Tony Buckingham

Who likes tacos?

iTacos in the App Store

iUI is cool, but UIWebView Navigation Controller is better

Thanks to Ben Gotow for this excellent iPhone class allowing for a webview with an associated Navigation Controller:

http://www.gotow.net/creative/wordpress/?p=16

The DrillDownWebController maintains a “stack” of DrillDownPages, with each page representing a single layer in the drill-down hierarchy. A DrillDownWebController can be a root level controller, or it can be loaded into an existing UINavigationController. When it appears, it silently swaps its parent’s navigation bar with it’s own and loads the first page.

Click To Play

The DrillDownPage is a wrapper for a UIWebView that acts as its delegate and provides higher-level access to important properties of the page, such as it’s title. I decided to pull this functionality out of the controller because it reduced confusion when multiple UIWebViews were being loaded. When the user clicks a link in the top level web view, a new DrillDownPage object is created and it begins loading the requested page in an invisible UIWebView. The controller locks the current page and displays an activity indicator in the top right corner of the navigation bar. When loading is complete, it animates a slide to the new page and updates the navigation bar. All the other pages in the page “stack” are notified that their position in the drill-down hierarchy has changed.

Dang, iTaco is already taken

In case you were wondering, iTaco is *not* the iphone app I’ve been working on, but iTaco was the name I had intended to use!  What a waste for something so stupid as this:

openCalais, RDF, Drupal, and you

Been playing around with the RDF drupal project and the openCalais plugin on my site here; pretty cool stuff.  Note the tags automagically picked up on this post.

http://drupal.org/project/opencalais

microformats

Microformats have been around for a while, but have never been implemented to their fullest potential, which is surprising considering the impact they can have on social networking applications.  I’ve set up this blog to use microformats.  If you look at the footer of this site, you’ll see my “hCard”, containing the information pertaining to me, and an image for my avatar.

So far, twitter has been the only service I have noticed “consuming” my hCard.  When I entered my website address into my twitter profile, it picked up my avatar and other information from the hCard on my site.  I’ve also set up my site as a “delegate” for openID, so whenever a site supports openID, I can just enter tonybuckingham.net as the openID site to log into that site.

I learned more about microformats at a SXSW presentation where the panelists were some of the actual microformat creators and evangelists.  In particular, they demonstrated a particular use case for events and hCalendar, which interoperates with OS X’s iCalendar spec.  HTTP pages containing hCalendar data can be parsed by hCalendar capable browser plugins to allow you to create appointments in iCal.  Yahoo Local supports hCalendar, for example, and if you are using the Operator addon, then you can select an event from an event page you are viewing and add it to whichever calendar you commonly use:

Keep up with me!

Just set up this site to blog about my development endeavors . . . stay tuned for interesting things!