kosertech

I’ve been doing some more work on PlainNote and added several fixes and features over the past week.  There is now protection code in case you exit the app while editing via the home button or get a call or sms and exit to deal with those your note will be autosaved.

I also changed the mail button on the note detail screen to an action button which now shows two actions.  The original action of “mail” to mail your note and a new action of instapaper which will send your note to instapaper.com.  This is a fast way to get your note online and you can pick it up via their website or in your rss feed if you subscribe to your own instapaper feed.

While creating the code in PlainNote for posting to instapaper I created it as a stand alone library so it could be included in other applications and have open sourced it.  The code is available at github here.  It’s pretty easy to use and you basically instantiate the library and then call one call to send it all to instapaper and you get a Yes or No back indicating if it went alright.

instaPaperLib *IPLib = [[instaPaperLib alloc] init];
BOOL response = [IPLib postToInstapaperWithUserName:@"username"
                                        andPassword:@"password"
                                            andBody:@"sample text snippit"
                                             andURL:@"http://www.somesiteurl.com"
                                           andTitle:@"Your post title"];

The new binary for PlainNote was also submitted to Apple this afternoon and hopefully it won’t be more than a day or so until the app is updated with these new features on the AppStore.

Posted PlainNote for review two days ago and got the rejection notice last night.  I used an action button to spawn the mail view and this was against user interface guidelines.

Just a quick swap to a text label and resubmitted it.  For future reference if your trying to do something that isn’t an action button don’t use this:

use this:

Or map a custom image to your button which is also possible.  Hopefully in a couple more days it will be available.  I’m encouraged by how fast it got reviewed though that was only about 48 hours vs my previous submissions taking over two weeks.

The Lowdown

I’ve been working for a few weeks on a pretty basic note pad application for the iPhone.  It’s called PlainNote.  It’s got a basic set of functions and should be as usable as the built in note pad that comes with the iPhone.  Initially the functionality will be very basic and allow for standard notepad use.  In the future I plan to expand it with online syncing, change the storage method from plist to a database, perhaps some basic themes (probably just reverse white text on black).

Initial Features:

• Create / Update / Delete notes
• Sort by date so newest notes are always at the top
• In App mailing of notes

Vision

I had a goal in mind when I started PlainNote of learning to code something that used a UITableView and to write it in Objective-c.  I’ve always had the intentions of releasing the source for PlainNote so that other people could see how I accomplished certain tasks such as storing dates in a plist, sorting an array by date, in app mail etc…

The app store reviews should be interesting on this one since it is just another note pad.  Hopefully people will get that it is an open source project so other budding developers can see how to accomplish things in Objective-c but I don’t have high hopes for that.  The reviews seem to be a pretty mixed bag on applications.

I submitted it to the AppStore on 2/9/2010 so lets see how long it takes to get there.