#basar akyelli

Before enrolling in Flatiron School, Basar Akyelli was an Electronic Discovery manager at Deloitte. Concerned that his skills were slowly becoming outdated and driven by an enthusiasm for Apple products, he enrolled in Flatiron School’s iOS Development Immersive. Now a Product Manager at Google, Basar spoke with us to share what spurred his career change, and how he rediscovered what he loves about tech.

Tell us a little about your background—what were you doing before applying to Flatiron School?

The following is a guest post by Basar Akyelli and originally appeared on his blog. Basar is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

For my upcoming Flatiron School Meet-up talk, I’ve been learning about ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Api’s. My aim is to be able to build a back end for an iOS App eventually; so I am planning to put all of the moving parts together on my MacBook.

Since I need Visual Studio to build ASP.NET Web Api’s, I purchased Parallels and installed Windows 7 as a virtual machine. Then I installed Visual Studio 2013 and started getting my hands dirty. Little did I know that I needed to take quite a few steps to be able to access my web application from Safari OS X.

Here are the steps that I followed to make all this work:

1) Disable Firewall in Windows 7: Obviously the ideal way of dealing with this would be opening ports for your web applications. But since I’m only planning to use my Parallels virtual machine for ASP.NET development, I took the risk and disabled the entire firewall. 

2) Fix Parallels Sharing Preferences Before Installing Visual Studio:  This took me the longest time. In order for IIS Express to find its configuration files, you need to make sure Parallels does not map OS X Documents folder to Windows Documents folder.

3) Update Network Adapter Settings for your Windows 7 Installation: We want OS X to be able to ping Windows 7. In order for this to work, you need to make sure both OS’s are on the same subnet. I made this work by tweaking the Parallels settings:

4) Fix IIS Express Configuration: Your IIS Express configuration file resides in this location: %USERPROFILE%\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config

You need to open this file and fix the following line which corresponds to your Web App. This will enable us to reach this app with computer name, instead of forcing us to usehttp://localhost

5) That’s it! Just run IIS Express: You need to open a command prompt with Administrator privileges and run the following command

“C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe” /site:YourWebAppName

Now go to Safari on OS X and run your test!

The following is a guest post by Basar Akyelli and originally appeared on his blog. Basar is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

This week at Flatiron School, we learned how to create custom UIMapView annotations using the MKAnnotation protocol. Even though at first I found it to be more complicated than it should be, it started to make more sense after I used it a few times.

Let’s build a single view application that shows our custom MKAnnotation object on a map.

On Xcode, let’s create a new Single View application:

  Since we’ll be using Map Kit methods and objects, we should add the Map Kit framework to our project.

Onto our main View, let’s drag and drop a Map View and check its “Shows User Location” behavior:

If we run our application now, this is what we get:

Let’s zoom to our location. Not that hard. We need to create an outlet to our Map first. Just Control-drag your map to the ViewController.h file and create an IBOutlet. Let’s name our outlet mapView:

  Don’t forget to import  <MapKit/MapKit.h> in your header file. Now we’re ready to zoom. We will need to implement the Map View’s didUpdateUserLocation method. In order for the Map View to call this method once it finds the user’s location, we need to set its delegate property to our ViewController.

Now let’s run the application again:

 Much better. Now that we’re done with our basic set up. Let’s create a custom annotation for Bryant Park. For this, we’ll need to create a new NSObject class which adheres to the MKAnnotation delegate. Let’s go ahead and create this class, called “MyCustomAnnotation” and set its protocol:

The MKAnnotation protocol asks us to create two properties: an title property which is an NSString, and a coordinate property which is a CLLocationCoordinate2D. We also need to create a new initializer as well as a method which will return an instance of MKAnnotationView: 

title is the text that is displayed inside the Callout box which is shown once you tap on a pin. coordinate is the 2D coordinate of the pin. Let’s go ahead and implement our initializer and our  MKAnnotationView method.

We’re basically returning a MKAnnotationView object that has a custom image (park_icon) and it is able to show a Callout dialogue. It will also have an Detail Disclosure accessory on its right side.

Let’s go ahead and add our custom MKAnnotationView to our map. Let’s not forget to import MyCustomAnnotation.h to our ViewController.m file. We will need to add an annotation to our map, and we’ll also need to implement the viewForAnnotation method of the MapView protocol to set our annotation’s view to our newly built method.

We’re asking the mapView if there are any unused MyCustomAnimation annotations that we can re-use (this is to prevent creating unnecessary annotations — we only need what we see on our screen.) Then we set it to our annotationView method which we built into our MyCustomAnnotation object.

We’re done! Let’s see what our app looks like now: