It’s gotten very late, already 8 pm. But let me still show you a few screen shots of my upcoming DTCertificateViewer component. You can already pre-order for 50% off the final retail price.
Author Archives 
Auto Doc
With Appledoc + Jenkins it is fabulously easy to have your documentation be automatically generated and uploaded to a documentation site. Let me give you a quick guided tour about the individual parts of our setup. The final result you can admire on our new Cocoanetics Documentation Site.
Dynamic Unit Test Cases
You probably now how to add static test cases to a SenTestingKit-based unit test. You create a subclass of SenTestCase and add instance methods with their names prefixed with “test”.
When the unit test runs it builds the test classes and then introspects each one to dynamically find all such named instance methods. Those are then executed one after the other.
Usually you get by with this technique but there might be scenarios where you would want to be able to dynamically add test methods based on some external information, like a property list. Let me show you how.
Today’s Hero: CHEN Xian’an
I was having a problem in DTCoreText where the multi-byte sequence making up an Emoji would not get properly encoded by DTHTMLWriter. A quick peeking into NSHTMLWriter didn’t bring relief either, Apple is not encoding these characters, but leaves them unencoded.
Urban Airship Commander 1.1.1
Ah yes, the famous 1.1.1 version of a new app… You know, version 1.0 is always the minimally viable product. Version 1.1 lets you add new stuff that didn’t make it 1.0. And version 1.1.1 then is another layer of polish and tweaks.
Urban Airship Commander is dear to our heart and so it also deserves the benefit of a 1.1.1 version.
Scotty, We Need More Power!
I remember a long time ago when CPUs still had only a single core and the chip manufacturers where racing for getting the highest Gigahertz. Then some technical limit was reached they shifted their philosophy to increasing the number of CPU cores. The unfortunate side-effect of this approach is that we developers need to adapt our code to make use of these multiple cores or else our CPU-intensive code will find a bottle neck in being only able to max out one core.
In a previous article I described how optimizations in genstrings2 (our Open Source replacement for genstrings) led to the re-implementation being upwards of 30 times faster than the original.
The reason of this was mostly grounded in some smart using of multiple GCD queues. In this blog post I shall explore how we can get DTCoreText to also make use of all available CPU cores.
New Setup Guide for DTCoreText
After several fellow developers reported that they where unable to compile their apps having followed the previous DTCoreText Readme I felt that I needed to create a new Setup Guide. So I did that for the better part of a day, painstakingly verifying each individual step and documenting how the recommended approaches would be.
I used a relatively new feature of appledoc to create Programming Guides which allows to add markdown files that get transformed the same way to HTML as the header comments are.
You can also add images and cross references, which unfortunately seem to have a mind of their own. But I finally found a way how to get it what I wanted it to do and you can see the results online.
iCatalog 3rd Gen Goes Live
Our partner has begun rolling out the latest generation of iCatalog+ apps which marks the third generation of our framework. The 3rd generation will also celebrate the 3rd birthday of our iCatalog.framework. Initial development had begun in Summer 2010 with the first public release occurring in October 2010.
Fast Hashing
In DTCoreText there is the DTCoreTextParagraphStyle class which represents an Objective-C wrapper around CTParagraphStyle. This has a method createCTParagraphStyle which creates the actual Core Text object to put in attributes of an NSAttributedString. It also knows how to create an NSParagraphStyle, but since this only exists from iOS 6 upwards and lacks a few features we’re still using the Core Text variant everywhere.
Due to the way how DTCoreText works I need to createCTParagraphStyle whenever I am constructing a sub string of the generated attributed string. This led to an unnecessarily large amount of CTParagraphStyle instances being created. So I had implemented a method long time ago to cache thusly created CoreText objects based on the ivars.
Though this was causing some problems in DTRichTextEditor and so I yanked the caching back out. Now the project has developed much further and so I felt I would want to give the caching another go. Here’s something interesting I learned.
RFC: DTCertificateViewer
In the past most of my components where first developed for a need that either we had for our own apps for for a client. With the new DTCertificateViewer I want to try something new: Request for Comments (RFC).
Historically those RFCs are the documents that describe how everything on the internet works. But I see no reason why we couldn’t use the term as well to use it what the name describes, namely soliciting comments about the usefulness of an idea.
