1. Make sure the UIButton is not blocked by another view. If your UIButton is behind another UIView (even if it’s transparent), it may be blocking touches as well. Either move it forward in your nib hierarchy or call [containerView bringSubviewToFront:myButton]; Also make sure the blocking view does not have exclusive touch: blockingView.exclusiveTouch = NO;
2. Make sure your UIButton’s container view can be interacted with. This is the one that gets me. If your UIButton is a subview of another view (not your view controller’s main view), it may not be configured to allow user interaction (the default). Try: containerView.userInteractionEnabled = YES;

*Obviously, import the QuartzCore Framework and import it into your file.

I was able to accomplish this effect in 5 steps:

1. Create two UIImageViews in your nib. Create a UIImageView for your main image, then another for your reflected image. Make sure their view content modes are both set to Aspect Fit. Also, make the frame size of the reflected image 2x that of your main image (because the perspective reflection will add width to the image).
2. Load up the main image as normal. Now load up the reflection to be upside-down like so:

   reflectionView.image = [UIImage
                      imageWithCGImage:mainImageView.image.CGImage
                      scale:1.0f
                      orientation: UIImageOrientationDownMirrored];
   

3. Now create the perspective transform like so:

   CATransform3D rotationAndPerspectiveTransform = CATransform3DIdentity;
   rotationAndPerspectiveTransform.m24 = 1.0f/-mainImageView.frame.size.width;
   [[reflectionView layer] setTransform:rotationAndPerspectiveTransform];
   

4. Move the reflection into place:

   reflectionView.center = CGPointMake(self.view.frame.size.width/2, mainImageView.frame.size.height*1.5);
   

5. To create the fade effect add a gradient that fades into the background color (black in this case).

   reflectionView.layer.masksToBounds = YES;
   
   // define gradient
   CAGradientLayer *theGradient = [CAGradientLayer layer];
   theGradient.frame = reflectionView;
   theGradient.colors = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
                         (id)[[UIColor clearColor] CGColor],
                         (id)[[UIColor blackColor] CGColor], nil];
   
   // add gradient to reflection image
   [reflectionView insertSublayer:theGradient atIndex:0];
   reflectionView = 0.25f;

The album “Algorithms” was featured in some “Best of 2011″ blogs this year. I kind of feel like we pulled something of a fast one on people as we are, for all intents and purposes a DIY, unsigned band- so being mentioned in line with bands like Mastodon or blink 182 is pretty damn funny to me. I had something of a shitty year, but making this album and hearing that some people actually enjoyed it was really nice.

Anyway, I felt like pooling the blogs all together here for some reason. I left out out some of the blogs that linked to full album downloads (we love you too, but I probably shouldn’t post those). Thanks to every one who wrote one of these lists (or voted for us, if the case may be), your gigantic checks are in the mail.

Axl Rosenburg’s Top Fifteen Metal Albums of 2011 (Metal Sucks)

Maclyn Bean’s Top 23 Albums of 2011 (American Aftermath)

Top 100 Albums of 2011 (The Clock – Plymoth State University)

Sean Gressens’ Top 100 Albums of 2011 (Metal Injection)

Jesse Get Your Gun: The Top 10 of 2011 (Gun Shy Assassin)

Metal Injection Junkie’s Top Albums of 2011 (Metal Injection)

It’s not to say we didn’t have some serious help from some amazing dudes. Since there weren’t really liner notes for our solely digital or handmade CD release, here is a short thank you list, in no particular order, but with what they did, for fun.

• Kurt – recorded the damn thing.
• Alan – pressed the awesome button (mastering).
• Matt – believed in us early on, for some weird reason.
• Ben – too many awesome things to list.
• Curran – made us sound cool to people (an onerous task).
• Shina – starred in our video and let us crash at his house during recording.
• Andrea – has been to every nyc (or slightly outside) show.
• Dudes – every kid or band who helps us with a show or lets us crash on their floor. that’s so nice of you!

“world’s best dad”

if ([scrollTimer isValid]) {
[scrollTimer invalidate];
scrollTimer = nil;
}

-Time signatures (limited to 4/4 currently)! This one’s big time…

-Custom Keys for Smart Instruments.

-Show the total track time somewhere.

-Fades!

-Pitch correction

That is all.

Needless to say, this could cause some confusion to the user, especially if you still have cells in the table view that are not editable. I wanted my table view to automatically exit edit mode when I remove the last editable cell. However, in my commitEditingStyle function, this:

if ([tableView numberOfRowsInSection:0] == 0)  //if no more cells
[tableView setEditing:NO animated:YES

was not doing anything. I stuck an NSLog in there to see if it was in fact triggering when the last cell was removed and it was. The solution: call setEditing on super, not tableView, i.e.:

if ([tableView numberOfRowsInSection:0] == 0)  //if no more cells
[super setEditing:NO animated:YES];

The problem is, the nav controller doesn’t “fade out” the selected table cell when you go back a view in the navigation controller. In debugging the problem I discovered it is not sending viewWillAppear/viewDidAppear messages to the view either.

After scouring the web, I found that a lot of people were having the same problem, but no one was able to present an elegant (or quick) solution. Anyway, I came up with a solution that still seems kludgy to me, but is only a matter of adding a single line of code.

Pass viewDidAppear manually.

In the view controller that is the root of the navigation controller (which is one of the view controllers of the tab bar controller), in your didSelectRowAtIndexPath method, you will likely have something like this:

DetailViewController *detailViewController = [[DetailViewController alloc] init];
 [self.navigationController pushViewController:detailViewController animated:YES];
 [detailViewController release];

Add the following line in between the pushViewController line and the release line:

[self.navigationController viewDidAppear:YES];

The problem is, I believe, is that the navigation controller has already “appeared” when it is first loaded and showed the root view. So when you go back from a deeper view, those viewWillAppear/viewDidAppear methods aren’t getting fired anymore to refresh the selected tableView cell. The added line forces the navigation controller to fire viewDidAppear which under normal circumstances reloads the previously selected cell and refreshes the tableView for you.

Not sure when you wouldn’t want this behavior- it should be automatic in my opinion. Having a table view inside a tab doesn’t seem like it would be too uncommon.

So I was listening back to some of those old recording and decided that while there is still a lot I want to do with some of them, a handful are as complete as they’ll ever be. So instead of waiting indefinitely to finish everything for a full-length, I’ve decided to release the 3 most finished and  cohesive songs as an EP titled: “1: From South Slope to Bushwick”. It will be sold on iTunes. The plan is to release the other eight or so songs in future EP installments as well.