Category Archives: iOS

iOS related articles

Alternative Audio Tracks in HTML5 Video

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A major advantage of HTTP Live Streaming, and it is still unbeaten by any other standard, is that you can use any technology to compose multimedia content. You don’t need expensive media servers to handle media streams. You can easily delegate media composition to some simple PHP / Python / Ruby / Node.js modules. As a long-time Flash lover I was somewhat prejudiced against the Apple’s video delivery standard. But as a developer, every day I use it to solve tasks which have been almost unattainable with the previous stack (or required expensive software). Adobe HDS playlists have been really hard to deal with. Just think of binary data in f4m playlists. They require much more time to develop & debug the solution. MPEG DASH is also far from being intuitive.

In this post, we are going to discuss how to make an alternative audio track for your video. Although HTTP Live Streaming can streamline this task, yet there are some limitations, so you need to make certain hacks on the client side. In our Together project, we had to implement alternate sound tracks for user videos. Luckily, we use HTTP Live Streaming throughout the system. Continue reading →

Parallax in iOS Applications

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The idea of using the phenomenon of parallax in mobile application design is in no way new. Like many other ideas, parallax was borrowed from the Web design realm, where initially it had been rather popular. Parallax enriches your design with an impressive illusion of depth and space. By now, due to certain encumbrances of Web application development, the fashion for parallax in website design has somewhat subsided. The mobile applications world, however, is quite on the contrary. There the parallax is live and kicking and reluctant to retire. Moreover, it has even become a default home screen in the new iOS 7.

In this post, we are going to tell you of our new DVParallaxView component and show you how to enhance your applications with the parallax effect similar or probably even better than the iOS 7 home screen. Continue reading →

The Art of Core Motion in iOS

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With emergence of accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer on iPhone devices, new opportunities have opened up before iOS application developers. However, although their APIs have been announced for several years now, not much on them can be found on the Web today. On the one hand, this topic is really not so vast to dedicate a book or series of posts to it. But on the other hand, there are certain specifics and pitfalls you have to be aware of. This post is intended for developers who are willing to befriend accelerometer and gyroscope in the iPhone. Continue reading →

Playlist Player for iOS

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DVPlaylistPlayer Title

A player is a core part of your video application. If you ever have tried to build a player into your application, you probably know that you need some time to set up and customize it. We would venture to say, that mostly you need a player to run playlists rather than individual videos. In this post, we would like to tell you about our open source component we use to play back videos in our Together project. Please welcome to our playlist player, DVPlaylistPlayer. Continue reading →

Push Notifications: Tips and Tricks

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push notifications service

Push notifications is a really great mechanism available to all mobile developers (and beyond). With notifications of this type, you can notify users of important events, so that they can respond as quickly as possible, even when the application is not running. Moreover, with this approach you can boost user awareness of your product. In this post, we are going to share our hands-on experience in implementing such functionality in our large-scale projects and provide a number of tips and tricks. Continue reading →

Blur Effect in iOS Applications

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For any iOS application, interface appearance is a key driver to success. Sleek and elaborate design combined with impressive look and feel of your app, can enhance user experience and add points in favor of your application in the App Store.

How can you best impress the user? Nice appearance can be achieved in many ways, one of them is to apply effects on different parts of the interface and the image as a whole. Among all these, perhaps the most commonly used effect is Blur, and we are going to discuss it in this post. We will tell you how to apply Blur using different frameworks, and also we will experiment a little to benchmark performance of different methods. Continue reading →

Best Practices for Server and Application Interaction

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iOS Best Practices

In this modern era of growth and development of mobile applications, enabling of efficient client-server interaction is gaining more importance. In this context, the following factors are critical: flexibility, scalability, documenting, support for older API versions, and caching. In this post, we are going to discuss the most important aspects of service development and design that will help you attain better results. Continue reading →

AirPlay and HDMI

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If you develop gaming or multimedia applications for iOS, then AirPlay is absolutely a must for you, almost a standard. Indeed, what could be better for a user than watching favorite videos or photos on a big screen of a plasma TV or playing advanced games using iPhone/iPad/iPod as a multi-touch joystick? AirPlay has been designed specifically for this purpose. Continue reading →

Multiscreen Support in Mobile AIR Applications

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As AIR applications can run on multiple platforms and devices, AIR based developers have to take into account a vast diversity of screens, their resolutions and DPIs. Despite a broad diversity of supported platforms, in this post we will focus on multiscreen development for mobile AIR applications based on the Flex framework. Continue reading →