libdispatch. If your projects don’t support these technologies, well, do yourself a favor, learn them and love them. We were resistant to ARC at first too, just give in ;).
All disk saves are now non blocking and processed in a separate dispatch queue.
The thread saftey issues that popped up over the last year should be resolved. All dictionary modifications are now done in a serial dispatch queue.
On iOS, when saving a UIImage, EGOCache now serializes the UIImage instance rather than the old way of using UIImagePNGRepresentation. This allows you to retain all meta information associated with the object, such as orientation and scale. An additional benefit to this is that the image is saved in it’s original format, so JPEG’s are no longer bloated to PNG size when saved. One downside to this, if for some reason you were retrieving images via -dataForKey:, that will no longer work.

This is absolutely NOT a beta release. We’ve been shipping this code on App Store since August and it’s running on millions of devices, so feel confident in switching to it from 1.0.

Grab the code here: https://github.com/enormego/EGOCache

Lastly, I wanted to add a quick update on the rest of our open source libraries:

We still use them, every day. We’ve been evolving them over the years and they’re all rewritten to utilize the same technologies mentioned above, and will be updated soon. We don’t take major updates lightly, and we’re not going to put them out there until we’ve already shipped them in our own apps and know for certain they’re rock solid. Look for EGOHTTPRequest 2.0 in the next few weeks.

Installing ImageMagick for PHP and MAMP

saverio — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:46:00 -0400

Install Brew (https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation)
In Terminal, run: brew install imagemagick
In Terminal, run: brew tap josegonzalez/homebrew-php
In Terminal, run: brew install imagick-php
Copy the compiled extension path (extension= …)
Edit this file: /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/envvars
Comment out the only lines that aren’t already commented out.
Add the extension= path to your php.ini files.

MAMP Users:

/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf

MAMP Pro Users:

/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf
/Library/Application Support/appsolute/MAMP PRO/conf/php.ini
And MAMP PRO > File > Edit Template > PHP > SELECT YOUR VERSION

Everyone Else:

In Terminal, run: php -i | grep php.ini$ to find the location of your .ini file.

Restart Apache via MAMP.

Calculating the height of text in Android

shnhrrsn — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:51:36 -0500

While Android has numerous methods for sizing text, as far as I can see, none of them let you pass in a max width to get the height of the text once it wraps.

This is relatively simple to do on iOS via – sizeWithFont:constrainedToSize:lineBreakMode:.

For Android, I came up with the following convenience method to do it:

With this, you can just do int height = getTextHeight("text", 160, 12.0f, Typeface.DEFAULT_BOLD); and you’re set.

Android Hardware Acceleration Bug: canvas.drawBitmap NullPointerException

shnhrrsn — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:08:00 -0500

Despite what Google says, there’s still a bug in the Android SDK when doing the following:

As per the Android docs, the second parameter is supposed to accept null. Passing in null works fine on devices without hardware acceleration, but will result in a crash if the device has HA. Google claims this bug was resolved in ICS, but it’s definitely still present as of today.

As long as you provide the src rect, everything works fine:

Webkit box-shadow inconsistencies

shnhrrsn — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:59:00 -0500

There appears to be an inconsistency in how Webkit renders the CSS3 “box-shadow” tag depending on whether or not you prefix with “-webkit”.

John Barker brought this to my attention while working on something for Fav.tv so I began to investiate, and sure enough, it’s true:

You can find the code/working example here: http://jsfiddle.net/AK5Pt/2/

CSS3 Horizontal Navigation

shnhrrsn — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:42:00 -0500

Example of a pretty simple horizontal menu with vertical texted, purely powered by HTML and CSS3.

Head over to jsfiddle to see a working example and view the code: jsfiddle.net/qSzMa/4/

Note: This only contains the -webkit css prefixes, you’ll need to update with -moz, -ms, etc for production use.

"EGO" Xcode Theme for Xcode 4 + EGOv2

shnhrrsn — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:46:00 -0500

Almost two years ago now, we posted our Xcode theme, “EGO”. It’s been significantly more popular than I ever thought, we’ve seen a lot tweets about, we’ve seen it in screen casts, and it even made an appearance in the product launch video for robotcat’s Outside app. There’s no real metric for these things, but it seems to be one of the more popular third party Xcode things (we’re number one in Google!).

So, with the GM release of Xcode 4, we’ve gone ahead and ported our original EGO theme to the new Xcode 4 file format.

We’re also posting a new version of EGO, EGOv2. It’s based on EGO but has some key differences: New background color, new comment colors, themed console, and other minor tweaks and slight HSB adjustments. Here’s a comparison:

Original EGO Theme

New EGOv2 Theme

To install the themes, run the following blocks of code in Terminal:

Original EGO

mkdir -p ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/FontAndColorThemes; cd ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/FontAndColorThemes; curl -O http://assets.egoco.de/egotheme/EGO.dvtcolortheme

New EGOv2

mkdir -p ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/FontAndColorThemes; cd ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/FontAndColorThemes; curl -O http://assets.egoco.de/egotheme/EGOv2.dvtcolortheme

Now just restart Xcode, go to Preferences > Fonts & Colors, and select “EGO” or “EGOv2” from the color theme drop down.

Note: Both themes now use Menlo Bold 13pt. This might not be for everyone, but I’ve found it much easier on the eyes and the bold seems to render nicer than regular, to me. Feel free to change!

Safari View Source in TextMate

shnhrrsn — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 04:10:04 -0500

While I love developing in Safari over alternatives like Firefox and Chrome, it lacks in one particular area: View Source. Safari’s View Source is practically useless, it doesn’t show line numbers, no syntax highlighting, etc.

Safari does offer the Web Inspect, which is nice, but a little annoying for quick look ups since everything is broken down into the DOM tree.

I’ve seen other Safari Extension’s like BetterSource that do this right in the browser, but really, why re-invent the wheel? TextMate is an awesome editor (albeit with this issues) and would be perfect for this.

I decided to see if I could get a “View Source in TextMate” item in the contextual menu. After reading over all of the docs, it became apparent to me that opening files in a native app just wasn’t going to happen.

I was able to get it to work by writing a TextMate plugin to handle the heavy lifting via it’s txmt:// URL scheme. So it all worked out in the end, you’ll just need to install the TextMate plugin as well as the Safari extension. Â Enjoy!

Download the ViewSourceInTextMate TextMate Plugin

Download the ViewSourceInTextMate Safari Extension

Facebook Redux: Who doesn't love a happy ending?

shnhrrsn — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:31:27 -0400

Late last week, we had a bit of a misunderstanding with Facebook. We probably jumped the gun and ended up rendering the title of the post a bit hypocritical, as many of you pointed out. We should have reached out to Facebook first to find out how this happened, but we were pissed off and wanted to tell the world. It’s not easy to get in touch with Facebook, and we were in no mood to sift through their site to figure it out. Apparently, we could have emailed them at opensource@facebook.com.

As it turns out, Facebook didn’t even know they did anything wrong. EGOTableViewPullRefresh made it’s way into Three20 by way of a fork merge from a third party. This obviously doesn’t excuse Facebook, since they are responsible for their repository, but it does explain how it happened.

Within hours of our post going up, Jeff and David from Facebook’s Open Source team became aware of the mix up and reached out to us resolved the issue quickly. All in all, we were pretty happy with the resolution. We received credit for our code in three20, and we helped make Facebook’s iPhone app just a little bit better.

Facebook didn’t stop there though, David reached out to me again this week and send me a Facebook Swag Pack:

At the end of the day, Facebook screwed up, but did everything right to resolve it, and then went beyond that by sending us from free Facebook swag. We’re definitely sorry for how we initially handled this situation as well, since it’s clear now we could have avoided this by simply getting in touch with Facebook right away.

So thank you Facebook, you guys definitely have common courtesy!

What ever happened to common courtesy?

shnhrrsn — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:17:32 -0400

Updated 8:30PM — See below

Upon updating Facebook’s iPhone app last night, the first thing I immediately noticed was Pull to Refresh, the awesome UI Element created by Loren Brichter for Tweetie 2. We fell in love with this element the second Tweetie 2 hit app store, so we re-created it and open sourced it for everyone to use.

We’ve seen Pull to Refresh used in a few apps before and always wondered whether or not it was the one we created, but never one as popular as Facebook. I immediately started looking to see if our code made it into their app, it would be awesome to see Facebook using something we wrote.

I was a little disappointed when I found out this element was actually apart of their open source iOS library three20. Still, I was curious as to how they did it. Was it similar to what we came up? Was it better? We were never fully happy with our implementation, but never had the time to spend on making it better.

Digging through their source code, I finally found the class: TTTableHeaderDragRefreshView. I started looking over to code to see how they accomplished it, and that’s when I realized it: this was our class. You can see a diff on the two classes init methods below:

Note: For the purposes of the diff tool, I normalized the code blocks a bit, but you can compare for yourself by going here and here.

Facebook prefixed some variables, slapped their Three20 branding on it, restructured some code, but it was the same code we wrote. The same code we wrote, with zero mention of us.

Just like all of our open source code (and we’ve published a lot of it), our intent is always for it to be used to help developers and generally make apps/app store a better place for everyone. We were ecstatic that we might have made Facebook just a little bit better.

To find out that they took our code, re-released it as their own, and take credit for it though? That’s not cool Facebook. Not cool at all. It also violates our license, which states they need to retain our copyright notice when republishing it.

Still, we’re glad we could help made Facebook, three20, and all of the apps using pull to refresh in three20, better. It just would have been nice to get at least a hat tip from Facebook.

Update 8:30pm: Facebook reached out to us and they’ve updated their headers to attribute the source code to us.

How to Add Those @2x iOS4 Resources to SVN

shnhrrsn — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:25:00 -0400

In order for your app to take full advantage of the iPhone 4 Retina Display, you’ll need to add 2x resources to your iPhone project.

If you’re using SVN to manage your files, you’ll be faced with something pretty annoying:

$ svn add Default@2x.png svn: warning: 'Default' not found

This was incredibly frustrating for me, no matter how I tried to escape it: single quotes, double quotes, backslashes, etc. SVN refused to add.

This is due to internal path recognizers in SVN. It expects the last at symbol to specify a revision. This is easily corrected by adding an at symbol to the end of your file:

$ svn add Default@2x.png@ A (bin) Default@2x.png

You’ll still need to manually add each resource, but it’s better than nothing. You could also use an IDE like Cornerstone, but I prefer the SVN CLI way of managing SVN.

Before anyone says anything: I know this isn’t an issue in GIT. GIT’s awesome, I love GIT. Unfortunately I still have some projects that require SVN.

What if images on the iPhone were as easy as HTML?

shnhrrsn — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:53:00 -0400

HTML is great, you want to set an image and you do <img src=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />. It does everything else for you, it caches, it even loads in the background. This is something that is taken completely for granted until you actually have to do it yourself.

The work involved in doing this on the iPhone is a pain. It’s not so bad if you’re viewing a single image, but if you’re displaying web-based images in a table view? Ugh.

Enter EGOImageLoading.

We created EGOImageLoading to be as easy to use as HTML. EGOImageLoading is a few classes to make life easier on the developer, and to give the end user a much smoother result, easily.

Here’s what EGOImageLoading does:

It loads the image in the background
It caches the image to the disk for you
It allows you to set a placeholder image while it’s loading

And here’s where it gets even more awesome: It changes loading priorities on the fly. If the user scrolls a bit in the table view, it’ll decrease the priority of those images, and load the ones they’re looking at right now, first.

So how simple is this? You can jump to our GitHub page and grab the demo, but here’s what our UITableViewCell subclass looks like:

Yeah, it really is that simple.

So how does it work?

It’s all based on EGOImageLoader and EGOCache.

We published EGOCache a few months ago, and we’ve since improved it to work better with EGOImageLoader.

EGOImageLoader does all the heavy lifting. It checks to see if the image is cached, if it is, you get it right away. If not, it loads it up in the background, and if it’s told to, it decreases the priorities and bumps new loads to the top.

You can use EGOImageLoader without table views, and it’ll work great. However, this post is all about table views, so we created UIImageView and UIButton subclasses, EGOImageView and EGOButton respectively, that interact with EGOImageLoader for you. That means all you have to do is initialize them, and set the URL. Seriously, that’s it.

They both contain “increaseImageLoadPriority” and “decreaseImageLoadPriority”.

You’ll probably never need to increase priority, since it does that for you when it loads (or re-sets a loading URL). However, you are going to want to decrease the load priority once the table view cell is moved off screen, we do this in the above example by tracking willMoveToSuperview.

So there you have it, image loading on the iPhone, that’s just as easy as throwing in an HTML image tag.

You can grab EGOImageLoading on it’s GitHub page: http://github.com/enormego/EGOImageLoading

Also a quick note, EGOImageLoader is powered by the awesome ASIHTTPRequest class by Ben Copsey. I’m sure you could rework it to work with NSURLConnection, but why? ASIHTTPRequest is amazing. If you’re not using it, you should be.

Update: When EGOImageLoading was first released, ASIHTTPRequest was a small, light weight class and the above was true. As ASIHTTPRequest grew it become increasingly bloated and unnecessary for most HTTP requests. EGOImageLoader is now powered by NSURLConnection.

Using MapKit to create Map thumbnails

shnhrrsn — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:25:51 -0400

The snippet of code below will give you a 64x64px view of a map thumbnail. This creates a similar effect to the thumbnails used in the Maps app when you click into a location on the map.

EGOCache: Objective-C Image/String/Data Caching

shnhrrsn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:58:53 -0400

EGOCache is a pretty simple caching class for Objective-C that’ll let you cache data for a certain period of time. It’s designed to work on the iPhone, so the paths reflect that.

Pretty simple to implement:

You can grab it via github gist: http://gist.github.com/141427

Also to note, if the cache expired or there is no cache, it simply returns nil. So all you need to do is check if it returns something, if not, grab the data you’re looking for and cache it.

UPDATE: For the latest code, visit the EGOCache page on GitHub: http://github.com/enormego/EGOCache

EGOTitledTableViewCell

shnhrrsn — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:17:32 -0400

Here’s a quick class I wrote to give you a title-table view cell as seen below:

You can grab the code on GitHub: http://gist.github.com/122538

Here’s a quick example of how to use it:

Enjoy!

P.S. EGOTitledTableViewCell has properties for titleLabel and textLabel if you want to change the font/text properties.

EGODatabase, Finally Released

shnhrrsn — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:02:18 -0400

We mentioned a few months ago on Twitter that we were working on a thread-safe Objective-C wrapper for SQLite after using FMDB extensively in just about all of our apps. We kind of felt like we were doing way too much work using FMDB to avoid thread issues, so we came up with EGODatabase.

EGODatabase uses some code from FMDB, but for the most part, it was completely reworked to use result sets and row objects. One of the biggest differences between FMDB and EGODatabase, aside from EGODatabase being thread-safe, is when selecting data, EGODatabase populates its EGODatabaseRow class with the data from SQLite, as opposed to retaining the SQLite results like FMDB does.

EGODatabase is tested to work with with iPhone OS and Mac OS X 10.5

Here’s a quick look at how EGODatabase works:

You can grab EGODatabase over at GitHub:

http://github.com/enormego/egodatabase/tree/master

Xcode "EGO" Theme

shnhrrsn — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:34:00 -0400

“EGO” is the Xcode theme we created for our own personal use. We started with a copy of the “Dusk” theme and toned down the colors a bit to make it easier on the eyes.

“EGO” uses the font “DejaVu Sans Mono” at 12pt. Some of you may know it as “Panic Sans” from Panic’s Coda (which is a repackaged version of it). You can grab the font over at dejavu-fonts.org. If you already have Code installed, feel free to swap in Panic Sans in place of DejaVu Sans Mono.

Here’s a screenshot of “EGO” in action:

To get EGO run the following code in Terminal:

mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/Xcode/Color\ Themes; cd ~/Library/Library/Application\ Support/Xcode/Color\ Themes; curl -O http://assets.egoco.de/egotheme/EGO.xccolortheme

Now just restart Xcode, go to Preferences > Fonts & Colors, and select “EGO” from the color theme drop down.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: This will only work for Xcode 3.x. Click here to get EGO for Xcode 4 and EGOv2!

Security: Blocking SVN/Git files with LightTPD and Apache

shnhrrsn — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:06:35 -0500

If you use a source control management solution like SVN or Git for your web applications like we do, you know how awesome it is to deploy changes on a production server.

You can simply run svn up or git pull to update your web server with the latest revision of your app.

There’s a huge security risk involved here though. Using the standard Apache or LightTPD setup, all of the files in the .svn or .git directories, are available to download.

SVN Example

You have your app running out of /home/example.com/html/
Let’s say, the user wants the source code of your index.php file, all they would need to do is go to this URL:
http://example.com/.svn/text-base/index.php.svn-base That’s it, there’s your source code.

Git Example

Git can be even more dangerous depending on your setup (specifically, if they can browse directory listings). If they can download your .git directory, they now have a branch of your repository.

So how do I protect myself from this?

Some people like to run svn export instead of svn checkout or for git users, git checkout-index instead of git pull.

Sure this works, but it’s not ideal. You can’t simply pull the changes and be live.

After you checkout your app, do the follow:

Apache

Put the config items below in the .htaccess file in your root web directory:

LightTPD

Put the config items below in your lighttpd config file:
Now when you go to those files, you won’t be able to access them.

Bonus Tip

Keep the majority of your code below a web accessible directory. All we have in our web accessible directory are our images and index.php file. Everything else sits below it in an app directory.

Cocoa Helpers

shnhrrsn — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:04:36 -0500

Cocoa Helpers:

We’ve just published all of the “helpers” we’ve accumulated over the last few months while developing iPhone our projects.

They’re hosted on GitHub and we’ll definitely be updating them as we develop more, you can check them out here: https://github.com/enormego/cocoa-helpers

There’s a README at the bottom of that page listing all of the class categories and methods we’ve added.

Most of these classes will work for both Mac and iPhone development, but any of the UI* classes are iPhone only.

Enjoy!

iPhone SDK Available Memory

shnhrrsn — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:48:44 -0500

The new app we’re working on requires at least 14mb or so of free memory to perform a few actions, so we wanted to build in a warning to the user to let them know if their device doesn’t have the memory available. Easy right? Not so.

As far as I can tell, there’s no method in the Objective-C portion of the iPhone SDK. After a bit of googling, I found this on Apple’s mailing list. I’ve re-worked it and wrapped it in Objective-C to provide easy access.

Here’s the code provided as a category to UIDevice:

Now, it’s pretty straight forward:

Hope this helps someone!