RubyMotion
Yesterday, Laurent Sansonetti announced RubyMotion, the first product from his new company, HipByte. Laurent is the creator of MacRuby and worked on it part-time while an employee at Apple.
RubyMotion is interesting, but I don’t have any plans to use it myself, especially for client work. There are two reasons.
PaintCode
I am not an artist, but a fact of life when creating apps in 2012 is that Apple’s standard Cocoa controls don’t provide everything. PaintCode is perfect for those times when I need a relatively simple icon that can be composed from shapes and I don’t have the budget to hire a designer.
Old iPad + Air Display = Awesome
Here’s one thing to do with an older iPad if you recently replaced it with the new Retina model:
Get Air Display on the iOS App Store ($10) and use that older iPad as a second display when you’re working away from your regular desk.
VC Is Destroying the Software Business
I’ve had this post bubbling around in my head for the past day or so. I almost wrote it yesterday, but decided not to. Then Tim Bray wrote about who gets the mobile money:
A river of gold for the people who build good phones. Another river for the people who run the networks. And for the developers, crumbs.
I’m going to take a leap here and blame it on venture capital.
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.
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.
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.