tagged: MXit

Coding tricks learned from the MXit iPhone App

Posted by Leonard Ah Kun in Coding Tricks, iOS

Being a mobile app developer, whenever I use an app, I always think about how things were implemented and when I see something cool, how they did it. I’ve made a chat application before on the iPhone, and there are some complexities you run in to interface-wise, so I was interested in how our local devs tackle the problems I’ve come across. The MXit app isn’t bad, but not the greatest chat app out there. Anyway, there were 2 things I’ve learned from it.

1. Chat session conversations are displayed using a webview. I havn’t seen this done before, but it does add picking up urls, copying and pasting and pinch zoom all for free!

The downside doing it this way is that It is a bit slow to render sometimes though.

2. Customise the keyboard by overlaying your own buttons. This is a pretty cool trick, however it could have been done better by matching the colour better and also adding a button pressed highlight state when pressed.

There is one problem though that I’m not sure how you avoid. If you have a different international keyboard open, there’s no way to press the international button.