Thanks to everyone who came out to Rachel and my session today on introducing.NET developers to Objective-C and iOS development. I've posted our slides in this post. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

iOS for .NET Devs Slides

In my previous post,  I demonstrated how to implement a SQLite database in your Cordova mobile app using the SQLite plugin in Telerik's Icenium IDE.  Now we will see how to add barcode scanning to your app using the Barcode Scanner plugin.  Previously, we built a Shopping List app that lets you add items, mark them as complete, and clear completed items while storing all data in a local SQLite database.  Now we will add a new "Scan" feature so users can scan a barcode to add items to their list.

First, we need to add the Barcode ...

If you need relational storage for your Cordova-based app, SQLite provides a lightweight and feature-rich database.  I will walk you through the steps to use SQLite with Telerik's Icenium IDE and build a demo Shopping List app that will select, insert, update, and delete records from a local database on the device.

First, add the SQLite plugin in Icenium.  Double-click your "Properties" folder, select the Plugins tab and check the "SQLite" plugin.  This will add the Plugins folder and SQLite scripts within that folder.

Database and Table Setup

Before you can use your SQLite database and tables, you need to ...

I'm just wrapping up my first project using Icenium, Telerik's cloud-based IDE for creating Android and iOS apps using HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. I must say that it's been a very enjoyable experience and I've been very impressed with the product that our friends at Telerik have created.

It's a bit unfair to do a full review of this product yet, since it's so new and still in v1. ...

Falafel Software’s mobile conference solution EventBoard, has been chosen as the official application of the Microsoft MVP Summit.

The Microsoft MVP Award is given to technical experts who actively participate in the community, sharing both their knowledge and enthusiasm for Microsoft products. For 20 years, it has remained one of the most difficult awards to earn and wearing the badge of an MVP has signified supreme technical excellence with Microsoft technologies.

Each year, every MVP from around the world is invited to Microsoft headquarters for the MVP Summit. This private event gives MVPs early and direct access to ...

Every year, October kicks off a very busy season at Falafel : “Conference Season”. Multiple members of the team travel across the country and around world to share their expertise on a number of technologies. All Falafel Software team members spend their days, and often their nights, helping design and build cutting edge solutions for our customers. Their technical presentations draw from these real world experiences and are assembled, practiced, and presented in what little spare time they have. That’s why we call them “Rock Stars”.

This weekend at Silicon Valley Code Camp, Falafel’s entire team from around the ...

Learning a new programming language is a lot of fun, but it can be disorienting to not have all of your usual tools in your mental toolbox, so to speak.  We get used to using our familiar patterns and syntax, and even though the new language may be just as capable, it takes some getting used to in order to have the same level of productivity.  It’s been over a year since I started working on iOS apps in Objective C, and still I sometimes find myself searching for ways to write a block of code that I could write ...

Listen to this week's installment of "The Tablet Show" featuring Falafel CEO Lino Tadros.
 
The Tablet Show (Show 47, Released Aug. 27th, 2012 )

You'll enjoy this 10-time Microsoft MVP's take on Windows 8 development, HTML 5, JavaScript, iPad and more as Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell ask about his real world experiences developing in the mobile space. 

If you happen to be experienced in development using Visual Studio, but a bit new to working in XCode for iOS development (like me), you are probably used to your application breaking on exceptions during debugging.  But by default, your iOS application may not act as you expect when it comes to debugging crash exceptions.  You may instead see something like this:

With an error message that says: 

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception

What?  Why was my exception uncaught while I am debugging?  I, for one, would rather be taken to the point at which the exception ...

Last week I found myself debugging an issue with Apple Push Notifications service (APNs) on one of our development servers, and learning a bit about APNs certificates and Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS 7.5 in the process.

 

My first task was to try to isolate why the push notifications weren't received by our iOS devices, so I started on my local development machine.  I installed the certificates into my personal certificate store, stepped through the notification code, and sure enough I heard my iPad chirping telling me the notifications were being received.  It turned out that the certificates ...

Apple does a lot of neat things with images in iOS, and many times we get the benefits of shiny, chrome-like effects on our images without really doing anything.

If you create a new tabbed application in XCode, the default setup will give you two tabs, with square and round images in the tab bar for the tabs.

Note the shiny blue appearance of the selected tab.  So, what do the original images look like?  Pretty boring, actually:  just a plain black circle and square.

Wow, that's a quite a difference.  Pretty cool, right?  I thought so too.  But then ...

Here's a tip for the iOS beginners among us:  Just because something is on the left doesn't mean it's called Left.  LeftBarButtonItem, for example, might just take you down the wrong path if you’re not careful.

Let's say you are wanting to show customized text on the button that shows up on the left side of the navigation bar in an iOS app.  In an unmodified Master-Details iPhone app, it is the button that returns you to the Master table view screen from within the Details view.

By default, that button displays the Title text from the previous ViewController.  The ...