Version 1.1 of This Day for iPad has been released. At first I wanted to add swipe navigation for events and fix a few small things, but somehow it dragged on. When I finally coded it, I had to reject the app from the App Store 2 or 3 times because I kept finding nasty bugs that made it crash or display incorrectly. By the time I had fixed everything critical, the new iPad had come out, so I added graphics for it right after that. And at the very end I discovered that sharing to VK requires a captcha, so I had to google it and implement its handling.

So in the end, what started as small changes turned into a pretty substantial changelog for such an app:

• support for iPad with Retina display;
• events can now be swiped with a finger;
• when publishing an event to Facebook or VKontakte, the app now shows a notification that the publication succeeded;
• when publishing events to Facebook or VKontakte, they are now posted in a more understandable form with the full date;
• captcha handling for posting to VKontakte added;
• fixed a bug that prevented long events from being published;
• minor improvements and bug fixes.

AllCafe for iPhone 2.0 has been released.

What is new in version 2.0

• New restaurant info layout;
• viewing restaurant photos;
• new restaurant news layout;
• viewing photos attached to news items;
• new restaurant review layout;
• viewing photos in a review and all photos from all visitor reviews;
• restaurant magazines added;
• various fixes and additions.

Screenshots of the new features:

Note! If you just need to figure out what kind of screen your iPad, iPhone, or iPod has, simply follow this link: https://arm1.ru/retina/

While trying to figure out how to detect the presence of a Retina display on a device in Objective-C, I had to do some googling. I found this solution and am writing it down here as a cheat sheet.

Get the screen bounds:

CGRect screenBounds = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds];

It returns the screen size, usually 320x480; even on iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPod Touch it will still return 320x480 (apparently because old apps would otherwise crash). For iPad it returns 768x1024 — both on iPad/iPad 2 and on the new iPad with Retina Display.

Get the screen scale:

CGFloat screenScale = [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale];

It returns 1.0f for all non-Retina screens. It returns 2.0f for Retina screens. This applies to all iOS devices.

So, having screen dimensions characteristic of the form factor (phone/iPod or tablet) and knowing the scale, we can calculate the device’s actual screen size:

CGSize screenSize = CGSizeMake(screenBounds.size.width * screenScale, screenBounds.size.height * screenScale);

If you run code like this:

CGRect screenBounds = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds];
NSLog(@"%f x %f", screenBounds.size.width, screenBounds.size.height);
    
CGFloat screenScale = [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale];
NSLog(@"%f", screenScale);
    
CGSize screenSize = CGSizeMake(screenBounds.size.width * screenScale, screenBounds.size.height * screenScale);
NSLog(@"%f x %f", screenSize.width, screenSize.height);

then you will see all dimensions in the console. In this case, I ran it on the iPad Retina simulator:

And then, by checking the dimensions/device type, you can substitute the required graphics at the required sizes. Profit.

P.S. As for images, you only need to create 2 files: for example, "image.png" and the same image at double size named "image@2x.png", and then use only the first one. For example:

[UIImage imageNamed:@"image.png"];

If the device has Retina, the app will automatically pick up the higher-resolution file (image@2x.png).

An insanely awesome concert, tons of positive energy, a very cool musician :)

Rock and roll from Deep Purple's vocalist (more precisely, he was the singing bassist). The last song has audio from the built-in Canon 60D microphone with the recording level limited. It does sound rough, though, because I was filming at stage level from the side — there you get hammered by the drums from the kit itself rather than from the speakers, and everything else comes from the monitors and amps.

I decided to save this for memory: the Facebook profile of The Qemists vocalist Matt Rose — both the avatar and the cover photo are my photos from their concert at Aurora.

Twitter has firmly embedded itself in modern life, and by now even every housewife has at least heard of it, if not created an account there. Judging by my experience and the experience of people I know, you check Twitter very often during the day. Every day.

The idea came up to write a simple Twitter bot for notifications...

After some googling I found only English-language equivalents. Many reminder services no longer worked, others asked you to go to the site every time, almost register, fill in forms, while I wanted simplicity. Some even send reminders only once a day. The closest equivalent, judging by the description, works via PM, but if you remember the current Twitter client for iPhone, direct messages are buried far away and you do not notice them right away. In short, the desire to write my own, and in Russian, won out.

I created an account with a memorable login: @napominau.

Everything is very simple: you need to send it a tweet in the form "day.month hour:minute what to remind about".

Once a minute the bot checks tweets mentioning it and parses them. If there is a format error somewhere, it will send a reply about it.

Basically, the bot remembers whom to remind, about what, and when; once a minute it checks whether it is time to remind someone about something, and sends the reminder tweet to whoever needs it.

I suggest everyone test it and play with it. Maybe for some people it will even be more convenient than other reminder tools. And it is cross-platform too :-D.

Account: @napominau.

Format: day.month hour:minute message (the format is in the Twitter account description).