Onno's Blog

The new version of my bike ride scheduling iPhone app, Club Rides, is up in the iTunes App Store.

It has native support for both iPhone and iPad. In addition to the new schedule for 2011 there are several other enhancements:
- Faster launch time
- Displays the club’s RSS feed for club news
- Share your favorite rides via email (facebook and twitter to come in an update)
- Send the rides you plan to do directly to your calendar
- Tap the ride leader’s phone number to call

To enable posting your rides to the calendar on your device, tap the Settings icon in the top right corner of the screen and select which calendar you want to use.

On iPhone to show a map with the starting location of the ride, tap the starting location in the ride view.

Club Rides comes preloaded with Rochester Bicycling Club’s schedule. It supports other clubs, like Northern California’s Western Wheelers, as well. And it can support your club by using the customization guide. If you like to make Club Rides applicable to your cycling or hiking club then I would be happy to assist you.

(this post is a little late – couldn’t log in for days – called in my host’s customer support and lunarpages came through with flying colors – thanks guys!)

A quick collection of code snippets or the joy of navigating a sometimes quirky SDK.

Setting a pattern as background to an UIView, a category method I added to UIViewController:

- (void)makePatternedBackground {
        UIImage *tile = [UIImage imageNamed:@"viewBackground-tile.png"];
        UIColor *pattern = [[UIColor alloc] initWithPatternImage:tile];
        [self.view setBackgroundColor:pattern];
        [pattern release];
}

The png image is a 16×16 pixel pattern created in Photoshop.

Rounded corners for images (or any UIView subclass, really). Don’t forget to import QuartzCore.h:

        UIImageView * icon;
        ….
        icon.layer.cornerRadius = 10;
        icon.layer.masksToBounds = YES;

Improving code reuse in an universal app for iPhone and iPad. This one has been bothering me for a while. Often you’ll significantly change how you present certain information on an iPad with its much larger real estate than on an iPhone. In that case you do your best MVC separation. Table Views are easy: you take care of the differences in your UITableView subclass. But there are some cases when the views will be largely similar. How then to avoid duplicating everything in two nib files and two UIViewController classes? Make a superclass that does most of the work and which contains all the IBOutlet properties that are the same between the two presentations. Subclass the superclass for iPad and for iPhone, and make a nib file for each. The superclass will have all the manipulation code while the two subclasses only have to take care of the small differences in displaying the view on iPad vs iPhone.

Notifications are your friend! NSNotification and NSNotificationCenter really help with code reuse between iPhone and iPad as well. With iPad’s UISplitView you often have both the table and a detail view representing a table cell’s drill-down visible and active at the same time. The delegate pattern breaks down in this scenario: multiple places in your app are interested in some events at the same time: send NSNotification messages from your data model object and have interested parties add themselves as observers.

And one more on improving code reuse: don’t make your UIViewController class the delegate object and datasource object for UITableViews it contains. Instead put that code in a separate object. Then you can set that object as delegate and datasource to the table in your iPad view and in your iPhone view.

Run over to install Club Rides on your iPhone or iPod Touch!

Club Rides helps you keep track of your bicycling club’s activities, see the yearly schedule of rides, keep track of your participation and mileage, view elevation profiles, and map the starting location.

You can view your rides by schedule, by distance, by starting location.

More information is on my Software page.

Club Rides comes pre-loaded with Rochester Bicycling Club’s schedule but can be easily customized to show your club’s schedule.

Go on, make me rich. It’s okay.