Geek, nerd & all round good egg

I’ve been the lucky owner of an iPhone 4 since launch day and i’ve been blown away by the retina display.

One problem though, is the support of the graphics in a UIWebView inside an app, or just browsing your favourite sites in Mobile Safari.

Some of my apps have UIWebViews inside them, and whilst I’ve updated all the other graphic elements that are hard coded inside the app using the @2x trick I was struggling how to actually get the web graphics to be nice and crisp on the retina display.

It turns out it is dead easy!

Let’s say you have a graphic that needs to be 20×20 pixels in size. Simply make it 40×40 pixels, and set the actual display size on screen to 20×20 like this…

<img src=”images/myiPhoneGFX.png” width=”20″ height=”20″ border=”0″/>

On a regular iPhone it’ll display as normal, on an iPhone 4 it’ll be crystal clear!

Easy peasy!

So i’ve been busy beavering away on the myDistrict project I’m developing for Stratford-on-Avon District Council, and part of this project is to retrieve various datasets from numerous API’s to enable the Stratford residents to get all their local information in one place.

The basics are there, and we’ll be gathering the residents geo information when they register (or upgrade their existing website account) so we are able to query all these fantastic datasets from www.data.gov.uk and more.

A bit stuck at first, I asked the Open Data guru from Lichfield District Council, Stuart Harrison, for some pointers. Stuart was very kind as to email through some sample code and links to blogs which reference the calls needed to access and unleash the data.

I thought I’d share some of this with you all, do with it what you will!

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Just having a quick flick through iPhoto at our shots from New York back in February 2009, and I stumbled across a capture I took of a fab looking take-away on the streets of Manhattan.

Obviously, the owners have a decent sense of humour.

So, I took the plunge and upgraded my iPhone 3G to an iPhone 3GS in sparkly white with O2, and so far, so good.

I backed up and resynced the new device and everything worked as normal within an hour or so.

The only thing it appeared to lose was all my saved WiFi connections, no problem for the odd couple I use at home, work and at friends, but when it came to using either The Cloud or BT Openzone’s free WiFi, it kept asking me to register.

So, entering your phone number and wham… error message!

It turns out, that if your change or upgrade your iPhone, you’ll also need to call O2 to ask them to reset your MAC address associated to your account.

I called and within 60 minutes my WiFi should be re-enabled. Though they gave me a handy tip….

Save yourself waiting in a queue, if you are with O2, and experience the same issue I did, then simply send the word WIFI as an SMS to 2020 and your MAC address will be reset.

As a Russian meerkat would say… “Simples”

So I’ve been busy for the last month or so on a fantastic new project for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This will me my maiden voyage into the dark depths of the App Store, and I’m sure I have lots to look forward to when it finally gets submitted to iTunes Connect in the coming weeks. Let’s just hope I don’t fall foul of some ludicrous rejection for the wrong sized icon or something equally daft.

The base coding and layouts are complete, just waiting on a few bits and pieces before I can submit the App.

Installed Pinch Media‘s stats, to get a good idea of App usage. Seems to be working well so far.

I’ll post the full details once I’m allowed to, I hope you’ll buy it!

So, I decided it was about time that I starting putting together my blog properly.

I set this up over a year ago, and so far it’s consisted of my tweets. But as most of those are useless bits of information on my day-to-life, I decided to bin them all off, stick with a tiny Twitter feed and just post up useful blog stuff.

There will be a bit of everything on here, but hopefully something that will you will find useful.