One feature that we always try to make sure is available on our applications is the ability for users to contact us directly from within the application via email. On the iPhone, there are 2 ways to do this. Starting with OS 3.0, Apple added the MFMailComposeViewController. If you are running on a pre-3.0 iPhone, you can still launch to the email application using the old URL scheme where you send a URL to the OS. This does have the drawback of exiting your application, so obviously you should try to send it with the built in functionality. Below is one way of implementing this.

We've recently complete a simple calculator for Pacific Cargo Control, that allows users to determine how many of a particular tie down are needed for a certain load. For over two decades, Pacific Cargo Control, Inc. has provided quality cargo restraint equipment and outstanding customer service - we're very excited to be working with them on this project.

Well, it's been a few days now and most folks have heard about Apple's now unveiled iPad. There are many different opinions about the relevance of it, and most pundits are quick to jump onto the iPad-hater wagon. There are myriad reasons given as to its short-coming, including (but not limited to) its inability to multi-task, its lack of a camera, its lack of any meaningful way to connect peripherals aka USB, etc, etc, etc.

If you're in the market for a robust OLE DB provider for your development, I highly suggest you check out my friend Sean's company Cherry City Software. He has a slew of commercially released and production tested modules for Windows 200x/XP/Vista/7. Check him out!

Gambling Planet recently added our iPhone games High Roller and Ten Thousand to their web site.

We are proud to announce our latest release for the iPhone and iPod touch. Twist Tac Toads is a fun "twist" on the classic game of Tic Tac Toe. It may sound easy enough, but one toad hopping can start a chain reaction that changes the whole board. You'll have to think ahead to keep your toads on the board and in line, and get your opponent's toads hopping off into the swamp.

So, a very common thing to want to do in your application is to display the version string. However, unless you know where to look, this can actually be a somewhat frustrating thing to try and do. The key here is the NSBundle class which will return you the main application bundle which you can then get an NSDictionary class from. Once you have the NSDictionary, you can then query any of the paired values from the info.plist file.
Sample code below for getting the App Version and the Copyright text.

+ (NSString*) GetAppVersion
{

Have you ever noticed that a lot of applications in the app store have what looks like over-lighting or washout around the top of the icon? Well, it turns out that that is how the iPhone and the App Store render your application's icon by default. However, if you have an artist that has spent a lot of time trying to make a good looking icon, they can be quite frustrated once they give you the icon only to see the top 1/3 of the icon become washed out, and in fact most of the apps from bigger named devs don't have this.

I have a bunch of utility classes and functions that I've collected in my 'toolbox' over the years. When I first started doing iPhone development, I was a little bummed out because the primary development language for it is Objective C, and while you can mix and match to a certain degree, I couldn't see how you could use C++ classes in tandem with Objective C classes.