Ad

Our DNA is written in Swift
Jump

Author Archives rss

ELO App at CeBIT

The current c’t computer magazine has a short snippet mentioning the hybrid iPhone/iPad app we’ve been developing for ELO Digital Office GmbH.

ELO APP at CeBIT

If you come to CeBIT please pop by ELO’s booth at hall 3, F30 to give the app a whirl. Doing so you can do us a favor if you keep mentioning how much you like the slick UI.

Radar: Xcode Should Support Auto Save and Versions

This is a feature request for something that could have used just yesterday. Filed as rdar://13271368  and on Open Radar.

Update: I was made aware by an Apple engineer that Xcode is indeed already autosaving versions of your files as you make changes.  Versions is an OS X feature. But there is no Revert menu option in Xcode to access these saves. As a workaround you can open the source file in TextEdit and do the reverting there! A hidden feature that is so well hidden, it’s even in a different app!

Read more

DTRichTextEditor 1.2

It’s been a while since I last blogged about the progress we are making on DTRichTextEditor, my rich text editor component for iOS. January saw many more licensees that ever before, people are just fed up with not being able to integrate rich text editing into their apps.

Selling many licenses also allows me to dedicate a great deal of time to improving and tuning the component. Now here is Version 1.2.

Read more

Zarra on Locking

In my previous article dealing with Multi-Context Core Data I introduced a 3-context scheme that Marcus Zarra hat shown us in a back room at the 2012 NSConference.

Several people inquired about Locking, take for example Wim Fikkert:

Thanks for the great article. However, like Tom, I was wondering if the main context will not be blocked whenever you perform a save to disk with the persistent store. I am using the last design pattern, and I keep running into my app locking up. I have done some more searching and came across this article. Perhaps you can comment?

I don’t pretend to come anywhere close to being the Core Data expert that Zarra is, so I went straight to the horses mouth and asked him.

Read more

Don’t Complain, Fix It!

The worst thing you can do if you are using somebody else’s code is to complain to them via email about the shortcomings of their software. More often than not you can assume that the Open Source code this person put online is a labor of love. And complaining is as close as you can get to trampling on the other person’s feelings about their “baby”.

Hobbyists and Pros alike, you are a developer and if you have any interest in getting improvements for the other person’s software then you should adhere to these simple steps I am laying out for you to follow. This is specific to DTCoreText, but I am certain that the basic principles apply to any other project as well.

Read more

Urban Airship Commander 1.1

We are happy to announce several big improvements on our Urban Airship Commander app. Besides some features that where not ready in time for 1.0 there are also 2 suggestions of users we implemented.

Contrary to popular belief this app is not a game. It is a tool for developers.

Update Feb 25th: The Update is now approved and available on the App Store after 10 days.

Read more

Individual Learning App uses DTRichTextEditor

Stefan Zimmermann of CoSciCo kindly provided me with this testimonial about why and how they licensed DTRichTextEditor for their iLA app.

ILA (CS) is the first incarnation of the iLA platform and is designed with deep learning, easy knowledge sharing and project planning in mind. Well, sure you can also just take notes and “beam” them to a friend or colleague.

Excerpt, organize and share, thoughts, ideas, and knowledge topics in a natural way, – simple and fast, without the interruption of the flow of ideas by having to think how to organise it, first.

Stefan’s own words after the break.

Read more

What to Do When Xcode Beachballs

Apple keeps working on making Xcode more stable all the time. While Xcode 4.6 has much improved in terms of simply quitting on you, people report that more often now they see Xcode just hang.

One method to deal with race conditions in a highly parallelized application like Xcode is to add semaphores and locking. Unfortunately locking is not the end-all of all all Xcode problems, even with a liberal sprinkling. A blocked main thread is a blocked main thread.

Spinning Beach Ball

Here is what you should do next time you encounter the beach ball of doom.

Read more

UIView Background Queue Debugging

Over the the past few days we’ve been chasing an elusive bug that was testing the limits of our sanity. We repeated the following conversation about 3 times:

“Hey, we did some changes. The jumping views should not occur any more. We didn’t see it even after 2 hours of testing”
“I’m still getting it, right after launching the app.”
“&”§%, $%&% &!”

I would bet that this happened to you to, especially when working with background queues for updating some data and then updating UI to reflect the new information.

Similar to “did you reboot your PC?” being the standard answer to 99% of Windows problems, we iOS developers found that “are you maybe calling UIView methods on a background thread?” solves the Lion-share of problems with views. Here’s a convenient way how you can quickly find these elusive issues too.

Read more

Cocoanetics Design Update

The theme I’m using on Cocoanetics.com has gone to version 1.6.6 which is to say that over the past 2 years our designer has done an awesome job to polish the look. I think it is about time that I give a shout-out to Jeremiah Tolbert from Clockpunk Studios who is in charge of this all.

Read more