Beamz by Flo Rida

Check out the new Beamz by Flo Rida that just launched on the Mac App Store. Just a great Mac app that integrates with the Beamz by Flo Rida instrument. It's our first Mac app that integrates with a USB device (as well as Bluetooth Low Energy forthcoming). Tremendous team effort to get it launched!

It's a very addictive experience and is a lot of fun to use! It just sucked me in to keep playing and experimenting with it. I was using a prototype, but can't wait for the production versions! Awesome gift for the Holidays coming up!

The app can be used without the device to get a feel for what it would be like without the instrument, and there's also a version for iOS devices that uses Bluetooth Low Energy on the iOS App Store (launched in August).

Slicy Photoshop Export Better Than Cake

For iOS and Android projects we're constantly having to export Photoshop designs to the individual assets. It gets very tedious to use the Slice Tool in Photoshop to manually draw boxes around all the assets you want exported and to hide/show groups to get the right transparency and backgrounds.
Well, if you're still doing it this way I have a recommendation! Slicy which is just plain awesome. It's the best $29 I've ever spent.

Take a look at the "How it works" video on that page, but in a nutshell you name your Groups or Assets in a Photoshop file as Foo@2x.png and Slicy will perfectly slice these from the layers and export both the 2x and 1x image sizes. You still have to make sure that the designs use even pixels, but otherwise it works great. That's it. Done. It can even export automatically every time a change is made to the Photoshop file.

We even use it on Android even though it's originally built for iOS. We will use Foo.png instead of the iOS naming of @2x.png (with the designs made for xxhdpi with a resolution of 1080x1920). We then take the directory we had Slicy to export to and use a our android shell script (droidsize.py) to export these to all the other dpi's.

iOS Custom UISwitch

On an iOS project we had the need to provide a custom UISwitch similar to the following.

With iOSS 5 there is quite a bit of support for interface customization. It's great for customizing almost every control in iOS, except... UISwitch. The only thing customizable with UISwitch is the tint color, which is pretty limited. So, iOS 5 is out for supporting this customization.

Next, we looked at several existing open source projects. There are several out there that support a customized look and feel, but none of these had the "feel" of the built in UISwitch control from Apple. Some would allow dragging, and some just clicking, but none allowed both a click and drag interaction.

There was a strong desire for the switch to behave just like the standard UISwitch that supports both a click and drag interaction. That led us to create our own. We were able to support the look and feel and mimic the behavior of UISwitch by implementing a custom drawRect as well as a custom touch handling. Check the Open Source implementation.

LolayUISwitch.h
LolayUISwitch.m

Next, we hope to extend this to support setting the "on" value with animation, and additionally adding in support for all the autoscale settings of iOS on a UIControl. Also, thoughts of supporting a UIView rather than just a UIImage.

OSX Lion and Xcode 4.1

We've upgraded to OSX Lion and Xcode 4.1 and it has been an interesting process. Here's the steps we took.

1. The first was to make sure we were upgraded to 10.6.8 before we started anything.
2. Purchase and download OSX Lion from the App Store (Note, you before starting the installation you may want to create a bootable drive)
3. Install OSX Lion
4. Java is not installed by default, so after Lion is installed you can install Java by going to a Terminal and typing "java -version" and it'll start a download to install Java.
5. Before installing Xcode 4.1 it's good to remove any previous versions of Xcode
1. Uninstall any previous Xcode by issuing a "sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools"
2. In ~/Library issue a "find . -name *Xcode*" and remove each file/directory
3. In ~/Library issue a "find . -name *Simulator*" and remove each file/directory
4. Reboot
6. Next find Xcode 4.1 on the App Store and download and install it. This just installs the installer. You then have to install it. The installer can be removed when you're finished.
7. If Xcode launches with errors or has no menu times you'll need to reinstall iTunes. The download has the 64-bit universal builds now.

The only issue we've seen is that Core Location isn't working in the simulator and generates an error. See our post on the developer forums.