RubyMotion

Posted by: on May 4, 2012 in Blog | Tags: , , | No Comments

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.

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PaintCode

Posted by: on Apr 11, 2012 in Blog | Tags: , , , | No Comments

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.

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Old iPad + Air Display = Awesome

Posted by: on Mar 19, 2012 in Blog | Tags: , , | No Comments

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.

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VC Is Destroying the Software Business

Posted by: on Mar 6, 2012 in Blog | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments

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.

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Sold on Homebrew

Posted by: on Feb 3, 2012 in Blog | Tags: , , , | No Comments

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.

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Why Software Projects Are Regularly Late

Posted by: on Jan 30, 2012 in Blog | Tags: , | No Comments

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.

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Git: HTTPS Repository + Access Control

Posted by: on Jan 9, 2012 in Blog | Tags: , , | No Comments

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.

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Non-Rectangular Buttons on iOS

Posted by: on Jan 3, 2012 in Blog | Tags: , , , | No Comments

sample remote from Yahoo! Connected TV iOS SDKOne 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.

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“I heard you liked files”

Posted by: on Dec 2, 2011 in Blog | Tags: , | No Comments

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.

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Unit Testing Cocoa with MacRuby

Posted by: on Sep 29, 2011 in Blog | Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments

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.

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