Our first iPhone game GreenThumb available in the App Store

We are giddy to announce the availability of our first game for the iPhone, GreenThumb. View the game at iTunes or try a full-featured, ad-supported FREE version! GreenThumb is an original, one-thumb casual game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is easy to pick up yet challenging to master.

Using iPhone 3G S Voice Control Commands

Apple’s latest hardware upgrade for the iPhone line, the iPhone 3G S, adds voice control capabilities. Without looking at the device, using voice control you can easily dial the phone using numbers or a contact’s name, and control the iPod with various commands. Here are the details:

iPhone SDK: Solve [UINavigationController pushViewController:] unrecognized selector sent to instance

I adore coding to the iPhone SDK. It’s the most joyful coding I’ve done in the quarter century (gasp!) I’ve spent coding various computer systems. It’s a combination of Objective-C (elegant) and Cocoa (beautiful). There is one exception I keep getting and just infrequently enough that I forget why I get it. I thought someone might benefit from this because it’s an easy trap to fall into.

Cocoa: Explode or break an NSString into individual words

Breaking apart a string of text into component words is a requirement for performing searches in text and other text processing. This task is easy in Cocoa/Objective-C, although it requires digging through a few class references in the documentation. If you need a more complicated expansion of a string, at least this code will give you a starting point.

iPhone Programming: Set UITableView Accessory Arrow Style

The iPhone SDK provides an easy-to-code standard for creating consistent user interfaces. The UITableView class is used in many iPhone applications. Most applications that present information to you in rows that you can tap to slide a new page over to see details use a UITableView to do the magic. Once you have a UITableView setup, you can easily add the little accessory arrow icons to the right side of the table cells by following the steps in this Tech-Recipe.

Open vim editor to first occurrence of search term

I don’t want to admit how long I’ve been using vi as my go-to editor (although if vi had been born then, it would now be old enough to drink and vote). One of the things I love about vi is that you only need to know a few things to use it, but it has so many little tricks that you never seem to run out of new things to try. The ones that make your life easier will stick. I had never seen this one before — it’s a simple command line option for vim that includes a search term. When used, your cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the term.

How to empty or clear the contents of an existing UNIX file

If you want to empty the contents of a UNIX file, you could delete it and recreate it, but, as is typical of UNIX, there are more elegant alternatives. Here are a couple of ways to dump the innards of a file. If you know of any others, add them to the comments.

Defend Your Web Server Against Distributed Denial of Services (DDos) Attacks

In computer security, it quickly becomes apparent that preventing computer attacks is much more challenging than attacking computers. A good example of an easy technique to prevent a website from functioning is a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack in which a number of compromised computers around the internet make web (or other protocol) requests on some poor server. If the web page requested is one that requires lots of server-side processing, the resulting load from the combined requests prevents the web server from responding to legitimate requests, thus denying the service. As Tech-Recipes.com was subjected to such an attack recently, we felt it might be beneficial to others if we described the steps we took in our response.