Your Own Free L2TP/IPsec VPN
If you have a VPS for web applications, it’s relatively easy to set up your own L2TP/IPsec VPN for use by Mac OS X or iOS clients. When you’re away from your home or office on someone else’s Wi-Fi (at coffee shops or a conference), it’s a good idea to use a VPN to keep your network use secure and private. While there are free VPN services (Cloak is one), the free plan is time and bandwidth limited. You can pay to lift the time limit, but why pay for another service if you can piggyback on another you already have?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X
If you’re (re)building a development workstation on Mac OS X, you may have decided to use the latest MySQL 5.5 packages from mysql.com. Unfortunately, that means you probably have seen (or will soon see) two problems.