→ Microsoft Acquires Xamarin ∞

Interesting, and unsurprising, news today that Xamarin has been acquired by Microsoft. I’ve never used it directly to build apps but I did to some research into using their test cloud system (which is actually calabash-based, something I’ve worked a lot with and have written about before). I hear of a lot of people loving to be able to build iOS apps without learning Objective-C or Swift.

This gives Microsoft an interesting position as a vendor of an iOS SDK. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

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.

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.

→ Implementing a language with LLVM ∞

Writing a programming language is not something I’d ever attempt to accomplish. However, the idea of getting a better understanding of LLVM is very interesting. This tutorial isn’t a complete lesson in the compiler, but I think it will at least help you learn a little more about it..

“This tutorial runs through the implementation of a simple language, showing how fun and easy it can be.”

Sounds fun. I’m in.

Controlling Xcode warnings via pragmas

I hate warnings in Xcode. Originally, they didn’t bug me too much and I’d even use the #warning preprocessor directive to note TODO items. I want problems to be the only thing that shows up in the build log so I notice it right away. Then, one day Xcode updates and I get a lot of new warnings. This is a good thing and you should choose to turn the stricter warnings on.

My Developer Tools and Utilities List (2012 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’ve seen this idea come up often on other blogs, so this is an idea borrowed from other developers on the internet. Anyway, the following is a list of hardware and software I use on a regular basis. Hardware Retina MacBook Pro - with a 2.

Automated Acceptance Testing or: How I stopped worrying and trusted the tests

This month at Triangle CocoaHeads in Durham, I stepped away from being just the organizer and did a talk on automated acceptance testing with Calabash. This is a topic I’m really excited to learn more about and am constantly trying to become a better tester. I first learned about Calabash when seeing a video of one of the blitz talks from NSConference about it. I started using it on one project and it seemed to do a nice job.

Static Linking with C++ Project in Xcode

This week at NSCoder Night, another developer was trying to statically link the MySQL library. He had initially linked it as a dynamic library and couldn’t seem to get it working with Xcode. After working with it for a little while I figured out what needed to happen; and it wasn’t clear. Here I’ll discuss what process I went through to track down the problem and what tools I used.

Things I wish I knew yesterday

Even when you’ve been working in an environment for years, you still find things you never knew. I liken it to learning about a famous actor you had never heard of, but has starred in all your favorite movies. I found two things that I wish I had known or seen, but for whatever reason, I missed. First up, convenience functions for converting a CGRect to a NSString or a NSString to a CGRect.

Global hotkeys in Cocoa on Snow Leopard

I am working on a small app at the office for all our mac users to help locate files on the network (more on this later), I decided to go with a spotlight style NSStatusItem based app. I’ve been really inspired by these apps lately (when done right). Mostly thanks to Notify. To make this more handy I decided to include a global hotkey. For Leopard and earlier, one problem is you have to use the old Carbon-based events.