Sold on Homebrew
I’ve been a MacPorts user for a very long time, so when I heard about Homebrew, I looked into it, but didn’t see anything compelling enough to convince me to switch. That changed today.
Why Software Projects Are Regularly Late
Michael Wolfe provides an excellent answer to the question of why software development estimates are regularly off by a factor of 2-3:
Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach.
Bundler 1.1 Prerelease is Worth It
In two posts from last year, Pat Shaughnessy discusses why Bundler 1.1 will be much faster and how to use some of the new features. Ordinarily, I avoid prerelease gems because I don’t want to risk the stability of an application. My release schedule won’t often align with a gem’s, assuming there is one.
Git: HTTPS Repository + Access Control
I’ve slowly switched to Git from Subversion over the last year or so, and lately I have begun to feel dissatisfied with my repository configuration. In this post, I’ll outline how to set up Git in a central repository model, exporting repositories over HTTP(S) and allowing for fine-grained access control.
Lights Post-Mortem
After two full seasons in the App Store, it’s a good time to look at how Lights Finder has performed and examine some of the metrics.
Non-Rectangular Buttons on iOS
One of the projects I worked on last year was the iOS SDK for Yahoo! Connected TV. Along with the SDK, Yahoo! wanted to ship an example app that demonstrated use of the SDK. Take a look at the screenshot to the right. See anything a little out of the ordinary?
Several of the buttons, especially the colored ones along the bottom half of the directional pad, are not rectangular.
“I heard you liked files”
Josh Susser on the proliferation of lazily-named configuration files:
Just because your configuration file’s contents are written in a DSL does not mean you should pretend it’s not Ruby anymore.
Unit Testing Cocoa with MacRuby
I spend most of my development time split between Rails and iOS. Each offers a rich API that makes building projects much more productive and enjoyable. There is one place, however, that Ruby clobbers Objective-C: testing.
Slides from Cocoa Networking Talk
I have posted the slides from my talk on networking with Cocoa at CocoaConf. For those that attended: thank you! It was great meeting so many new people and having the opportunity to present.
One common suggestion for improvement from attendees was for demos. These are always tricky with networking topics, because you never know how good the Wi-Fi will be at a conference. When I give this talk in the future, I think I will split it into two, build some demos, and bring a second laptop with a cross-over cable.
Your Own Private WWDC 2011
Now that Apple has released the complete set of WWDC 2011 videos to registered developers, those of us who couldn’t make it to the conference have the opportunity to hear about all the new, shiny stuff coming in Mac OS X 10.7 and iOS 5.