I recently took on a code challenge that was delivered in an interesting fashion. I was given a video that showed the manipulation of two images and was asked to create an iOS app that had the same behavior as the video.
After watching the video (many times), I extracted the following requirements for my app:
As a software professional I am interested in maintaining good relationships with my connections. While I never thought to use a CRM for such a purpose, that just might change after coming across Contactually.
Contactually allows you to collect and merge contact information from various sources including e-mail, calendars and social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter). Contactually can help you with automatic reminders to follow-up with your connections, but that is just a small part of what the platform offers. Some of the key features are centered around Buckets, Templates, Programs and Pipelines.
Posted in API
Tagged api, Contacts2Web, contactually, core data, crm, json, NSFetchedResultsController, NSURLSession, Universal Storyboard
Have you ever taken a Portrait oriented movie with your iPhone or iPad and sent it to your friends who were using Windows? I can understand their frustration when the video I so carefully recorded causes them to bend their neck to the side:
So what’s going on here? The problem is that the .MOV file that I send them has a 90 degree rotation set as the preferred transform. Some Windows clients (such as Windows Media Player, VLC media player, etc) do not take this transform into consideration when presenting the video.
I wanted to create a project that would allow me to address the issue with rotations and other compatibility concerns.
I published my results to scottcarter/VideoExport on Github.
Posted in iOS, Objective-C, Swift
Tagged export, mp4, objective c, SDAVAssetExportSession, Swift, video, video bitrate, video composition, video settings, videoComposition, Xcode
Overview
This article discusses the techniques I use for bookmarking code and adding log statements for both Objective-C and Swift.
Temporary Bookmarks
When I develop code I often find a need to temporarily reference different sections that I’m working on, either within the same file or in many different files. Prior to Xcode 4 there was apparently a means to set and jump to bookmarks with keyboard shortcuts as mentioned in the article Killer Xcode Tips and Tricks – Tips 1 to 10 (see tips 7 and 8).
Posted in Objective-C, Swift
Tagged bookmark, debugging, downcast, iOS, logging, macro, objective c, pragma, preprocessor, Swift, Xcode
Video Export Project
I am working on a project that will process videos taken with the camera or pulled from the Photo Library and export them to MP4 format, reducing the dimensions and bit rate.
As part of this process I am using the code for SDAVAssetExportSession that is a AVAssetExportSession drop-in replacement with customizable audio and video settings.
Video Composition
I make use of an instance of AVAssetReaderVideoCompositionOutput that is added to AVAssetReader in SDAVAssetExportSession.m. I set the videoComposition property of the former instance to a composition that allows me to set the render size and some appropriate transforms for scaling, etc. (CGAffineTransform).
Posted in iOS
Tagged CGAffineTransform, copyNextSampleBuffer, debugging, error, export, mp4, objective c, SDAVAssetExportSession, video, video composition, video settings, videoComposition, Xcode
