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Urban Airship Commander BETA

Imagine yourself implementing APN (Apple Push Notifications) using Urban Airship’s API and service. How do you go about testing the push functionality and possibly demonstrating it in front of your client?

The usual approach would be to peruse a web form on the Urban Airship site to send such notifications.

We felt a need to simplify the procedure and make it more fun for developers. So today we’re announcing UAC (Urban Airship Commander) which sets out to do exactly that.

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Before Renewing Your Membership …

The month before your membership in the iOS Developer program expires Apple begins to gently remind you that renewal is coming up. If you don’t want to experience an “interruption in service” you better renew as soon as possible.

There are however a few gotchas that I’d like to point out to you … watch your provisioned devices as well as your DTS tickets!

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GIC Acquires Cocoapedia

Grupo Imaginación Cibernética (GIC), a software development company based in Mexico, agrees to acquire Cocoapedia’s brand and assets after winning the bidding on Monday, July 16th. Cocoanetics sought to sell Cocoapedia because it no longer fit the company’s focus.

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You Don’t Need The Xcode “Command Line Tools”

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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Who Wants Cocoapedia?

Two years ago I was more idealistic than today. That was when I created Cocoapedia (Oct 2010) and thought that if the place was there the contributors would come. Boy was I naive.

The idea behind Cocoapedia came from an unfortunate run-in I had had with Wikipedia two years earlier. At that time I – similarly enthusiastic – had created a Wikipedia page for myself only to find that flagged for deletion the day after. That was when I learned that Wikipedia has a set of relevancy criteria that artificially filters the content that can go into it.

I had never gotten a medal, never played a part in “historic, political or newsworthy events”, are no “widely known personality from the entertainment industry” and nobody has ever called my works as excellent. My TV appearances were never in an important function, I did not write two novels (or 4 non-fiction books) and the scandals I have unearthed fell mostly on death ears, too.

So I figured, if Wikipedia won’t have us irrelevant iOS developers, then our own Wiki definitely would. So Cocoapedia was born.

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XBench: Apple Stock SSD versus Striped RAID

I purchased a current model MacMini (Mid 2011) to serve as a Continuous Integration server. I chose the one model that has 4 GB and 2 HDDs because the larger RAM certainly should benefit the overall performance and 2 HDDs would give me an opportunity to experiment with striping the hard disks to see what performance could be gotten from that.

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TWIT haunted by Cocoanetics

One day before the WWDC 2012 keynote a group of Austrians hired a car and drove north to Petaluma where the TWIT podcast studio is located. We have been long time fans of Leo Laporte and his prize-winning podcast pioneering. So we were delighted to be witnessing the taping of This Week in Tech #357.

One year before, when I attended my first WWDC I was less well organized and at this time Leo Laporte was still residing in what they called the “TWIT Cottage” a small house with next to no room for guests. But this year 2012 was different since just a few months earlier TWIT had raised enough money to move to their much larger current studio.

Because of this emailing ahead and reserving seats was but a formality.

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Leap Second Attack

Comics mentioned that last night we would get more rest, exactly one second. Hardly worth noticing though, if it weren’t for several computer systems which seemed to have issues with suddenly finding them one second out of whack.

The reason being that (in UTC) yesterday was one second longer than usual because of an inserted Leap Second. There’s something positive about leap seconds, as Wikipedia notes: “Between their adoption in 1972 and June 2012, 25 leap seconds have been scheduled, all positive.”

At the time of this writing (the day after) I cannot reach any of the sites on apple.com. Pure coincidence? Or a Leap Second Attack?

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Podcast #39 – “WWDC, what next?”

Episode 39, recorded June 30th, 2012

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CoreLocation Background Update Messaging

Two years ago I put together revolutionary chart that detailed the flow of delegate messages when sending an app into background. This was even featured by Erica Sadun of TUAW because it for the first time visualized the whole process in a easy to understand way.

Based on this chart Carl Brown from PDAgent made an addendum to deal with the special case of background region updates and sent it to me. To my shame I have to admit that it was sitting at the bottom of my inbox for 4 months now and it is only now that in my effort to reach Inbox Zero I am dealing with this and putting it up here for your viewing pleasure.

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