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!

Read more

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”