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
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
Here’s a tip I picked up last night at our local Cocoaheads meeting: if you have a lot of RAM in your machine and a decent chunk of it is not currently in use, create a RAM disk and mount it at ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More