There’s a bug – it seems – in Xcode 4.3.2 that was causing an issue with my DTBannerManager component. I’m documenting the workaround here and how to recognize that you are experiencing the bug.
Author Archives 
Podcast #36 – “Google Currents”
Episode 36, recorded Sunday May 6th, 2012
In this episode my special guest is Will Kiefer. He is the Senior iOS Engineer in charge of Google Currents. Will tells us why UIWebView isn’t all that bad and has some amazing performance tips for us with which to tame it. You should make lots of notes and you will feel like you visited a lab at WWDC and had your brain supercharged.
Podcast: Download (61.5MB)
GCD, ARC, Blocks – Oh How Simple!
I’m “totally” migrating my iCatalog framework project to ARC, GCD and blocks and I’d like to share with you some of the revelations that the use of these modern technologies brings with them.
Here are two examples of the kind of simplifications you will see if you do the same. This approach is compatible with iOS 4.0 and above.
Resource Bundles
When shrink-wrapping your code for later reuse you inadvertenly will come into the situation that you have some resources (strings, XIBs, images et al) in your project that you also want to be reused. So what do you do?
If only we had frameworks on iOS … then we could bundle the resources together with the code in a framework. But Apple does not want us to compile frameworks in Xcode since these could potentially contain code downloaded after the app review process.
Popular projects like ShareKit or the Facebook iOS SDK have approached this dilemma by simply putting all resources into a folder, giving it the “.bundle” extension and instruct users of their SDK to also add this bundle to the “Copy Bundle Resources” step of their respective apps.
In this here blog post I will show you a smarter way.
Podcast #35 – “TapCaps”
Episode 35, recorded Saturday, 28th of April 2012. “TapCaps”
Alice Ning discusses the ins and outs of having a Kickstarter campaign for physical products versus software, we learn a bit about the magic behind capacitive touch screens and we learn what goes on behind the scenes of the TapCaps Kickstarter campaign.
Podcast: Download (46.4MB)
Creating a CoreData Model in Code
I’m working on my own file and image cache that uses CoreData for storage. The same way that NSURLCache is doing it, but with some optimizations that I know and understand. So I created DTDownloadCache and got it all working, but there was one minor thing that I didn’t like: The usual method of creating a CoreData entity model is by the entity editor built into Xcode.
This meant that I had to include the .datamodeld file in apps using this. But I didn’t want to have to create a resource bundle just for this single file as you would have to do if you keep your reusable code in static libraries. Ugh!
Fortunately there is a way how you can create a static model entirely in code so that you can make use of CoreData without having to ship an XML description of the model.
Disabling Facebook SSO, elegantly
The experts are still out as to the motivations behind Facebook’s iOS SDK strategy. But it is rather clear that if Facebook has their way then everybody is to be using their Single Sign-On (SSO) technique. Besides all potential advantages of having this SSO in place it has to leave your app for signing on.
Not exactly something that is useful for all use cases. We have one case (involving ShareKit) which works better with the old style of signing into Facebook. This “traditional approach” shows the login dialog in a web pop up instead of leaving the app.
In this post I’m sharing the 3 methods how to hack the Facebook class and bend it to our will.
On the Future of Remote Working
I read an article by Michael Abrash on the Valve blog that he signed up with Valve to investigate Augmented Reality. At the end of his article he mentions that Valve is hiring.
This prompted me to send him the following long email. And as I like for my writing to not go to waste I am posting it here as well.
Podcast #34 – “Be Excellent And Valuable”
Episode 34, recorded Saturday April 21th, 2012
We can learn about cool company philosophy from the Valve employee handbook, Objective-C is creeping up to C++ as the world’s almost most favorite programming language. And iOS 4 can now be retired.
Podcast: Download (13.8MB)
