Patterns with Swift Concurrency in new APIs

I’ve watched a lot of this year’s WWDC sessions—like over 30 this weekend. This year just seemed to be really interesting and I’ve really enjoyed many of the videos. Also, I’m super excited about DocC and can’t wait to start building better documentation! One thing has been bugging me. After watching Meet async/await in Swift, Meet MusicKit for Swift and Meet StoreKit 2 sessions I started noticing an interesting difference in patterns in use with Swift Concurrency.

Continue Reading »

Relaunching CocoaHeads.TV

In 2012 I launched CocoaHeads.TV as a site that could aggregate CocoaHeads videos from around the world. We had some really great success and people from Australia, China, France, Germany, and many groups in the US started submitting videos. Unfortunately, I didn’t build it to make it easy to submit and I became the bottle neck to adding new videos. No more! I’ve relaunched CocoaHeads.TV with a redesign and I’ll be asking for CocoaHeads organizers to join the site and post their videos.

Continue Reading »

CocoaHeads March 2016

For CocoaHeads March I was inspired by one of our member’s other meetup groups, Triangle Open Source Open Mic, and decided to have ⚡️lightning talks ⚡️. We actually did this once before in December of 2013 and I’ve been wanting to do it again since then. Considering I only gave the community a one week heads up, I think this we had a great selection of talks.

Continue Reading »

Learning German with AVSpeechUtterance

For the last couple of months I’ve been studying German with my wife. We both have always wanted to become polyglots so we decided to stop waiting around an just start learning. We both have some ancestors from Germany and would love to visit, so that was a great place to start. One thing I’ve been struggling with is numbers in German. I can count well, but hearing a number in conversation requires a lot of thought. The problem is it is backwards from English, Twenty-One in German would be One-and-Twenty (einundzwanzig). So what’s an iOS Developer to do? I made an app for me to practice.

Continue Reading »

360|iDev 2015

This week I was a speaker and attendee at 360|iDev in Denver. It was my third time at a 360|iDev (fourth if you count last year’s Mini in Greenville, SC) and I think this was probably the best one I’ve been to yet. Now, I’m not saying the previous visits to this conference were bad or anything, I just enjoyed it a lot this year. Here I’ll review the week and my session.

Continue Reading »

May the Force Touch be with You

Last week I bought a newly updated 13" MacBook Pro with an amazing new Force Touch trackpad. I love it and it’s hard to go back to the older trackpad on my MacBook Pro at work. I’ve already caught myself trying to press on the top corners of the older version and have tried to press harder a few times. At this week’s NSCoder Night I decided to play around with the new Force Touch API to see how it works.

Continue Reading »

Swift, you’ve changed so much

During the crazy week of WWDC 2014—right after the announcement of Swift—I decided to spend a little time trying to implement a quick weather app using the new language. I managed to wrap it up in a few hours (and spent way too much time trying to figure out how to parse JSON with a generically-typed dictionary) and open sourced it. There it sat for all these months while several versions of Swift were released.

Continue Reading »

Videos for iOS and Mac Developers

I haven’t been very disciplined in updating CocoaHeads.tv this year. One of my goals for CocoaHeads in 2015 is to improve the quality of videos I record and find ways to improve CocoaHeads.tv. I’ve been really inspired by some of the videos out there in the community. 360|iDev and 360|iDev Min The folks at 360 have been pretty good about providing the videos from sessions at their conference. Currently there are videos from the last two years of 360|iDev and this years 360|iDev Min.

Continue Reading »

My Developer Tools and Utilities List (2014 Edition)

I’ve often wanted to do a yearly roundup of the tools and utilities I use; if only as a log of things I use over time. I did this two years ago in 2012 and when I was thinking about getting back to blogging I wanted to update the list. The funny thing is not much has changed. I’m actually surprised that I don’t use that many tools. Hardware Retina MacBook Pro - Still working with my 2012 Retina MacBook Pro with 2.

Continue Reading »

Where I change my mind about CocoaPods

It has almost become a joke at our local NSCoder Night. Bring up CocoaPods and a long and heated discussion about whether it is a good idea will begin. I’ve always been on the “I don’t like it” side of the argument. Then today during our weekly “CocoaBrains” tech talk at Two Toasters we re-review this dependency management solution. Spoiler: I am changing my mind about CocoaPods. Reasons I didn’t like it I tried CocoaPods when it was pretty new.

Continue Reading »