Step 1: Adding the right delegates
Make sure your current class (probably a ViewController) uses the following delegates:

• UIActionSheetDelegate
• UINavigationControllerDelegate
• UIPickerViewDelegate
• UIPickerViewDataSource

Step 2: Trigger the UIActionSheet
Go to the method where you want to make the UIPickerView appear. In my case it is when I select a row from a table, but of course it could also be when you push a button or anything you want.

/* first create a UIActionSheet, where you define a title, delegate and a button to close the sheet again */
UIActionSheet *actionSheet = [[UIActionSheet alloc] initWithTitle:@"Select position" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:@"Done" destructiveButtonTitle:nil otherButtonTitles:nil];
/* I always give my controls a tag, to make sure I can work with multiple actionsheets in one View (to identify them when an event triggers */
actionSheet.tag = POSITION_ROW;
actionSheet.actionSheetStyle = UIActionSheetStyleDefault;

/* Initialize a UIPickerView with 100px space above it, for the button of the UIActionSheet. */
UIPickerView* positionPicker = [[UIPickerView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0,100, 320, 216)];
positionPicker.dataSource = self;
positionPicker.delegate = self;

/* another unique tag for this UIPicker */
positionPicker.tag = POSITION_ROW;

/* Add the UIPickerView to the UIActionSheet */
[actionSheet addSubview:positionPicker];

/* Select the previous selected value, which for me is stored in 'currentPosition' */
[positionPicker selectRow:currentPosition inComponent:0 animated:NO];

/* clean up */
[positionPicker release];

/* Add the UIActionSheet to the view */
[actionSheet showInView:self.view];

/* Make sure the UIActionSheet is big enough to fit your UIPickerView and it's buttons */
[actionSheet setBounds:CGRectMake(0,0, 320, 411)];

/* clean up */
[actionSheet release];

Step 3: Implementing the datasource and delegates for the UIPickerView
Now, the triggering of the UIActionSheet is now working, but you would also like to have some items in your UIPickerView. Well, take a look at the following code and read the comments.

/* Defines the total number of Components (like groups in a UITableView) in a UIPickerView */
- (NSInteger)numberOfComponentsInPickerView:(UIPickerView *)pickerView;
{
    return 1;
}

/* What to do when a row from a UIPickerView is selected. This will trigger each time you scroll the UIPickerView, so only lightweight stuff. */
- (void)pickerView:(UIPickerView *)pickerView didSelectRow:(NSInteger)row inComponent:(NSInteger)component
{
	overlayPosition = row;
	[tableSettings reloadData];
}

/* For me the number of items in the UIPickerView is known on compile time. So here I just return 3 */
- (NSInteger)pickerView:(UIPickerView *)pickerView numberOfRowsInComponent:(NSInteger)component;
{
    return 3;
}

/* Because the UIPickerView expects a UIView for every row you insert in the UIPickerView, you need to make one. What I do here is really simple. I create a UILabel* and with each row it requests I just change the text in the UILabel. */
- (UIView *)pickerView:(UIPickerView *)pickerView viewForRow:(NSInteger)row forComponent:(NSInteger)component reusingView:(UIView *)view
{
/* Create a UILabel and set it 40 pixels to the right, to make sure it is put nicely in the UIPickerView */
	UILabel *label = [[[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(40, 0, 280, 25)] autorelease];
	label.textColor = [UIColor blackColor];
	label.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];

	switch (row)
	{
		default:
		case kUnderClock:
			label.text = @"Under clock";
			break;
		case kAboveSlider:
			label.text = @"Above lock slider";
			break;
		case kCenter:
			label.text = @"Vertically centered";
			break;
	}

	return label;
}

Step 4: Do stuff when buttons on the UIActionSheet are clicked
Now, the final thing you have to do is make sure you listen to the events of the UIActionSheet also. So here is the code:

- (void)actionSheet:(UIActionSheet *)actionSheet clickedButtonAtIndex:(NSInteger)buttonIndex
{
	if (actionSheet.tag == POSITION_ROW)
	{
/* Do stuff here, only intended for the right UIActionSheet. This only applies for when you use multiple UIActionSheets on the same ViewController. Closing it is unnecessary, because you already specified a destructive button. */
	}
}

Desktop Backgrounds HD has the following features:

• Over 14.000+ unique HD backgrounds available
• Delivers the backgrounds to your phone in the right resolution (iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and iPad)
• Create an overlay, to show some text over your background (v1.1)
• Dim backgrounds for better use behind your icons
• Mail your backgrounds to a friend (you need to have a mail account setup on your device) (v1.1)
• iOS 4 requirement (is this a feature?)
• Intelligent caching system, to keep data-transfers low
• Multi-task support

Here are some screenshots for the application:

So after a coupe of google searches, I came up with the following solution, follow these steps and you will be sending emails with attachments before you can say “emails with attachments” 250 times.

Step 1
First add the MessageUI framework in your application.

Step 2
The class you want to use the functionality in, should get the following 2 imports:

#import <MessageUI/MessageUI.h>
#import <MessageUI/MFMailComposeViewController.h>

Step 3
Make sure your class listens to the MFMailComposeViewControllerDelegate.

Step 4
Next up, is to add code to add an attachment to the mail composer and open it up.

MFMailComposeViewController* composer = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
composer.mailComposeDelegate = self;

[composer setSubject:@"The subject of the email"];
NSData *imageData = UIImagePNGRepresentation([UIImage imageNamed:@"test.png"], 1);
[composer addAttachmentData:imageData mimeType:@"image/png" fileName:@"test.png"];
NSString *emailBody = @"Check out this amazing PNG!";
[composer setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:YES];
[self presentModalViewController:composer animated:YES];
[composer release];

Step 5
Add this method, to make sure you get back full control over your view-controller:

- (void) mailComposeController:(MFMailComposeViewController *)controller didFinishWithResult:(MFMailComposeResult)result error:(NSError *)error
{
	[self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
}

In this last method you can also perform error checking, which is not included in this example. Hope this helps anyone, and if not… too bad :D

Well there are examples enough about this, most of them are all the same, but there is one annoying thing. It saves the view in the good ol’ resolution. Because I am making all my apps “retina-aware”, I wanted to change this.

So here is my code snippet of how I save an UIView to an UIImage:

UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions(myView.bounds.size, NO, [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale]);
[myView.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()];
UIImage *viewImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();

It automaticly takes care of any scaling, if there will be higher resolution iPhones/iPads in the future.

For example, sometimes you receive a string like this: Terminator_2$003A_Judgment_Day. I wanted to convert the weird encoding they use, so I wrote a piece of code for that. It might be that this could be encoded some other way and then I would like to hear from you, but here is my code:

+ (NSString*) replaceHexInString:(NSString*) value
{
	NSRange range = [value rangeOfString:@"$00"];

	while (range.location != NSNotFound)
	{
		if (range.location + 5 <= [value length])
		{
			NSString* hexValue = [value substringFromIndex:range.location];
			hexValue = [hexValue substringToIndex:5];
			NSString* newHexValue = [hexValue stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"$" withString:@"0x"];

			unsigned int dec;
			NSScanner *scan = [NSScanner scannerWithString:newHexValue];

			if ([scan scanHexInt:&dec])
			{
				NSString* convertedValue = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%c", dec];
				value = [value stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:hexValue withString:convertedValue];
			}
		}

		range = [value rangeOfString:@"$00"];
	}
	return value;
}

I know this probably does not get the UTF-16 characters, but in my case I (hope to) know they won’t use them.

Well, that’s about it. Not sure if anyone can use this, but I do :D.

After comparing a bit, I came to NLog and tried integrating this in my project. My project being build in Visual Studio 2010 has support for those nice web.config’s that can be transformed/malformed/adjusted while publishing. This was very necessary because my debug (local) build uses a different SQL instance than my production build.

So I just wanted to show you how I configured NLog in my web.config. It might be obvious for some people, but for others it might not.

In my normal web.config I added the following lines. First I added a new section row to my configSections.

<configSections>
	<section name="nlog" type="NLog.Config.ConfigSectionHandler, NLog" requirePermission="false"/>
</configSection>

After that I went and added the normal NLog configuration to my web.config.

<nlog>
 <targets>
 <target type="Database" connectionString="Data Source=(local)\SQLExpress;Initial Catalog=MyDatabase;Integrated Security=True" dbProvider="mssql" name="DatabaseTarget">
 <commandText>
 insert into Log (TimeStamp, Level, Logger, Message, UserIdentity, CallSite) values(@time_stamp, @level, @logger, @message, @useridentity, @callsite);
 </commandText>
 <parameter name="@time_stamp" layout="${date}"/>
 <parameter name="@level" layout="${level}"/>
 <parameter name="@logger" layout="${logger}"/>
 <parameter name="@message" layout="${message}"/>
 <parameter name="@useridentity" layout="${aspnet-user-identity}" />
 <parameter name="@callsite" layout="${callsite}" />
 </target>
 </targets>
 <rules>
 <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="DatabaseTarget" />
 </rules>
</nlog>

This is the information for my debug environment. Because my laptop run SQL express, it connects to that instance.

This is my web.config.release :

<nlog>
<targets>
		<target xdt:Transform="SetAttributes"
				xdt:Locator="Match(name)" name="DatabaseTarget"
				connectionString="Data Source=(local);Initial Catalog=MyDatabase;Integrated Security=True"/>
	</targets>
</nlog>

It changes the connectionstring when I publish my release version. I love that feature of Visual Studio 2010!

• You register for an account
• You confirm your email address
• You login and add a car, called ‘ride’. You can choose between thousands of different car-models in our database
• After that you can start uploading pictures or make ‘picture groups’. These are groups that make it possible for you to categorize the pictures of your car
• The pictures show up on our website and the website also provides you HTML or BBCode to easily place the pictures on a different forum
• That’s it

YourRides can host an unlimited amount of pictures for you and it supplies you with short URL’s to them.

Currently there are already a lot of features, like commenting, rating and searching. But more features are planned to be added, but these will be revealed later on the site and via the YourRides twitter account.

New features:

• Completely new code, more efficient, more stable
• Thumbnails look nicer and higher quality than before
• Search through wallpapers! Every wallpaper is tagged which makes finding it a lot easier!
• WallPapers are VERY high quality, supplied by TheWallpapers.org
• Option to choose whether to save the full image, or just a cropped version
• WallPaper 3 supports loadbalancing! Get the fastest server for your location!
• Support multiple resolutions, good for when a new iPhone comes out with higher resolution screen
• Upload your own images in a higher quality, no compression used!
• Completely multi-threaded. No more ‘stuck’ GUI’s
• Fixed a couple of memory leaks

The GUI of WallPaper is still under heavy development and I am looking for the nicest way to manage this 22.000+ wallpaper library. So here are some screenshots. Not every screen is made yet, but it will be finished by the end of the week (hopefully).