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.
Music to Code By: June
Instead of focusing on a single band or record in a Music to Code By post, I’m going to try something a bit different this time. For me, there are two kinds of coding. The first is deep thought: architecture design, solving a difficult algorithmic problem or hunting down a tricky bug.
Happy World IPv6 Day
June 8, 2011 is World IPv6 Day. Many large organizations around the world will offer their primary website’s content on the IPv6 Internet in addition to IPv4. If all goes well, the hope is that this will be a permanent change and these sites will operate dual-stack.
You can test your ability to reach the IPv6 Internet by visiting test-ipv6.com.
If you operate a website, you can make your content available directly to IPv6 users, too. Obtain a native IPv6 address block from your Internet provider, configure your servers with an IPv6 address, then add AAAA entries to your DNS for the new address.
CocoaConf
CocoaConf is a new developer-focused conference for Mac OS X and iOS being held August 12-13 in Columbus, OH. I am presenting a session on networking with Cocoa. It will cover the various APIs available to Mac OS X and iOS developers from Apple and third-parties, as well as touch on issues unique to using the network on a mobile platform.
Early registration opened today and you can get a conference pass for 50% off.
Pow, IPv6 and localhost
Pow is a new zero-configuration server for Rack web applications by 37Signals. It makes development, especially on multiple applications, painless: it adds a new .dev domain, with individual apps symlinked from ~/.pow. Pow manages application instances automatically and integrates seamlessly with RVM.
To Bake or Not to Bake?
Brent Simmons has lately been advocating for “baked” blogs. In a nutshell, a baked blog is one that produces static HTML files. These days, most popular blogging software stores content in a database and runs a bunch of code for every page request: pull the post out of the database, generate the page based on a template, and finally send the finished page to the browser. Under a normal, light traffic load, this works fine, but as soon as a post is linked by a very popular site, it buckles under the load. Best case, visitors get an error page. Worst case, your server crashes.