Thinking about heading off to Morocco, get a bit of sun and beach!

You also get free entry into the Shakespear’s Museum, and they will have some great food and drink on offer. A nice chance to try some Pimms and a Globe burger.

Shakespeare was born on 23 April, 1564, and this years free days was on Sunday, 22nd April 2012.

I also got to see a lot more of MIPtv, a huge TV event, where all the TV show produces come to sell their shows and channels to all the TV Channels around the world. Being a speaker at MIPCube, meant I got special entry to all the events as well.

Somehow on this trip I manages to lose my glasses on the yacht we were staying on, lost my iPhone at the beach at 2am, and my HTC android decided to stop working as well. I think it missed my iPhone.

You can read more about my apps at Rewired State. Thanks to Rewired state and Midem for organising this wonderful event.

Villa Francais, 33 Avenue Wester Wemyss, 06150 Cannes, France

The aim is to come up with apps for the TV industry, and helping people stay in touch with their favorite TV shows.

In most cases, you’d just need to use the default styles defined in NSDateFormatterStyle.

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateStyle:NSDateFormatterMediumStyle];
[dateFormatter setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];
NSLog(@"%@", [dateFormatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]]);

[dateFormatter release];

// Output: Dec 2, 2008 3:58 PM

But at times, you’d prefer to set your own time format, and that’s where it starts to get tricky.

It is actually quite simple, all you have to do is to create a format string to tell NSDateFormatter how to format your time string.

:
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"hh:mm:ss"]
:
// Output: 03:58:27

The problem is, the official documentation from apple doesn’t really tell you what specifiers are available to format your string. Even worse, it doesn’t conform to the ISO 8601 standard! What a bummer! And after a bit of searching on the net and still come up short, I have decided to just hack a little bit of code together to dump a list of specifiers and their results.

(EDIT: Apparently, there is now a link to the Unicode Date Field Symbol Table that Apple follows, even though my test shows that it still doesn’t conform 100% to the standard. Thanks Benjamin and Adam for finding it.)

a:	AM/PM
A:	0~86399999 (Millisecond of Day)

c/cc:	1~7 (Day of Week)
ccc:	Sun/Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri/Sat
cccc:	Sunday/Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday/Saturday

d:	1~31 (0 padded Day of Month)
D:	1~366 (0 padded Day of Year)

e:	1~7 (0 padded Day of Week)
E~EEE:	Sun/Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri/Sat
EEEE:	Sunday/Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday/Saturday

F:	1~5 (0 padded Week of Month, first day of week = Monday)

g:	Julian Day Number (number of days since 4713 BC January 1)
G~GGG:	BC/AD (Era Designator Abbreviated)
GGGG:	Before Christ/Anno Domini

h:	1~12 (0 padded Hour (12hr))
H:	0~23 (0 padded Hour (24hr))

k:	1~24 (0 padded Hour (24hr)
K:	0~11 (0 padded Hour (12hr))

L/LL:	1~12 (0 padded Month)
LLL:	Jan/Feb/Mar/Apr/May/Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov/Dec
LLLL:	January/February/March/April/May/June/July/August/September/October/November/December

m:	0~59 (0 padded Minute)
M/MM:	1~12 (0 padded Month)
MMM:	Jan/Feb/Mar/Apr/May/Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov/Dec
MMMM:	January/February/March/April/May/June/July/August/September/October/November/December

q/qq:	1~4 (0 padded Quarter)
qqq:	Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4
qqqq:	1st quarter/2nd quarter/3rd quarter/4th quarter
Q/QQ:	1~4 (0 padded Quarter)
QQQ:	Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4
QQQQ:	1st quarter/2nd quarter/3rd quarter/4th quarter

s:	0~59 (0 padded Second)
S:	(rounded Sub-Second)

u:	(0 padded Year)

v~vvv:	(General GMT Timezone Abbreviation)
vvvv:	(General GMT Timezone Name)

w:	1~53 (0 padded Week of Year, 1st day of week = Sunday, NB: 1st week of year starts from the last Sunday of last year)
W:	1~5 (0 padded Week of Month, 1st day of week = Sunday)

y/yyyy:	(Full Year)
yy/yyy:	(2 Digits Year)
Y/YYYY:	(Full Year, starting from the Sunday of the 1st week of year)
YY/YYY:	(2 Digits Year, starting from the Sunday of the 1st week of year)

z~zzz:	(Specific GMT Timezone Abbreviation)
zzzz:	(Specific GMT Timezone Name)
Z:	+0000 (RFC 822 Timezone)

(Letters not listed here did not return any result.)

Basically, you put the above letters together in a NSString to tell NSDateFormatter what to display.

In most cases, you can concatenate a letter together a number of times, and you will get a 0 padded version of it up to the number of letters you have concatenated (eg: @”ssssss” => @”000059″). In other cases, the longer concatenated version will give a different result (eg: @”M” => @”12″, @”MMMM” => @”December”).

Also, some of the different letters seem to be giving out the same results (eg. the q’s & the Q’s), while others have subtle differences (eg. the v’s & the z’s). One of the silly one is the uppercase Y’s, where the year jumps ahead at the end of the year, so unless you really want that, it’s better to just stick with the lowercase y’s.

Stolen from here: http://web.archive.org/web/20100213132409/http://www.stepcase.com/blog/2008/12/02/format-string-for-the-iphone-nsdateformatter/