Introducing – iAd Production: A Beginner’s Guide

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Ben Collier's book, iAd Production a Beginner's Guide

A beginner’s guide to iAd Producer

In late February my book iAd Production: A Beginner’s Guide finally got published after 9 months of hard work!

Think of an iAd as a micro-app contained within an app, on a user’s iPhone or iPad, that they’ve downloaded from the App Store. When the user taps your advert’s banner, it bursts into life, filling the entire screen of their device.

The book focuses on using Apple’s iAd Producer app to create interactive ads for iOS, find out more about it on my book page.

iOS SHA512 Hex String

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Here’s an Objective C method that’ll return a SHA512 hex of a given string:

-(NSString*) sha512:(NSString*)input {
    const char *cstr = [input cStringUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    NSData *data = [NSData dataWithBytes:cstr length:input.length];
    
    uint8_t digest[CC_SHA512_DIGEST_LENGTH];
    
    CC_SHA512(data.bytes, data.length, digest);
    
    NSMutableString* output = [NSMutableString stringWithCapacity:CC_SHA512_DIGEST_LENGTH * 2];
    
    for(int i = 0; i < CC_SHA512_DIGEST_LENGTH; i++)
        [output appendFormat:@"%02x", digest[i]];
    
    return output;
    
}

You'll need to include:

    #include

£ PHP Issue

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If you’re outputting strings with certain characters in PHP you may find they’re showing as  to fix this make sure you’re setting the character encoding right by using the htmlentities function:

htmlentities("£123.45",ENT_QUOTES,"UTF-8")

This encodes the correct html entities for the values using UTF-8 encoding.

App Store Keyword Searching Optimisation Tips

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From the iTunes Connect FAQ: [Developer login required]

“Your app is searchable by your app name, your keywords and your company name.”

This means you don’t have to waste valuable keywords by including your app or company name in the 100 byte keyword limit.

To gain a few more characters you can also remove the spaces in-between keywords and separate them with commas: just,like,this.

However; don’t be a dick. It’s tempting to fill your app name up with many keywords, this makes your app look cheap – don’t do it!