How to create a USB Recovery Drive in Windows 8
How to execute a method on another thread using Grand Central Dispatch
Everything in your iOS app happens on “the main thread” by default. It’s like at the hairdresser’s – one thing after another. Since iOS 4 however you can execute things “asynchronously” by using Grand Central Dispatch. With it comes another phenomenon called Blocks. To make use of this feature you need to define your own […]
How to download a file and save it to your app’s Documents directory
Say you had the URL to a file on the web and you’d like to save said file in the app’s Documents directory. I thought it would be as simple as using the NSFilemanager and copying the URL. But it’s a little more complex than that. Instead, we can use NSData to retrieve the data […]
How to test the size of a UIImage (in bytes)
We can use NSData’s length method for this. Imagine your UIImage is yourImage: NSData *imageData = UIImageJPEGRepresentation(yourImage, 1); NSLog(@”Size of your image is %d bytes”, [imageData length]) [imageData length] returns a double in bytes, which will be the size of your image. This is useful if you’d like to save something and you’re limited in […]
How to detect if your app is running on iOS 7
You can query the NSFoundationVersionNumber like so: if (floor(NSFoundationVersionNumber) <= NSFoundationVersionNumber_iOS_6_1) { // you’re running iOS 6.1 or earlier } else { // you’re running iOS 7 or later } Note that if you’re compiling with an older SDK, the value you’re querying may not be defined – in which case, you must define it […]
How to covert an NSUInteger / NSInteger into an int value
Before the addition of 64bit in iOS it was possible to take an NSUInteger (or NSInteger) and put it into an int variable, like so: int arrayCount = [self.myArray count]; If you add 64bit support to your app you may notice a compiler warning when you do this: Implicit conversion loses integer precision: ‘NSInteger’ (aka […]
How to avoid WAL files in Core Data
Since iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 the default journalling mode in SQLite Stores is WAL. In addition to the main store file you’ll find a WAL file with the same (or larger) size as the store file, and a less important SHM file. Prior to this implementation it was easy to save the context, […]
How to link to graphic assets within WordPress Plugins
When you want to display graphics that reside inside your own plugin directory you can serve those via a handy built-in WordPress function called plugins_url. It works just like its counterpart get_stylesheet_directory_uri does in themes. For example, if you’d like to link to a file that resides at http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/your-plugin/images/your-graphic.png then you can write this URL … Read more