Coredata – the iPhone way!

Coredata debuted with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and was brought to iPhone with v3.0. Keeping it simple, Coredata is a schema driven object persistence framework that serializes and deserializes objects to a data store … bla bla bla! Now the real definition: Coredata is a framework that acts as an object layer between database and [...]

Understanding Apple Push Notifications (iPhone)

iPhone OS is a closed platform. Daemons (background processes) are not allowed. This means your device (iPhone / iPod) cannot run a user service and communicate with backend servers unless your application is running. Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying: “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform … you need it [...]

Revisiting Model-View-Controller (iPhone) App programming!

iPhone (and for that matter Android as well) uses MVC or model-view-controller patterns as agents of decoupling and reusability. MVC lies at the core of design patterns and is extremely useful for GUI-based Applications. Mobile Apps are generally GUI-based, unless you are writing a daemon (that means you are working at Apple, in that case [...]

Writing good User Stories!

User stories are important requirement gathering / feature establishment tools in Agile development environments. User stories also serve another purpose, they enable non-IT professionals (customers are business guys most of the times, unless you are working with a product engineering company) describe their requirements from usage point of view. UML as well as DSL have [...]

Basics of iPhone Game design and Game Like UI Design

Before I talk about  game design for iPhone and mobile UI design in general, let me share some iPhone games related trivia with you all. Out of all iPhone Native Apps, games category is the fastest growing category with more than 10,000 games already part of app store. In 20 most sold apps, 14 are [...]

Android Intents and Intent Filters

I sometimes wonder who are these architects sitting in Google giving such funny names to simple concepts? Maybe it is because they don’t want a developer to understand the concepts easily. Anyways lets try to make some sense out of this mumbo jumbo of Intents and Intent filters. Lets say there is an “activity 1″ [...]

Android Manifest File

Android Manifest file is at the heart of the (structure of) android app. If you do not pay attention to androidmanifest.xml file and its role, you will not be able to design and develop your app and further you will not be able to reuse the platform and its services. To put it succinctly, the [...]

iPhone Application Life cycle

In simple terms, Application Life cycle means the life of an application (software) when it is running as a process. From the moment, you execute a program (app) and it starts running in memory, to the point when you exit the program (app) and it is flushed out of the memory by the system (generally [...]