After working full throttle on the scribd app and struggling to keep two more deadlines the past few weeks where really taking their toll. So today begins a week of downtime for me. We – that’s me, my wife and our dog – have rented an apartment and I had to promise not to bring any devices…. except the iPhone.
“Honey, what if we get lost? I need the maps app to steer us back to civilization!”
You get the picture. š See you on the other side.
Somebody people told me that some function in my NSAttributedStrings+HTML would take forever but whenever I tested it, I could not see anything wrong. Then Stuart Carnie was able to send a snippet of code that, when pasted into appDidFinishLaunching, would exhibit the same problem, duplicatable.
I was stumped at first. How could I have missed it? But at second glance Stuart did not reference any of my classes, but was only using standard SDK calls. Yet, those are almost identical to what I had wrapped into DTCoreTextFontDescriptor, my Objective-C wrapper.
Then it dawned on me: this might be a lazy loading problem. Or maybe even a bug in CoreText.framework.
Fans of this blog and twitter followers alike will have a chance to get a free copy of Portal 2 on Steam. This highly anticipated game will be released on April 19th, round about the time when @Cocoanetics will surpass 2500 followers on Twitter.
When I went to Steam to pre-order my copy I saw an offer to buy two copies and give one away. So I thought that this might be a nice way to say “thank you!” for you being a frequent visitor to my blog and for following me on twitter.
To participate all you need to do is tweet the following text. On April 19th I will haveĀ tweetaways select a random winner from all the ones who tweeted the correct phrase.
Portal 2 Giveaway by @cocoanetics (BTW a great source for iOS dev info): http://bit.ly/g5nsKGĀ #raffle
Good Luck!
I’ve been hired by scribd to help jumpstart one of their iOS-related projects. That means I’ll soon grab my bags and hop onto a train that brings me to Vienna from where my plane leaves early morning Saturday, March 12th. I will be flying via London Heathrow to San Francisco where two busy work weeks are awaiting me.
I am mentioning this for some reasons, obvious and less obvious ones. Of course I like to gloat a bit, but I am also mentioning my trip because it might cause extensive delays when responding to your e-mails.
Just how does one land such a gig? I can only assume that my online activities and networking have played a role. This includes my educational articles from which people might deduct that I am serious about Cocoa. It also includes my open source projects, one might think that CoreText might be one of the technologies that scribd has a vested interest in.
You might have stumbled upon my site because of the variety of iOS development topics I am covering. I generally try to make any interesting thing I’m learning myself into an educational blog post. There are the things I stumble upon myself, those I document in the Recipes section. And whenever somebody sends me a question I try to answer it with code, examples and so that both our knowledge increases.
Let me summarize the ways how you can express your gratitude. There is a variety of options you have and if you make use of them I will be happy. Which in turn causes me to write more. Win-Win.
I have to admit I am rather close to being stressed out at the moment. In this article I will try to summarize all that’s going on in my head to find a strategy or guideline as to how to deal with a good problem to have “too much work”.
I made a promise to take one day off per week to recharge my batteries. Writing helps me do that and so I hope to share a few insights into my complicated brain while at the same time asking for your forgiveness if you have to queue to have me look at your code.
But first, I want to show off my new battery I had put into my MacBook Pro. It’s one of the first ones that no longer has a “user serviceable battery”. I could have sent it in to an authorized Apple repair center, but instead I opted to call upon a friend of the Austrian Cocoaheads who happens to be an “authorized Apple screw-driver”.
For my Rich Text Editing component I wanted selections to look like the Apple originals. So I made a screenshot of some editing action and inspected it in Photoshop to find out how they are drawn.
Visually there are two options: either the selection boxes are drawn behind the text not affecting it, or they are layered on top of the text. Ā Because the selection also changes the color values of the black text it must be the latter. It’s on top.
In this article I’ll try to figure out the math so that I can calculate the original blue and alpha value used. We will see that it is orders of magnitude easier to do if we know the result of blending this color over white and black than two arbitrary ones.
iTunes Connect is closed until December 29th.
This means:
… from Apple or their sites.
A while back I announced some changes for my iOS business and website. First there was the new name “Cocoanetics” to replace the ill-fated “Dr. Touch”. Next there had to be a new design. Something professional. Something easy to read so that you have fun every time you return to the site.
After asking around a bit I found Jermemiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios who took my by the hand and made this wonderful new WordPress template. When working with Jeremiah he took charge of the design with me defining some base rules that I wanted to have incorporated:
Working with a seasoned WP-Pro got me some pretty innovative solutions for a previously tedious work-flow.
Read more
You might have noticed that your SVN access to components repositories does not work any more. As of today our old Subversion server has been turned off.
It has served me well, but it was a VisualSVN on top of a virtual Windows NET and thus somewhat a pain to maintain. The new hardware is a dedicated machine with CentOS and proper backup procedures. Previously I had to rely on some file-based backup scheme, now the are regularly saving SVN backups to a second server. Having a quad-CPU dedicated server with 750 GB RAID HDD gives us way more room to grow than we previously had on a 7 GB HDD virtual Windows server.
If you are a customer of one or more of our components then look for an e-mail informing you about new access details.
In order to be able to send out these mails I had to go through my invoices and compile a list of customers for each component. In spirit of reusability of data let me show you how many sales I’ve had per component.
License:
