For those of you that aren’t familiar, the default sound (low-res sample) is something like a trumpet from the Kentucky Derby. It’s odd, a bit annoying and almost every other game center game uses it.

Apparently up until iOS 5.0 you had no choice but to live with it. Thank You Apple for now allowing us to change the default sound! Not so much thanks for burying the instructions deep, deep in the documentation. I’m yet to actually find it in the docs and Google search returns nil.

I must give credit where credit is due – Jason Lust pointed this out over in the developer forums: Add a sound to the resources of your app bundle with the file name “GKInvite” of format “caf”, “aif”, or “wav”.

Yeah, that’s it. Add GKInvite.caf to your project. No code changes. It just works.

On November 22 (just 4 days after the actual pepper spray event happened @ UC Davis) I submitted my original version of the CPSEC (Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop) App for review to Apple’s App Store. After 19 days and 2 “This App requires Additional Time for Review” emails it became apparent to me that in it’s current state the CPSEC App was not going to see the light of day in the App Store.

Common sense and experience should have told me that submitting an app that contained a copyrighted image was not going to fly but in my haste to beat out the competition I went ahead and submitted anyway. Well, I learned my lesson the hard way and after loosing a lot of time I resubmitted the app using stock images. I believe I did a really good job creating the substitute images. Take a look at the main example below:

App Description:

Now you can create your own pepper spray cop mashup photos without expensive graphic design software

** Features **
- Over a dozen different poses
- Accessories
- Different spray types & catch phrases
- Facebook & Twitter Sharing

Add the infamous pepper spray cop to any of your photos or even take a new one and drop him in. Then share your creations with all your friends on Facebook & Twitter. *Notice to iPod Touch Users: You CAN still use this app (even without the camera!) No problem, you just can’t take any new pics but YOU CAN do Everything else iPhone users can.

Will my changes be enough to pass Apple’s rigorous review process? That remains to be seen. Will users still want to use an app to create Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop Mashup Photos without using the original images? That remains to be seen as well.

Stay Tuned!

Their templates have become invaluable to iOS dev’s and are a must have tool for creating app mock-ups! They offer these to the developer community free of charge, so if you use it and want to says thanks like them on Facebook  & also follow them on Twitter.

Download the iOS 5 GUI PSD (iPhone 4S) from their site.

For those of you who are not already familiar with the templates by Teehan+Lax here are a few screenshots:

The full .psd template:

Full size Assets:

Even Notification Center:

Thanks guys!

You can only safely drop armv6 support if set your deployment target to iOS 4.3+  which runs on the iPhone 3GS/4,  iPod (3rd Gen), iPad/iPad2. Actually, anything after 4.3 can be set to Optimized armv7 but that’s a totally different blog post

Here’s a quick and dirty guide to get you armv6 support in your iOS projects:

1.) Go to Project -> Build Settings -> Architectures -> Architectures:

2.) Click on Architectures and select Other. . .

3.) select $(ARCHS_STANDARD_32_BIT) and click the (-) to delete it.

4.) Click the (+) sign and add armv6

5.) Click the (+) sign again and add armv7 then click Done

6.) Find your apps Info.plist file and delete the Key called Required device capabilities

I believe that’s it. At first I did all the above steps except for #6 and while reveiwing my app in iTunes Connect I noticed something odd:

I saw my Supported Architectures as planned but what I wasn’t counting on was the Required Capabilities. If armv7 is required it seems to me that support for armv6 would be futile? So i fired up xcode and this time I actually tried to build my app on an old iPod Touch. No joy   even though it was showing the correct Supported Architectures. I deleted the Required device capabilities Key from the Info.plist and bingo. I re-upped my binary and all seems right with the world:

If I’m doing something wrong please feel free to let me know I’d rather do things the preferred way plus id rather not spread incorrect information. Thanks!

The most recent version of their IAP Client Library changed the default download directory.

Downloaded content used to go into your applications NSDocumentDirectory directory.
Now by default content is decompressed into NSLibraryDirectory/ua/downloads/<product_id>/

Why the change? The answer lies in Apple’s new iCloud Data Storage Guidelines which state Data that can be downloaded again or regenerated should be stored in the <Application_Home>/Library/Caches directory. (Hopefully I’m not breaking the NDA by publishing this.) They don’t want iCloud backing up Terabytes of data for no reason. That makes sense. Unfortunately my app was coded to search the Documents dir for new content, so when I updated the Airship client library and tested it I was no longer seeing the new content in my app ;(

In my quest for answers I stumbled into UA’s IRC Channel #urbanairship on irc.freenode.net . (If you’re not familiar with internet relay chat or Freenode you should start here.) They suggested I try implementing the following delegate method into my code:

[UAStoreFront setDownloadDirectory:kUAOldDownloadDirectory withProductIDSubdir:NO];

This method decompresses content directly into the root of your apps Documents directory without creating any sub directories. It worked perfectly for me but I felt uneasy about submitting the app knowing that it was directly violating the new Data Storage Guidelines so I decided to dig a little deeper.

The real problem wasn’t with UA’s library it was with my apps codebase. I was searching for the new content by doing this:

-(void)AddAudioFilesFromDocDirecotry:(NSString *)type
{

	NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory , NSUserDomainMask, YES);
	NSString *documentsDir = [paths objectAtIndex:0];

	NSFileManager *manager = [NSFileManager defaultManager];
    NSArray *fileList = [manager directoryContentsAtPath:documentsDir];

    for (NSString *s in fileList){
		if ([[s pathExtension] isEqualToString: type]) {
			[defItems addObject:[s stringByDeletingPathExtension]];
		}
    }

	fileList = nil;
	manager = nil;
	paths = nil;

}

I needed a way to search the new path  NSLibraryDirectory/ua/downloads/<product_id>/ so I did this:

-(void)AddAudioFilesFromDocDirecotry:(NSString *)type
{

	NSString *productDirectory = kUADownloadDirectory;

	NSFileManager *manager = [NSFileManager defaultManager];
    NSArray *fileList = [manager contentsOfDirectoryAtPath:productDirectory error:nil];

    for (NSString *s in fileList){
		if ([[s pathExtension] isEqualToString: type]) {
			[defItems addObject:[s stringByDeletingPathExtension]];
		}
    }

	fileList = nil;
	manager = nil;
}

kUADownloadDirectory is defined in UAGlobal.h as:

#define kUADownloadDirectory [[NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSLibraryDirectory, \
NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex:0] stringByAppendingString: @"/ua/downloads/"]

So by using NSString *productDirectory = kUADownloadDirectory;  my AddAudioFilesFromDocDirecotry method was now checking the correct directory: NSLibraryDirectory/ua/downloads/ BUT remember there is still the small issue of the content being decompressed into a sub folder of it’s own name ( NSLibraryDirectory/ua/downloads/<product_id>)

This time I was able to use another available delegate method:

[UAStoreFront setDownloadDirectory:kUADownloadDirectory withProductIDSubdir:NO];

which the guys at UA were kind enough to provide. As you can see, this delegate method is setting the correct download directory (kUADownloadDirectory) AND it’s removing the pesky <product_id> sub directory (withProductIDSubdir:NO).

Now my app uses the most current IAP Client library and it conforms to Apples iCloud Data Storage Guidelines

From the Urban Airship Support Center:

For those of you that only need to access individual files you can use NSString’s stringByAppendingPathComponent to build up the path:

NSString *productId = @"YOUR PRODUCT ID";
NSString *filename = @"YOUR FILE NAME";

NSString* libraryPath = [NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSLibraryDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex:0];
// build the fill paths by appending ua and downloads to the base libraryPath
libraryPath = [libraryPath stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"ua"];
libraryPath = [libraryPath stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"downloads"];

// Append the product id:
NSString *downloadDirectory = [libraryPath stringByAppendingPathComponent:productId];

// now append your filename
NSString *fullPathToMyFile = self.filePath = [downloadDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:filename];