Andreas Dolinsek's Weblog

Appengine – Efficiently delete data with MapReduce

Andreas Dolinsek — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:18:45 +0000

The new method: The new (easier) way is to delete data is the builtin datastore-admin.

The traditional mapreduce method: The mapreduce-technique won’t affect the latency of your application, but be careful with your quotas. You can also filter out entities you don’t want to delete in the clearmodel.process method.

(1) Get MapReduce for AppEngine and check it out …
svn checkout http://appengine-mapreduce.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ appengine-mapreduce-read-only

(2) If you use AppEngine with python go to the python/src/ directory and copy the mapreduce subdirectory into the root directory of your app engine project.

(3) Then create download mapreduce.yaml file in the root folder of your appengine-project (same folder where your app.yaml is). Edit this file an set your model you want to clear after default: at the last line of the file.

(4) Get the file clearmodel.py and put it into the mapreduce subdirectory.

(5) Install mapreduce in the app.yaml

(6) Navigate to /mapreduce and login with your Appengine-User. You can start the clear-process with the webinterface.

iTranslate for iPad – a huge success

Andreas Dolinsek — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 23:51:26 +0000

Our new product iTranslate for iPad is a huge success on the AppStore. Only a few hours after the launch we dominated nearly every country rankings.

More Infos will be available soon @SonicoMobile or on our brand new website http://www.sonicomobile.com.

Trivia: A nice article about Sonico Mobile

Andreas Dolinsek — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:59:31 +0000

Loquendo Vocal Technology and Services

The developers at Sonico Mobile are experts on the iPhone & iPad platforms, and have created several applications for the iPhone including iTranslate, Music-Quiz and Qype Radar. Their products have seen over 5 million downloads from the Apple App Store, and over 1 million people are using their apps on a regular basis. For more info:www.sonicomobile.com.

First iPad commercial

Andreas Dolinsek — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:49:13 +0000

Single line UITextView

Andreas Dolinsek — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:07:56 +0000

The standard behaviour of the UITextView automatically resets the contentInset property to 32, which causes strange behaviour if you just want an UITextView with a single line. On responding the cursor disappears in the negative content area. The solution is simple. Just subclass the UITextView and force overwrite the property contentInset with UIEdgeInsetsZero. It just acts like an UITextField now. The SMS.app for example uses this behaviour for text-input with the ability to enter multiple lines.


@interface InputTextView : UITextView
@end

@implementation InputTextView

/*************************************************
* fixes the issue with single lined uitextview
*************************************************/
- (UIEdgeInsets) contentInset { return UIEdgeInsetsZero; }

@end

Custom fonts since iPhone OS 3.2

Andreas Dolinsek — Sat, 08 May 2010 13:41:54 +0000

Finally iPhone OS 3.2 supports custom fonts. Here is a short summary what you have to do..

Supported font formats are ..

TrueType-flavoured OpenType (extension .ttf) and
PostScript-flavoured OpenType (extension .otf).

Ok what you have to do is simple ..

just add the key UIAppFonts as array to your Info.plist
add the *.ttf or *.otf files to your bundle
insert the filenames as values to your UIAppFonts array
Load the fonts with ..

// use the font name here, not the filename
UIFont *myCustomFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"AnnabelScript" size:30];

Note: You can also use the fonts in your UIWebViews with font-tags or CSS.

Do you need the sample project?

Just ask me on twitter: @andidol

WWDC 2010 in San Francisco

Andreas Dolinsek — Sun, 02 May 2010 09:51:24 +0000

Sonico Mobile is going to attend the World Wide Developers conference in San Francisco. We are looking forward to meet a lot of iPhone developers and Apple engineers from all over the world.
I Just had a look at the Sessions & Labs section. They provide a lot of useful informations about new techniques and frameworks of iPhone OS 4.0. I hope that we can take a look at some new products like the iPhone 4th generation or something .

The center of the app universe

Just for fun – our iPad unboxing video :-)

Andreas Dolinsek — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 08:10:14 +0000

Early iPad adopters

Andreas Dolinsek — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:38:53 +0000

If you are an early adopter of the iPad, you get this error when accessing the App Store on the device .. “The App Store is not supported in this country”

The solution is a little work around, but not difficult.

Just open your desktop iTunes and search for the apps you want to purchase. You can download them normally and sync them with your device. The background for this issue is, that developers can set release regions where their apps are available and so you can find them over normal search and purchase them in your country’s store. Apps which are not available in your country, are not listed in the search results. Apple will enable the stores at the release date in your country (including the Apple apps like iBooks, Pages, Keynote and Numbers).

The solution to access all iPad apps available on the store now, is to create an US iTunes account.

Sonico Mobile got 2 iPads for development

Andreas Dolinsek — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:07:27 +0000

We ordered two iPads from US for development. Programming on simulator and on a device are two very different animals. With the simulator alone you cannot check the performance and user experience very well .. so this is the beginning of real iPad development.