In this post, I’ll walkthrough how to customize the background of UISearchBar. In order to customize the UISearchBar, first we need to know it’s subviews. We can get the subviews by running the code below: for (UIView *subview in [searchBar subviews]) { NSLog(@"%@", [subview class]); } If you run the code above, and you are running IOS 4.3 and above, you should see two subviews “UISearchBarBackground” and “UISearchBarTextField”. So, we know that UISearchBar consist of [...]

There are situations when we need to style a UILabel differently for each text. This can be done by using NSAttributedStrings. Thanks to the library OHAttributedLabel, you can achieve the styled NSAttributedStrings easily under one UILabel. In order to use the library, you must first import the CoreText Framework. In the example below, I style the label so that the text are splited into 2 different colors. OHAttributedLabel *label; NSString *txt = @"page (1 of [...]

Before IOS 5.0, UINavigationbar can be customized by using ‘Category’. On IOS 5.0 onwards, customizing with ‘category’ doesn’t work anymore, instead we can use a new API called: – (void)setBackgroundImage:(UIImage *)backgroundImage forBarMetrics:(UIBarMetrics)barMetrics In order to customize UINavagationBar for both IOS 5.0 and below IOS 5.0 devices, we have to prepare these two methods: 1. Write a category for UINavigationBar (for IOS 4.3 and below) 2. Check if device is IOS 5.0 and above, use – [...]

In this post I’ll show you how to modify the XCode 4.2 Project Template. When we create a new project in XCode, we can choose which project template to use. However, some project templates provide an options to use Core Data while some not. To enable the Core Data option in a project template, we need to modify the ‘TemplateInfo.plist’ which you can find at: Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/Templates/Project Templates/Application/(Application Type).xctemplate/TemplateInfo.plist For example, by default my Tabbed Application [...]

ZXing is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library implemented in Java, with ports to other languages. In this tutorial, Im going to show you how to make a small modification to the library so that the QRCode reader can read from image as well instead of just camera. First of all, download the ZXing-1.7.zip. After you unzipped it, look for the folder ‘iphone’ -> ‘Barcodes’, this is the sample project we will be [...]

There’s a lot of libraries available for parsing XML in Objective-C, one of them is TouchXML. Here’s a sample source code on how to use TouchXML to parse XML data. You can get the TouchXML here. TouchXML is using XPath, if you never heard of XPath, read it more here.