Blocks on the iPhone – PSAlertView

17 Mar
2010

It took a while to get my head around blocks. And it didn’t help that they are not officially available on the iPhone. But savvy devs from Plausible Labs back-ported the GCC extensions that were added to support blocks to the iPhone. And it’s AppStore-safe and they are developing it actively, now adapting it for the iPad. (I already blogged about it)

Today I coded the first actually useful component for blocks. PSAlertView – a wrapper for UIAlertView, no more need for custom delegates. It’s so natural if you think about it.

Some code so you get the idea:

PSAlertView *alert = [PSAlertView alertWithTitle:alertTitle message:alertMessage];
[alert setCancelButtonWithTitle:NSLocalizedString(@"Ok", @"") block:^{}];
[alert addButtonWithTitle:NSLocalizedString(@"Retry", @"") block: ^{
[self sendMessage:message];
}];
[alert show];

No more custom delegates, no need to set the protocol in the class header. You can use variables from the function surrounding the block (message) and there’s no performance impact.

Update: Check out a full example on github. I’d love to read your thoughts on it!

PSAlertView is loosely based on PLActionSheet, thanks to Landon Fuller for the tutorials.