I’ve seen two separate postings today talking about Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity framework, introduced in iOS 7. The first was an article on Cult of Mac (linked from iOS Dev Weekly) and the second a Gist from Mattt Thompson. I feel that we collectively need a reality check. Read More
There is a lot to like about the enhancements to the unit testing workflow in Xcode 5, in particular the ability to see in the gutter of a test suite which tests are passing and which are not, and to re-run a single test. Unfortunately, I am also a fan of Kiwi, Specta and their RSpec-like syntax, which doesn’t play well with the test navigator. One of the best ways to organize specs with those tools are nested contexts. Read More
There’s a recent post from Dermot Daly of Tapadoo making the argument that if you don’t update your iOS app to fit iOS 7’s new design, it’s going to be an insta-delete.
I think someone needs to take a deep breath and calm down. Read More
Over the last month, Linode has announced several major upgrades to their infrastructure that significantly raises the bar to compete in the VPS provider market. I moved from hosting my own servers out of my home office to Linode last summer and was happy to switch. Now Linode has improved the network, CPUs and RAM in every plan for essentially the same monthly price. Read More
In 2009, Peter Hosey wrote Warnings I turn on, and why. It remains an excellent explanation of why certain warnings, off by default, are a good idea to use. In it, he mentions the use of “treat warnings as errors” and calls it “hardass mode.” Read More
Mark Dalrymple, a co-founder of CocoaHeads, regular CocoaConf speaker and Big Nerd, recently wrote a series of posts about DTrace: Read More
Last night I ran into a vexing problem. I had an API endpoint in a Rails app I developed for a customer that accepts request parameters in both the classic application/x-www-form-urlencoded content type as well as application/json. JSON is a more compact format and is easier to scan when reading client logs, so it is now my preferred format for request POST data. Read More
Making the rounds recently is a patch for MRI Ruby 1.9.3 from funny-falcon. It backports some changes coming in Ruby 2.0 that improve start-up time and method lookup. A second version of his patch also backports some changes to the garbage collector to make it more friendly to copy-on-write. Read More
Earlier this week, Sucuri Security researcher Daniel Cid revealed that a very large number of popular sites expose their /server-status page to the world.
I was pretty sure the sites I run for myself and my customers were OK, but since paranoia is a good trait of a security-conscious techie, I double checked. Imagine my surprise when I found that one of my sites did the very same thing, as did one of my customer’s. Read More
I’m pleased to announce that our biggest project to date is now available on the App Store and Google Play.
Table37 is a full-featured restaurant management system. When Table37 came to us with the idea of modernizing everything about how a restaurant manages its contact with customers, we thought it was a terrific use of technology. Read More