Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Always-On iOS

Friday, June 23rd, 2017

The iPad is a perfectly capable computer, but one thing you can’t use the iPad for are jobs that take a long time. If you’re on a desktop or laptop PC and you need to kick off a job that’s going to take a half hour, such as rendering a 3D video, you just do […]

Xcode Errors in Source Editor

Saturday, November 19th, 2016

Here’s a problem I was having recently. My project would build and run fine, but the source editor was showing errors. Sometimes the errors wouldn’t be there, sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d interfere with things like autocomplete, and it made working with the affected source files rather frustrating. The problem was that the source file […]

Using a Grocery List on the Apple Watch

Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

Not every app should support the watch, but when the Apple Watch was announced, the one use case that immediately seemed obvious to me was quick access to a grocery list. I built this feature for MealPlan, putting a good amount of work into getting it to stay in sync with the main iPhone app, […]

Apple Handling of Non-Reproducible Bugs

Saturday, October 4th, 2014

The most frustrating thing about developing in Apple’s ecosystem today, for me at least, is bugs that are difficult to reproduce. I have two separate issues right now where customers write to me because they’re having a problem, and I can’t reproduce that problem. In both of these scenarios, asking the customer to reboot their […]

UITableViewCell, auto layout, and accessoryType

Saturday, October 4th, 2014

I just burned a few hours on this: Auto layout for UITableView cells is awesome. It’s so much easier than what we had before which was having to measure cells before they existed. With auto layout, as long as you specify the height of the cell’s contents in relation to its superview (by having constraints […]

MealPlan Sync with Ensembles

Wednesday, March 19th, 2014

MealPlan is a meal and grocery planning app that, up until recently, was only available on the iPad. I wanted to bring it to the iPhone, but I had to implement sync first. I started with iCloud Core Data Sync from Apple, back before iOS 7, and ran into nothing but troubles. It was seriously […]

Carrier Concessions

Wednesday, December 4th, 2013

Apple has this odd relationship with carriers. They make the best selling phone, but carriers do everything they can to steer customers away from it. I’m a Bell Canada customer, and so I receive a lot of promotional material from them. And it almost always treats the iPhone as a second class citizen. Their “2013 […]

Android vs iOS Development Estimates

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

I’ve built Android software and I’ve built iOS software.  I much prefer developing on iOS so that’s what I spend most of my time doing, but I’ve done enough Android to have my two cents to contribute on this issue. In a nutshell:  BBC said that they have almost 3x the number of developers working […]

Apple, ARM, and a hybrid OS

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Warning: crazy wild speculation ahead. There have been rumours recently about Apple using ARM chips in laptops. This would be a baffling move. Intel has been king of the hill when it comes to x86 performance, and isn’t likely to lose that crown any time soon. Power consumption of x86 chips has been coming down, […]

App Store vs Release Early / Release Often

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

Agile development makes it possible to build an app starting with a simple working core and then building out features over time. Each sprint, you’re starting with a working, shippable product, and over the course of the sprint, adding some amount of shippable functionality. The theory is your product is always “shippable”. When I add […]