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There are very few screens that can match that of the iPhone. Because of this, it’s hard to get an idea of what things will look like on it, without actually putting it on the device.

So how do you put the icon on the device? Well, you could set up a developer account and deal with certificates and provisioning profiles, then build and deploy your app to your phone. If you’re already an iPhone developer, this isn’t too big of a deal. What if you’re a designer? What if you’ve never set up an iPhone app before? There is an easier way.

iOS lets you add website bookmarks to your home screen so it looks like an installed app. To do this, you just have to add a link tag to your html that specifies the icon you want to use. Then you visit the site, add it to your home screen and you can see what it will look like.

Doing this by hand is definitely easier than building and deploying a full iPhone app, but it still is a time consuming multi-step process. I built something to make it a little bit easier.

With my iOS Icon Preview generator, all you need to do is upload an image and type in your phone number. It will generate the html necessary and text a link to your phone so you can add the page to your home screen and preview your icon.

I’m using Twilio to send text messages, which costs me a bit of money. It’s not expensive, but if the service took off, it could be. So I’m going to charge a bit of money for it. The way it will work is that you’ll get 10 icon previews for free. After that, you’ll have to pay $1 to recharge the generator and you’ll get 10 more previews.

Let me know what you think of the service, and the revenue model.

iOS Icon Preview Generator

Today I gave my 2 weeks notice at TechSmith. It was a tough choice to make but after lots of deliberation, I decided it was time to try something new.

When I was a senior in college 3 years ago, I never expected to take a job in Michigan. I didn’t think the kind of software job I wanted existed here. Then I found TechSmith. It’s a medium sized software company (just over 200 employees) located just outside of Lansing, Michigan. It’s really like finding a little piece of Silicon Valley in the heart of the state. It had everything I wanted except for one thing, location.

I’ve lived in Michigan my whole life. I grew up here. I went to school here. I don’t know what it’s like to live anywhere else. I’ve never had to call pop, soda and I’ve never had to deal with speed limits on the highway lower than 70. I want to live in a big city and be able to drive to the ocean. I want to be able to go skiing on real mountains that aren’t man made.

So I will be moving to Washington to work at Microsoft on the Windows Embedded team. To my friends, it might seem like an odd choice. I’ve never been the biggest supporter of Microsoft (I don’t even own a computer that runs Windows). For me, it makes sense. I’ve always wanted to work for a huge big name software company. Not just for the name, but also because at a company like Microsoft, the software I write can have an impact on millions of people. The code I write will affect the daily lives of so many people that I might actually be able to change the world. That’s pretty cool.

It’s pretty easy to add iAds to your iPhone app. The simplest thing you can do is drop an AdBannerView onto your interface in Interface Builder. That is the bare minimum you need to get them working. The problem with that is that ads don’t always load. When they don’t load, they leave an empty space and that looks kinda shitty. So what do you do?
You implement the iAd delegate methods and handle the errors. I hated doing that every time I added a new ad so I built RBAdView.

RBAdView is a UIButton subclass that shows an iAd when it can. When the iAd fails to load, it behaves just like a regular UIButton.

To use it, you can just put it in interface builder and be done, or you can add it programatically.

   RBAdView *rbBanner = [[RBAdView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 100, 320, 50)];
   [rbBanner setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"RBAd0"] forState:UIControlStateNormal];

   rbBanner.actionBlock = ^(ADBannerView* banner, BOOL willLeaveApp){
      NSLog(@"Banner will open %@",banner);
      return YES;
   };

   rbBanner.finishedBlock = ^(ADBannerView* banner){
      NSLog(@"Banner finished %@",banner);
   };

   [self.view addSubview:rbBanner];

There is an actionBlock that you can add that will get called when an iAd gets pressed. It will let you do things like pause your game before the ad takes over the screen.

The finishedBlock gets called when the user closes the ad.

If you have any trouble getting it to build, make sure you add the iAd framework to your project.

Check it out on GitHub.

It’s been a little over a year since I started this blog and I wanted to look back and see how the blog is doing. I thought it would be interesting to show my most successful posts and explain how I drove the traffic to them.

1. 20 Minutes with my Chromebook (9,728)
When I got my Chromebook I was a bit disappointed with it, but I believed it had some real potential. I wrote up a review of my initial impressions and posted it to Hacker News. It got picked up and made the front page. Most of my traffic came from the first few days after it was on Hacker News with a huge spike on the first day and then a tail of requests as people caught up on their RSS readers.

2. How to change the color of a UIBarButtonItem (3,264)
When I was working on one of my apps, I wrote a simple bit of code to change the color of UIBarButtonItems on the iPhone. I posted my answer to a few questions on StackOverflow and that drives most of the traffic for this post. It’s consistently my most visited post of the day, but it never got a huge spike like any of my posts that were featured on Hacker News.

3. What I learned from working with my first client (3,208)
This is another post that made it to the front of Hacker News. There are a lot of freelance developers on Hacker News and anything you post and people love to learn from other peoples experience.

4. Toto (2,212)
This is the main page for my app Toto, which received a good amount of traffic the day that the Mac App Store launched. Toto was one of the apps in the store at release and the only free to do list app.

5. Home Page (1,707)
I imagine most of this traffic comes from when people visit my other posts and want to see what else is on the blog.

6. Introducing HappyCampfire, a Campfire framework for OS X and iOS (1,254)
Another Hacker News driven post. This one also ranks high on Google searches for an iOS or Mac Campfire framework.

7. Afternoon Apps: Descrumbled (898)
Hacker news again (see a pattern?)

8. QDoba vs. Chipotle vs. Panchero’s (781)
One of my oldest posts. It was kinda from before I had an idea of what the blog should be about. It’s mostly from people searching for information about the restaurants or pictures of burritos.

9. How to change the color of UIBarButtonItem on iOS 5 (684)
In iOS 5, Apple made an easy way to change the color of a UIBarButtonItem. I made this post and linked to it at the top of the post I mentioned at number 2. It gets about 70-80% of the traffic that the other post gets.

10. Replacing the screen on your iPhone 4 (580)
Posted this to Hacker News as well which got it a decent amount of traffic at first. I also get a lot of traffic from people searching how to replace your screen.

Just submitting an app to Hacker News will usually get me about one or two hundred hits. If it hits the front page it will be a bit more. My top post was on the front page the longest (probably about 3 or 4 hours) and it got about 10k views. When I post a new post (without submitting it anywhere) I’ll se a slight bump in traffic. I guess it’s from a handful of subscribers or maybe it’s just me checking to see how the post looks.

Camera+ just got VolumeSnap back in their app. If you don’t know the story, Camera+ used the volume button on the iPhone to snap a picture. Apple rejected their app and kept them out of the store for three months when they found out. Then when iOS 5 came out Apple implemented volume snap in their own camera app. So now that Camera+ has it again and Apple seems to have relaxed their policy, I tried to figure out how Camera+ did it.

I came up with this class RBVolumeButtons. You use it like this:

   RBVolumeButtons *buttonStealer = [[[RBVolumeButtons alloc] init] autorelease];
   buttonStealer.upBlock = ^{
      counter++;
      [counterLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%i",counter]];
   };
   buttonStealer.downBlock = ^{
      counter--;
      [counterLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%i",counter]];
   };

It’s really that simple. Here’s how I did it.
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