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.
Continue Reading »Over at Two Toasters we’ve started a blog to discuss technical topics around iOS (and Android) development called Toastmo. Lately I’ve been pushing everyone to use UIAppearance in their work and custom views. Today we posted an article I wrote about it that covers all the basics and gives a few examples of implementing the protocol to help your own views. UPDATE: This post is no longer online. Sorry.
I’ve been using Rakefiles with my Xcode projects for over a year now. I really love that all the tasks I perform can be easily automated via a small Ruby method. For example, you can setup a rake task for running mogenerator: rake mogen
The biggest problem I’ve had is getting the xcodebuild command to work properly all the time. A few weeks ago, a coworker found this RubyGem that provides a nice interface to working with Xcode projects from the command line or Rakefile. It even allows you to run unit tests, manipulate the project, publish to TestFlight, and more.
Late last year I started working on a little experiment. I wondered if it was possible to speed up a download of a large file by splitting up a request and making multiple concurrent requests using HTTP Byte range requests.
So I put together a subclass of AFNetworking’s AFHTTPRequestOperation that can do just that. I found that it works best with about 3 concurrent requests. Any more than that and the overhead of the different operations and combining them seems to take longer than one request. Overall, when running on WiFi it seems to work faster than one operation.
I also created a custom progress bar that can show different parts of the download being finished. It is a pretty cool little project in itself! Even though it is slower with more than 3 requests, the progress bar looks really cool when you tell it to split into 100 requests and it shows them all completing.
Check out the source and send me any comments ideas you have or contribute, if you like. There are a lot of things I’d like to experiment with this idea and try to do some testing to see if it really is faster.
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.
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At our October CocoaHeads I gave a small talk on using UIActivity to create nice little wrappers around your application’s URL Schemes. I wanted to look for an app to implement a quick version of this on, but got busy and forgot.
Tonight, Google released the Google Maps App for iOS and matching documentation for their URL Scheme. I thought it was worth trying to wrap it in a UIActivity. It is far from tested or complete, but it was a fun little project to hack on.
Check it out on Github.
This weekend I was a speaker and attendee at CocoaConf Raleigh. Now in it’s second year in Raleigh the conference has matured into a great traveling conference (This year they were in Chicago, DC, Columbus, and Portland) with a lot of great sessions. I’ll review my session, discuss the sessions I attended, and talk about the conference overall. The Conference Last year my biggest complaint about the conference was the location.
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CocoaHeads is a great thing. Once a month our local community gathers together to talk about Apple Development, be geeks, and even talk about the latest movies. I like to imagine it as mini-WWDCs happening once a month, all over the world. That was the one flaw though, I’d like to visit all the CocoaHeads and see what they are talking about too. I noticed a few other groups had recorded their meetings, so I started recording our sessions hoping that more groups would do the same.
It hasn’t happened yet – most groups don’t record their sessions. What if there was a site that aggregated videos from all CocoaHeads groups? Would creating a place specifically for CocoaHeads videos help?
I think it’s worth exploring, so a couple weeks ago I launched CocoaHeads TV. Right now we have videos from Australia, China, France, and the United States.
A few months ago I spent a weekend and built a small app for the show my friend and I do every week, The Bad Movie Podcast. Then I sat on it for several months, only tweaking it occasionally. Deep down I thought there was no way Apple would approve it due to the nature of the show. Thankfully, a few people informed me that I was silly and should “Roll the Dice”.
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I had the honor of being interviewed by ObjectiveSee which is a great site featuring Interviews with Apple iOS and Mac developers.
I really like what Justin Watt is doing with that site and it really is cool to be listed with the other developers there.
Some of the other cool interviews to check out are (to name just a few, because they are all good): Josh Abernathy, Loren Brichter, Mike Rundle, and Sam Soffes.