While looking at Apple’s iAd Suite sample code I noticed that the TabbedBanner example was the perfect use case for iOS 6’s new Container View Storyboard object. It allows a view controller to be placed inside another view controller which is exactly how we want our banner view controllers setup. No code. Actually it gets better, to get Apple’s example to work with container views we mostly remove code! Check out my example github project or follow below to see how.

To get started it’s easiest to start a new project based on Xcode’s Tabbed Application template while making sure that the Use Storyboards option is checked. Then download Apple’s iAd Suite sample code and copy the BannerViewController .h and .m files into your project (for extra fun you copy the TextViewController classes as well to show off the timer reacting to ads appearing).

Next open up the main storyboard and remove the relationship segue to the first and second view controller and move them to the right to make room for the container view controllers. Then drag out two view controllers and two container view and place each container view inside their respective view controllers. Open the Identity Inspector and select each new view controller and change the class to BannerViewController. The Banner View Controllers now need to be connected to the tab bar so ctrl drag from the Tab Bar Controller scene to each Banner View Controller and select a relationship segue.

Now we need to make sure that the container view is the root view of each Banner View Controller. Unless someone knows an easier way I’ve found it best to drag the container view above the default view in Interface Builder’s Document Outline. Finally we can connect each Banner View Controller’s container view to their repective first and second view controllers from the orignial template by ctrl dragging from each container view to each first or second view controller and selecting the embed segue. We are all done with storyboard though you can add a long text view to each first and second view controller so that you can test the banner view controller to make sure it doesn’t occlude it’s child view controller.

Open up BannerViewController.h and remove the old init method. We don’t need this anymore since we are creating the banner view controllers in the storyboard.

- (instancetype)initWithContentViewController:(UIViewController *)contentController;

Move on to BannerViewController.m and remove the implementation of the previous method. We are almost done but we still how to set the _contentController instance variable and add the banner view controller to the BannerViewManager’s shared instance since we are not overriding the init method anymore. Instead of implementing a custom init method we have to wait for the storyboard to setup the view controller and then let us finish the initilization by overriding initWithCoder: and adding the banner view controller to the BannerViewManager’s shared instance.

- (id)initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)aDecoder
{
    self = [super initWithCoder:aDecoder];
    if (self) {
        [[BannerViewManager sharedInstance] addBannerViewController:self];
    }
    return self;
}

But what about the _contentController you may ask. At this point we haven’t loaded BannerViewController’s view and it’s subviews thus the container view isn’t loaded. Normally if we were creating this view controller programmatically we could create the view like in loadView but since it is created in the storyboard we can remove this method as well. After BannerViewController’s view is loaded it is still missing the contents of it’s container view so it invokes prepareForSegue: to retrieve the child view controllers from the storyboard. It is at this point we can set our _contentController to the segue’s destination view controller.

- (void)prepareForSegue:(UIStoryboardSegue *)segue sender:(id)sender
{
    _contentController = segue.destinationViewController;
}

And we’re done! Build and run to see that the banner view controller doesn’t occlude it’s child view controller when the ad pops up and the same ad is show across the view controllers. Now you can easily incorporate iAds into your Tabbed Application that uses Storyboards.

Can’t find the .com or .net top-level domain (TLD) for your website? Thinking about a country code TLD for your site like .io or possibly a domain hack? Great, there are plenty of short url’s available for other TLD’s besides the traditional .com’s and .net’s. You can filter by price or how it looks with your particular URL but you should also consider data detectors.

Apple’s data detector NSDataDetector combs user text views such as notes and emails looking for anything from mailing addresses, to email addresses and even tracking numbers for packages. But most importantly for your website it looks for URL’s. Now normally it will pick just about any TLD as long as it is prepended with www. such as www.github.io. However it doesn’t pick up all non-prepended TLD’s. For example, if you email someone with the text github.io, it will not turn that nice shade of blue indicating that it is a tappable link. So which non-prepended TLD’s does it pick up? I asked stackoverflow but no one seemed interested so I ran the names myself with this text file from ICANN.

Uppercase:

example.COM
example.EDU
example.EU
example.GOV
example.LY
example.NET
example.ORG

Lowercase:

example.ar
example.at
example.au
example.be
example.br
example.ca
example.ch
example.cn
example.de
example.dk
example.edu
example.es
example.eu
example.fi
example.fr
example.gov
example.gr
example.hk
example.hu
example.il
example.is
example.it
example.jp
example.kr
example.lu
example.ly
example.ma
example.mx
example.net
example.nl
example.no
example.nz
example.org
example.pt
example.ru
example.se
example.sg
example.th
example.tn
example.tr
example.tw
example.ua
example.uk
example.us

Interestingly enough the data detector is case sensitive. So it looks like if you can’t find a traditional TLD you should try to go with .ly (the country code TLD for Libya) since NSDataDetector picks up both uppercase and lowercase URL’s. One more thing to consider is the TLD keyboard shortcut on iOS. A user can hold down the .com button to quickly fill in .net, .edu, .org, .us, or .com of course. Also remember that all this was tested on the US locale and ymmv on a different locale.