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You might have heard about the term “Test Driven Development”. The idea is – as I understand it – that for every problem you find in a component of your apps you create a Unit Test that fails. Then you fix the bug. The Test now passes. This can be carried further by writing your test cases even before you write any implementation code.

Especially when encapsulating your frequently-used code in static libraries or frameworks those unit tests can help save you a lot of grief. Imagine adding some nifty new feature to inadvertenly  introducing a bug that would break some other existing functionality. If you run the unit tests they would show you immediately that your change broke something.

In this blog post I’m summarizing a couple of things to help you get your own unit tests started.

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Blogger Mark Gurman from 9to5Mac caused quite a stir when he showed screen shots showing that Apple had secretly updated the iOS Simulator to be able to deal with the rumored higher resolution of the next iPhone. His hack involved some nasty code injection that had previously been used to demo iPad on Retina resolution long before the iOS Simulator supported that.

The point of his article was that the main visible difference between the 5.x and 6.0 springboards when having more screen space available. On iOS 5 you always get 4 evenly spaced rows of icons there while on iOS 6 you will get an extra row of icons with no increase in spacing.

Because Mark did not give detailed instructions as he achieved the result (to “protect his sources”) developers all around started to investigate and Cédric Luthi beat everybody to the punch, revealing a method that is so simple, even I was able to follow it.

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When you start using CoreData for persisting your app data you start out with a single managed object context (MOC). This is how the templates in Xcode are set up if you put a checkmark next to “Use Core Data”.

Using CoreData in conjunction with NSFetchedResultsController greatly simplifies dealing with any sort of list of items which you would display in a table view.

There are two scenarios where you would want to branch out, that is, use multiple managed object contexts: 1) to simplify adding/editing new items and 2) to avoid blocking the UI. In this post I want to review the ways to set up your contexts to get you what you want.

Note: I am wrapping my head around this myself for the very first time. Please notify me via e-mail about errors that I might have made or where I am explaining something incorrectly.

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When Apple made Xcode into its own app bundle it greatly simplified our lives as developers. This enabled incremental updates for the stable version can get from the app store. Also you get updates the same way as updates for other apps.

To cut down on file size Apple made several items optional downloads, like the documentation, older versions of Simulator or Command Line Tools. The latter you need if you are building stuff outside of Xcode, like Open Source projects. You know, bare knuckles, command line geekery.

However those tools are not needed if you want to say use svn or git. This article explains why.

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