Glowing and soft shadowed text on iPhone

iPhone OS’s UILabel provides basic shadowing properties which can be used to create inset text effects and basic text shadows. However, the shadow has no blur and gives a sharp edge which is not particularly useful if you’re looking for a soft or subtle shadow.

Recently I needed to create a “glowing” text effect – essentially a soft shadow without the offset – so I wrote a simple UILabel subclass which let me specify an offset, colour and blur amount.

The screenshot shows a how the class can be used to create a glow effect but it’s equally easy to create soft shadows for your text.

You can find the source here on GitHub.

Simple iPhone & iPad Video Streaming with Streamory

For the last couple of months we’ve been working on technology to enable anyone to stream live and pre-recorded video to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices.

Today, we’re pleased to announce Streamory, our in-alpha service which lets users easily stream their own video and audio to the iPhone with only a couple of clicks. Streamory takes the hard work of configuring and setting up a streaming infrastructure, and instead lets you simply upload a video or input stream and, with a single click, publish a stream for use in your site or iPhone / iPad app.

You can check our simple web-based demo iPhone app on the Streamory site – make sure you’re using an iPhone or iPad for best experience, though! The demo app demonstrates some different types of output Streamory can generate, as well as adaptive bandwidth streams which give you higher or lower quality content automatically as available bandwidth changes.

We’ve already got some great ideas to make it easy for users to create iPhone-ready video streams without the fuss, but we’d love to hear what you think so get in touch and let us know! :)

We’re not ready for beta testers yet, but if you’d be interested in participating, drop us a line and we’ll get back to you when we’re ready.

Andrew Gleave is the lead developer of iPhone and mobile apps at Red Robot Studios. Considering developing a mobile app? Contact Red Robot Studios to see how we can help.