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.
Apple Isn’t Earning Their 30%
Much has been said over the last 2½ years about the App Store and places where Apple is failing third-party developers. Many things have been fixed, but unfortunately, many more have been neglected or only partially addressed. On January 22, 2011, the App Store surpassed 10 billion downloads. Let’s assume 1% of those are paid and Apple only takes the minimum 29¢ for each one. That’s still $29 million. Apple needs to do a lot more to earn their 30% cut.
Automatic Git Revision Stamping for App Store Projects
Following up on my post about automatic Subversion revision stamping, here is a modified script for use with Git-based projects.
Option-Click to Reposition Cursor in Terminal
I found this on SuperUser today and just have to share it.
In Terminal, you can reposition the cursor on a line by option-clicking where you want it to go. Credit where due.
It doesn’t happen every day, but certainly a few times a week: I end up with a monster command, spanning two full 100 character wide lines or more. Inevitably, there’s an error in there in the middle, and I sit waiting, holding down left-arrow to fix it and try again.