This minimalistic update to DTFoundation adds a helper method for loading small animated GIFs. It’s a hotfix release because no other functionality was modified.
Author Archives 
Understanding OAuth 1.0a
Chapter 6 in my book deals with how to build a solid wrapper around a RESTful web service and how to unit-test it. I thought I had finished principal writing on my book when I handed in chapter 7, soon too appear in the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) for readers who have preordered.
I walk you through implementing a wrapper – using NSURLSession – for searching for CDs on Discogs by scanned barcode. Until now the Discogs search API did not require any sort of authentication, which made it ideal for this example. Then a fateful email arrived on Friday, June 20th.
Open Letter to Long Lost Contacts
I extracted all E-Mail addresses from my archive, dating back almost 6 years. From the resulting 7303 I filtered all that didn’t seem to address individual people. That left 5466.
For a while I considered sending an email to all of these via Mailchimp. I even wrote the letter below, in English because I figured that most people would understand that. But then I decided against sending a mass e-mail, fearing that it would cause me more trouble than positive outcomes.
Instead I’m posting it on my blogs. Much less of a nuisance …
E-Mail Validation
For the ProductLayer sign-up form I wanted to make sure that the user can only send a sign up if the email address is valid. If you google for ways to validate an email address you most often solutions involving regular expressions. But since I don’t trust a RegEx unless I know it by heart, I implemented the validation with Apple’s own NSDataDetector for links.
For Hire
Over the last 8 months I worked almost exclusively on my book on Barcodes with iOS 7. That meant that during this time I could not take on any new projects. That has changed now, that my book is feature complete. There are some edits remaining to be made, as well as adding info on enhancements coming in iOS 8.
But as I need to earn a living I am now back on the market for taking on project work. I am acting Developer Evangelist for our Product Layer startup and am now looking for contract work to fill the income gap. I’ve summarized my skills and interests for your reference.
Should I switch to Swift?
Angelina asks:
I was very surprised when I heard about Swift. I was curious what your thoughts are about Swift and phasing out Objective-C specifically since you are in the process of writing the Barcodes book. Are you going to update your book to use Swift instead of Objective-C?
DTCoreText 1.6.12
It’s been a while since the previous update to DTCoreText. Now that I mostly finished my book I pulled together a new maintenance release.
DTFoundation 1.7.0
This release of DTFoundation contains fixes for the most part, but also one new class DTProgressHUD. Also it is the first released via the new CocoaPods Trunk mechanism. This is why it gets a minor release number bump.
Book: Feature Complete
On the last working day of May, I handed in the 7th and final chapter of my book. This chapter on Geofencing and iBeacons rounds off the offering of all technologies in iOS you need to know to build apps centring around physical products.
Radar: Ranging of iBeacons might fail if beacon is emitted on same device
This problem was encountered by me while research for chapter 7 of my book. Apparently other developers have encountered it as well as you can see from several questions on Stack Overflow:
- iOS 7 Ranging beacons: Sometimes ranging is Unavailable, and the only solution is reboot the device
- locationManager:rangingBeaconsDidFailForRegion:withError: kCLErrorDomain 16
- iBeacon: didRangeBeacons stops getting called, must reset device for it to work again
So I am filing this as a dupe hoping for it to be fixed in iOS 8. Or if not, that it will become more visible to Apple.
Filed as rdar://17003408 and on Open Radar.
