Ad

Our DNA is written in Swift
Jump

DTCoreText Introduction

Tom von Schwerdtner of SmartLogic has written an very nice introduction to DTCoreText.

A UIWebView can be adapted to look and feel like a non-web UI element, but instead of hacking that together, why not use a tool made for the job?

Very nice post. I especially like the image where he shows the difference in rendering between UIWebView and DTAttributedTextView if you hover with your mouse over it.

Apple’s New Age of Unfairness

You might have noticed that Apple didn’t do a tour of Tech Talks last year as they had been doing traditionally in the past. The reason for this had been a sea change in the ranks of Apple’s evangelism team, headed by John Geleynse. Up until last year Apple’s unofficial motto had always been “treat everybody the same”.

The popularity of iOS has brought with it an unprecedented explosion in number of developer accounts and so Apple decided at a secret board meeting held at the beginning of January to change their credo. One suggestion had been “don’t be as evil as Google”, but this was struck down by Tim Cook who feared that this would taint Apple’s reputation as it would have lowered them to their competitor’s level.

But joking aside, Geleynse came to realize that Apple just cannot muster the man power it would need to hold the kind of Mini-WWDC that these Tech Talks represented all around the globe. When I interviewed him at the last Tech Talk in London he told me that doing a Euro-WWDC would be too much of a financial burden on the company. I have no idea how such a statement fits together with frequent reports of Apple having problems finding which mattress to stuff their cash into next.

Read more

We’ll be back soon

We’re out of office until March 31st. There will be no e-mail checking until we get back, so please be patient with your requests and wishes.

We’ll be back at your service on March 31st.

Moving from SVN to GIT

When we started with Source Code Management (SCM) – at the time – we still had a virtual Windows server running with QualityHosting.de. So a friend set up VisualSVN for us on this box. This got us started with Subversion.

A few years later I got started with git. Then I got into it a bit more with git submodules. Those were the beginnings of a beautiful friendship.

Two years later we decided that was enough of procrastrinating. Finally the time had come to switch to git for good. Read more

Radar: Skipping Ahead Broken in Some Podcasts

The bug occurs in 2 out of 10 well-known tech podcasts and can be reproduced in iTunes 11. This isn’t related to iOS or Mac development but since I spent much time in researching this, I want to post it on my blog as well. Also I believe that if people file better bug reports Apple has more reason to fix the bugs.

I noticed then when I was investigating why skipping in some of my own podcasts didn’t work. Turns out that the reason for that was a combination of ngnix + WordPress Multi-User + one pesky rewrite rule. But this is not the root cause that some podcasts are having.

If you know how to read (and understand HTTP headers) let me know in the comments if you spot a possible explanation for this bug.

Filed as rdar://13490726 and on Open Radar.

Read more

Sir Ive Puts His Foot Down

Apple’s “new” Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Sir Jonathan Ive took on the additional role of also being of in charge of the iOS Alu.. Alumino.. Chrome when Scott Forstall moved into an advisory position.

In the latest update to the Podcasts.app I believe we are seeing the first hint of the fresh breeze that Jony is bringing to Apple’s app design.

The unword that definitely plagued Apple in 2012 was Skeuomophism. It means to make something look like it has different physical properties than it really would have. Like the Gamecenter app showing green felt when touching it really feels like touching glass to me.

Other examples include leather-bound digital calendars, the style of the Find my Friends app and a few more attempts to make iOS look more valuable by including expensive materials or craftsmanship.

Read more

DTXMLRPC for Posting to WordPress

On Fridays I like to do something fresh. Today I wrote an XML-RPC framework. The reason for doing that is that I love Amy Worrall’s QuickRadar.

Since I am trying my best to file good bug reports I spend much time on them. Being economically minded I like to reuse the same content I produce as much as possible. So when I file a Radar with QuickRadar I post to Apple’s bug report, to OpenRadar, share the link on App.net and on Twitter. What was missing in my opinion was to also get the text of the bug report into a new WordPress blog post.

Read more

Using Custom Fonts with DTCoreText

Friend of DTCoreText Holger was having problems getting DTCoreText to use the bold font face of his custom font.

I want to take this opportunity to explain what the root cause for Holger’s problem was and what you need to know if you’re using custom fonts with DTCoreText.

Read more

Parts Store Spring Cleaning

We received an overhaul of our WordPress template today which allows for a better shopping experience if you buy components on our Parts Store. The new system allows us for showing the price calculation and also lets us show an arbitrary number of options.

Read more

Localization Unit Test

It happens to the best: you add new features to an app localized in several languages. You are not the lazy type that names the NSLocalizedString key’s the same as the English-language strings. Instead you name the keys semantically, like DOWNLOAD_ALERT_MSG.

Then when it comes to shipping you send the client a note that there are some new strings and assume that he will be able to find out which are new and need to be translated. Which he would if he was using a tool like Linguan. Which he is not, because you might have forgotten to recommend it to him, or if he’s extremely unlucky then he’s a Windows user.

Read more