Beat Meier's blog

UITableView and Search Bar

via clingingtoideas.blogspot.com

Good post to see how easy it is to use a search bar with UITableView. This method uses the 'Search Bar and Search Display Controller' item in IB which basically will do all the work for us.

Reading and Writing plists

plists are wonderful for storing small amounts of semi-structured data when you don’t want the overhead of using a full-blown database. OS X, as you have no doubt noticed, uses plists extensively to store configuration data.

via iphoneincubator.com

Great blog post for loading plist, reading from it and writing to a plist.

CME: Weekly Report (September 20)

What we planned for this week

• Customize table view for search results
• Finish Steps screen
• Implement CoverFlow on steps screen
• Add Interactive search (smart search)
• Implement Settings View
• Implement Favourites View (add star button on SingleView), think of storage of favourites (another entity or plist)

What we actually did

• Implemented Custom Cell for SearchView
  We use a another nib-file which holds a custom cell.  We load this nib-file accordingly for every row. 
  Think about what we do if the user doesn't want to see the images in the search results. We wll probably create a second nib-file that doesn't have an image.
• Steps Screen
  Added CoverFlow effect for stepping through steps.  Removed memory leaks in Cover Flow. Added browsing through images (if available).
  
  
• Interactive search
  The search is started as the user starts to type. It is possible to search for multiple words separated by a space.  It will search in the recipe title and ingredients list.
  
  
• Settings View
  Loading basic settings structure from plist. The selected values for each setting are stored in a separate plist which is copied to the applications directory. It works.
  
  
• Favourites
  Added custom button to the navigation bar in Single View.  Changed search query so we can use the the same View Controller.  Added initMethod to distinguish between the Search and Favourites views.
  We store it in the recipes table as an attribute (on or off).
  
  
• Memory Leaks
  We used the Performance Tools from Xcode to detect memory leaks in the Search and Settings views.  They should be gone by now.

Who did what 

• Custom cell for search results (Chris)
• Settings screen (Mandy)
• Started test plan (Mandy)
• CoverFlow effect on Steps screen (Beat)
• Interactive search (Beat)
• Favourites (Beat)
• Fixed a lot of memory leaks (Beat)

Plans for the following week

• Implement the user-defined view for the measurements. Consider the settings made in the plist. Calculate the right amount according to the chosen settings. An additional feature would be to touch a row and change the units
• Add favourite button to Steps View as well
• Better quality images and have a thumbnail of each (will increase performance?). Use thumbnails with suffix "_tn"
• Add possibility to add a minus (-) in front of an ingredient to exclude this from the query
• Add copyright information to single view
• Research sponsor for our recipes
• Think about use of colours in App

Overall progress

We have a working App at the moment but without measurement conversion so far. So we are quite happy at the moment about our progress. We still have some remaining points from last week for further thinking:

• Necessity of searching recipes online
• Usability of the App - is the target audience satisfied?

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Hackintosh erased hard drive	L	H	NaN	Set up everything again.
App will not be accepted by Apple	M	H	Immense	Do it all again.
Users don't find App user-friendly	H	H	Weekend	Improve user interface.

Unitec Logo not allowed in documents

I received the feedback from our second Assignment (Design document), where I used the Unitec logo in the top left that it is not allowed or not without permission of the marketing department at Unitec.

I thought this is strange and wanted to double check that fact. I wrote an e-mail to the marketing department to make sure.

I was really surprised to get a negative answer. The logo is only used in official Unitec statements. The logo gives the confirmation of a Unitec held position. And furthermore "... it would be both undesirable and untenable to manage the views of 23k current students are consistent with Unitecs' ".

Well, I stil can't believe it... but I will remove the logo then. Maybe the work has a higher value without the logo anyway. ;)

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Great - CoverFlow effect working

Sent from my iPhone

CME: Weekly Report (September 13)

What we planned for this week

• Implement Customized TableView (Image)
• Test CoverFlow (Usability) in real iPhone
• Single view for selected item in TableView
• Load image and display image from CoreData on single view
• Research & Code Examples for UISegmentControl
• Create first screen with menu from plist

What we actually did

• Implement Customized TableView
  We customized table view to display the ingredients in the Single View. Basically we have two labels with a small font size, different colors and a smaller row height. We haven't customized the table view for the search results yet.
  
  
• Test CoverFlow
  We tested the cover flow usability in the real iPhone. We will give it a go in our App and we'll see how it goes. Unexpected exceptions are expected...
  
  
• Single View & UISegmentControl & Load image
  We implemented these. We are hiding and displaying the different parts of the view dependent on what segment was chosen.
  Loading the image from CoreData was easier than we thought.
  
  
• Create first screen with menu from plist
  It works like a charm.
  
  
• Steps view
  We started creating the steps view and are still working on this.

Who did what 

• Trying troubleshoot the mac to access the internet again (Chris)
• Added more recipes (Mandy)
• Implemented copying of database instead of importing the XML all the time (Chris)
• Implemented start screen, navigation from plist (Mandy)
• Added search control to the RecipeSearchViewController (Beat)
• SingleView with UISegment Control (Beat)
• Research customized TableView for search screen to show image, heading, subheading etc (Mandy) 

Plans for the following week

• Customized table view for search results
• Finish steps screen
• Try to implement CoverFlow on steps screen
• Interactive search (smart search)
• Settings View
• Favourites View (Button on SingleView), think of storage of favourites (another entity or plist)

Overall progress

We are on track. After next week we will have implemented all our desired screens. What is missing are details in respect of the design of the views. Before being able to ship our app to the app store more things are in the queue that need further thinking and investigation.

• How to present the user the possibility to change the units (despite of changing it in the settings)
• How to get more recipes into our database
• Necessity of searching recipes online
• Necessity of an advanced search (e.g. exclude ingredients)
• Usability of the App - is the target audience satisfied?

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Emotional outburst because of slow Unitec internet	H	H	Immense	Unfortunately we can't change it. :( Where can we complain?
Hackintosh problems, small screens and high possibility of crashing	H	H	3 hour / week	Buy a real Mac. Problem: no money. Solution: Unitec pays.

In love with TypePad

I have to make a confession. I like TypePad more than Vox! ;) I never was really convinced with that Neighbourhood stuff. Following a blog is sufficient in my opinion. Happy blogging then!

Sent from my iPhone 

CME: Weekly Report (September 6)

What we planned for this week

• Import Data into CoreData
• Fill TableView with data from CoreData
• Customize TableView
• Test CoverFlow (Usability) in real iPhone

What we actually did

• Import Data into CoreData
  We use a XML now to define the recipes. The images are stored locally under /ressources/images. In xCode we use a XML Parser to read the xml. While reading the XML we create the necessary Core Data Objects.
  
  
• Fill TableView with data from CoreData
  We just used the given example and changed the table to read the data from. It works, our recipe names are displayed. Yeah!
  
  
• Research on customizing TableView
  Found way to add images to view. No code yet, just in Tutorials.
  Link:  http://www.iphonesdkarticles.com/2009/01/uitableview-loading-detail-view.html

Who did what 

• Import Data into CoreData (Beat)
• Fill TableView with data from CoreData (Beat)
• Research on customizing TableView for recipe viewing usability (Chris)
• Research on TableViews (Tutorials) (Mandy)
• Added recipe test data into XML (Mandy)
• Added icon for our App (Mandy) 

Plans for the following week

• Implement Customized TableView (Image)
• Test CoverFlow (Usability) in real iPhone
• Single View for selected item in TableView
• Load image and display image from CoreData on single view
• Research & Code Examples for UISegmentControl
• Create first screen with menu from plist

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Work load in other projects, courses, assignments	H	H	Huge	Talk about time management. Define certain times a week to work only for this project.
Closing of vox	H	M	1 hour / member	Need a new way to distribute information, create new blog on TypePad. Follow each others blog in order to follow the actions from all team members.

Team's concerns

• Source Control decision/discussion: We're happy with GoogleCode and the integration into XCODE for the moment. It is really time consuming if we have to change that again. We don't like to create something and then after some weeks a 'rule' is coming for everyone how to do it.

Error messages not meaningful

There is a way to get more detailed error output. In this example in this from saving the context after deleting a managed object in CoreData:

        NSError* error;
        if(![[survey managedObjectContext] save:&error]) {
                NSLog(@"Failed to save to data store: %@", [error localizedDescription]);
                NSArray* detailedErrors = [[error userInfo] objectForKey:NSDetailedErrorsKey];
                if(detailedErrors != nil && [detailedErrors count] > 0) {
                        for(NSError* detailedError in detailedErrors) {
                                NSLog(@"  DetailedError: %@", [detailedError userInfo]);
                        }
                }
                else {
                        NSLog(@"  %@", [error userInfo]);
                }
        }