Along with the iPad last week Apple announced iBooks with support for the ePub format and iBookstore. We don’t know the details of what will be available, what we will be able to do, or how we will interact with it but I was curious about the iPub format and am sure it will see increased activity and interest in the future.

I really enjoy being an iPhone developer. One of the best things about the phone is being connected to the internet all the time. That means a lot of apps I work on need to connect web servers and web services.

Cover Flow is a technique that lets you browse and select album covers. Its used by iTunes and on the iPhone iPod player when the device is held horizontally.

It a gorgeous, visual and tactile technique that can have applicability in many places. Unfortunately, it is not part of the public SDK and can not be used without using private methods that are not allowed.

Lately I’ve been working on some projects written by other developers. I thought it would be useful to quickly summarize some techniques I use to get familiar with a code base I did not write or wrote a long time ago.

For this example I'm going to use source from the facebook three20 project http://github.com/facebook/three20 simply because it is popular and easily available.

Some of the techniques I use include:

1) Xcode Class Model

The first technique is to get an interactive class diagram using Xcode’s quick model feature under the Design > Class Model > Quick Model menu.