My name is Engin Kurutepe and I make useful apps
If you’re curious like me and ordered an Amazon Echo on a trip to the states, you will have noticed that Amazon’s setup interface does not allow you to enter non-US addresses for your Echo. Which is a double bummer, because the time zone cannot be set independently and is also determined by your address, making time and calendar based features totally userless in addition to weather and traffic.
Jul 17, 2016
WWDC season officially started this week! For the third time in a row, a lottery will determine who is lucky enough to get the opportunity to buy a ticket for $1599. If you’re not from the Bay Area, you need to pay for airfare and accommodation in addition to the WWDC ticket, and the whole week will suddenly end up costing $4000 easily.
Apr 20, 2016
I’ve been blogging on and off for a few years now but I never really made it a priority.
Aug 25, 2015
iOS 7 introduced a layered design language where the system achieved to create the illusion of three dimensionality by moving views on screen with the movement of the device. The parallax on the lock screen is probably the best known example of this effect. Some system views such as alert dialogs use this effect and as a developer you can use it in your own apps with the UIMotionEffect classes. Ash Furrow wrote a really nice tutorial on how to accomplish this back then in 2013.
Feb 17, 2015
The frosted glass effect is a central design element in iOS 7 and there are various ways how you can add it to views in your app. I have been working a lot with blur effects lately and decided to write up what I’ve learned in a series of posts. Let’s start with the simple case of creating a static frosted glass effect before moving on to blurred backgrounds with animations.
Apr 12, 2014
One of the new APIs introduced with iOS 7 is the new speech synthesizer in the AVFoundation framework. It went relatively unnoticed among the flood of more significant changes in iOS 7.
Jan 9, 2014
One of the changes in iOS 7 is the new method of determining the status bar style through the preferredStatusBarStyle method.
Nov 2, 2013
iOS 6 introduced many changes related to view auto-rotation, which basically aim to decouple view controller orientation from the device orientation. While this might sound counter-intuitive, it actually makes a lot of sense and allows for a finer grained control of view controller orientations: A UITableViewController in portrait orientation in a pop over contained by a view controller in landscape orientation on an iPad, for instance.
Feb 7, 2013