How to Play, Record, and Edit Videos in iOS

This is a blog post by iOS Tutorial Team member Abdul Azeem, software architect and co-founder at Datainvent Systems, a software development and IT services company.

Recording videos (and playing around with them programmatically) is one of the coolest things you can do with your phone, but surprisingly relatively few apps make use of it.

This is likely because learning the technology behind video recording and editing in iOS – AVFoundation – is notoriously difficult.

And to make it worse, there is very little documentation on how to accomplish anything with AVFoundation. One of the few resources available is the WWDC 2010 AVFoundation session video, but it only takes you so far.

There should be an easier way. Thus was born this tutorial! :]

In this tutorial, we’ll give you hands-on experience with the AVFoundation APIs so you can start using them in your own apps. You’ll learn how to:

• Select and play a video from the media library.
• Record and save a video to the media library.
• Merge multiple videos together into a combined video, complete with a custom soundtrack! :]

Are you ready? Lights, cameras, action!

How to Send an SMS Progammatically

This post shows the basics for sending an SMS message from within an iPhone application. The class you’ll need to use is MFMessageComposeViewController which presents the standard SMS interface for composing and sending messages. As you’ll see in the example that follows, you can also pre-populate the body of the message as well one or more recipients for the SMS.

SMS View Controller Interface

The view controller that will send the SMS is shown below, notice the message composer import statement as well as the reference to the protocolMFMessageComposeViewControllerDelegate. The delegate has just one method where you can check the result of the message (sent, cancelled or failed) and this is also where you dismiss the view controller show the message composer – more on this method in a moment.