April 2011 – Imthiaz Blog

UIScreen Notifications for connecting external display in iOS

April 29, 2011
Imthiaz
Programming

UIScreen class has three main notifications which gets triggered when a new screen (external display) is attached to the device.

UIScreenDidConnectNotification

This notification is posted when a new screen is connected to the device. The object of the notification is the UIScreen object representing the new screen. There is no userInfo dictionary. Connection notifications are not sent for screens that are already present when the application is launched. The application can instead use the screens method to get the current set of screens at launch time.

UIScreenDidDisconnectNotification

This notification is posted when a screen is disconnected from the device. The object of the notification is the UIScreen object that represented the now disconnected screen. There is no userInfo dictionary.

UIScreenModeDidChangeNotification

This notification is posted when the current mode of a screen changes. The object of the notification is the UIScreen object whose currentMode property changed. There is no userInfo dictionary. Clients can use this notification to detect changes in the screen resolution.

Simple code to listen to the notification

- (void)awakeFromNib{
    NSNotificationCenter *center = [NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter];
    [center addObserver:self selector:@selector(screenDidConnect:) name:UIScreenDidConnectNotification object:nil]; 
    [center addObserver:self selector:@selector(screenDidDisconnect:) name:UIScreenDidDisconnectNotification object:nil]; 
    [center addObserver:self selector:@selector(screenModeDidChange:) name:UIScreenModeDidChangeNotification object:nil]; 
}

- (void) screenDidConnect:(NSNotification *)aNotification{
    NSLog(@"A new screen got connected: %@", [aNotification object]);
}

- (void) screenDidDisconnect:(NSNotification *)aNotification{
    NSLog(@"A screen got disconnected: %@", [aNotification object]);
}

- (void) screenModeDidChange:(NSNotification *)aNotification{
    UIScreen *someScreen = [aNotification object];
    NSLog(@"The screen mode for a screen did change: %@", [someScreen currentMode]);

}

- (void)dealloc{
    NSNotificationCenter *center = [NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter];
    [center removeObserver:self name:UIScreenDidConnectNotification object:nil];
    [center removeObserver:self name:UIScreenDidDisconnectNotification object:nil];
    [center removeObserver:self name:UIScreenModeDidChangeNotification object:nil];
	//....
	[super dealloc];
}

- (void)awakeFromNib{

NSNotificationCenter *center = [NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter];

[center addObserver:self selector:@selector(screenDidConnect:) name:UIScreenDidConnectNotification object:nil];

[center addObserver:self selector:@selector(screenDidDisconnect:) name:UIScreenDidDisconnectNotification object:nil];

[center addObserver:self selector:@selector(screenModeDidChange:) name:UIScreenModeDidChangeNotification object:nil];

}

- (void) screenDidConnect:(NSNotification *)aNotification{

NSLog(@"A new screen got connected: %@", [aNotification object]);

}

- (void) screenDidDisconnect:(NSNotification *)aNotification{

NSLog(@"A screen got disconnected: %@", [aNotification object]);

}

- (void) screenModeDidChange:(NSNotification *)aNotification{

UIScreen *someScreen = [aNotification object];

NSLog(@"The screen mode for a screen did change: %@", [someScreen currentMode]);

}

- (void)dealloc{

NSNotificationCenter *center = [NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter];

[center removeObserver:self name:UIScreenDidConnectNotification object:nil];

[center removeObserver:self name:UIScreenDidDisconnectNotification object:nil];

[center removeObserver:self name:UIScreenModeDidChangeNotification object:nil];

//....

[super dealloc];

}

If anyone is interested in screen mirroring in iPhone / iPad check this UIScreen Additions.

Working with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

April 4, 2011
Imthiaz
Web

Today I started my journey to explore and learn more about Amazon Web Services (AWS). My mission is to setup a wordpress blog completely in the cloud. This blog post is just a mention about the journey and will be posting things in detail in the days to come.

What I did so far as follows..

Created a new EC2 instance with Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux
Logged into the instance and installed Apache, PHP and mysql client tools
Created a new RDS instance with mysql version 5.1.50
Added EC2 instance IP in RDS for allowing access.
Installed wordpress on the EC2 instance and configured the database
Created a new elastic volume storage for 1GB and attached the same to EC2 instance
Formatted the elastic volume storage and mounted the same for wordpress upload directory.
Created a new Elastic IP and attached the EC2 instance to the IP.
Created a cname cloud for imthi.com and pointed the A level record to the Elastic IP
The blog cloud.imthi.com is ready that is hosted in Amazon cloud 🙂

Phew, trust me it was not easy and I had to create and delete many EC2 instances to understand how things work. I am not sure whether the setup I had done is the best way.. I did some load test on the setup and it was not looking good

My next mission is to fire up multiple EC2 instances and to use a load balancer to handle the load so that the graph will look better in the days to come 😉

iPhone RSS Reader with source code

April 3, 2011
Imthiaz
Programming

Last week I had prepared simple RSSReader application for demoing at Arabnet Shift Digital Summit. Since there was not much time to really explain I had to cut short my presentation with a very basic application demo. I promised to few programmers at Arabnet that I will release the source code for this application on my blog.

Unlike my previous version of RSSReader this version is much cleaner and simple to understand. Removed lots of unwanted methods and made it as simple as possible to understand. When I released the last RSSReader code I received lots of emails asking for updates and some people wanted to fix and update few things to it. To enable all this I am releasing this source code at gitHub.

https://github.com/hmimthiaz/RSSReader

This source code does not have any license nor warranty. Please feel free to use this in any of your projects and don’t have to email me.

Enjoy, Happy Coding 😉

Trip to Arabnet Shift Digital Summit in Beirut

April 2, 2011
Imthiaz
Personal

Last week I got an opportunity to do a presentation in Arabnet Shift Digital Summit about iPhone development. This took place at Beirut in Lebanon. The submit was held for three days and was an outstanding experience for me. Had a chance to meet lot of people from the middle east region.

On the second day Arabnet team took us for a tour to Downtown Beirut. The city is very old and has so much history. They had rebuilt the city for the eight time after the war. The city traffic was horrible and that was the moment I felt so proud about Dubai’s traffic. The most annoying thing about the city is the taxi, you can get easily ripped off if they find that you are a outsider. There is no meter for any taxi and everything is random. You won’t believe I ended up paying different amount every day from the hotel I stayed to the submit. Food was so yummy and I enjoyed the grills so much. If any one is going to Beirut make sure you try out Shish Taouk.

Book Review – WordPress 3 Complete

April 2, 2011
Imthiaz
General

“WordPress 3 Complete” book written by April Hodge Silver is a excellent guide to kickstart, tweak and to play with your wordpress blog. This books comprises of 11 chapters which covers from installing wordpress to writing your own plugin (This book author recommends some programming knowledge in PHP, HTML and CSS).

Chapters covered in this book

Introduction to WordPress
Getting Started
Creating Blog Content
Pages, Plugins, Image Galleries Menus, and More
Choosing and Installing Themes
Developing Your Own Theme
Feeds and Podcasting
Developing Plugins and Widgets
Community Blogging
Creating a Non-Blog Website
Administrator’s Reference

Each chapter is explained with screenshot, examples, code snippet and reference if you want to learn a particular topic in detail. I would recommend this book to everyone who are new to wordpress and wants to customize your blog with custom themes and plugin.

You can buy this book from the following store

WordPress 3 Complete by April Hodge Silver From Packt Publishing

WordPress 3 Complete by April Hodge Silver From Amazon